Great. Well, hi, everyone. Thank you for attending another MediGov seminar. Today, we are joined by James Martel, who's going to be talking about anarchist prophets, disappointing visions, and the power of collective sight. Danny Spetzwick reached out to me, or or actually proposed like, had shared some of James's work on the MediGo Slack, which was very interesting, sort of looking at organization in the tech sector and this new book that's come out and had proposed during a session where we could invite James to come and talk about kind of the the kind of distinction between anarchy and, archism, and where we might locate or how we might think about anarchy in the context of the Internet and Internet governance. So I thought it'd be really nice if Danny wanted to give a little bit of a more fleshed out introduction to James, and then we'll pass off to James, who will give a kind of fifteen to twenty minute presentation on the topic, and then we'll open it up to a conversation that, Danny and I will be co hosting and co moderating. So welcome, everyone, and I'll pass it over to Danny.

Thanks. Thanks, Danny, and thanks, Zint. It's great to see all of you. I I loved reading the chat. Yeah. So I I I wrote a book recently, and actually, mostly I'm gonna talk about the Internet, but, and tech, but, I'm gonna sort of bring in a concept that I may I did in the book. So I will try to try to apply one to the other, and hopefully it'll be relevant for you guys. So, when the Internet began or when it was became well known, a lot of people said it was going to be the undoing of authoritarian regimes and the beginning of a new age of wild and untrammeled freedom. Insofar as the technology of the Internet allows for information to pass from person to person without any intermediary great collecting agency, the way like a newspaper works, for example, it seems as if the jig was up for various forms of domination and control. Even capitalism, which is arguably the greatest power in the world today, was, it was thought, going to be in big trouble as both workers and consumers would be able to band together and information could no longer be controlled or dominated. Something like this did seem to happen in certain industries like music and publishing as artists began to be able to market directly to consumers and the control that traditional corporations had on these industries wobbled and sometimes collapsed. But for all of this potential, I don't think it'll be controversial to argue that the Internet has delivered on few, if none of its initial promise for creating truly radical spaces, except maybe if you mean by radical spaces, radically right spaces. Instead of delivering a kind of radical and horizontal agency and freedom to individuals, the Internet has become absolutely dominated by capitalist forces, and in particular, the tech giants along with the Internet that developed along with the Internet itself. These companies are dominated by people who are far from being anarchists. They are instead libertarians, which is a very different thing insofar as well, anarchists are opposed to both the state and the market. Libertarians are against the state, but very much for the market. And instead of introducing a left wing form of resistance and mutual aid, the the internet has spawned instead a new form of fascism with platforms like Facebook, being the source and the and the, facilitator of of ethnics cleansing in Myanmar, to give one example, to fostering plots and conspiracies in the risk in rich Western nations and populism and authoritarianism. And although it is true that various revolutions in the past twenty years have used the internet as a way to thwart oppressive regimes, those regimes are figuring out how to use the internet right back to control it and turn it into a weapon against any kind of community organizing and or protest. So when the rest of my comments this morning, I'd like to spend a short amount of time offering some theoretical models for why the internet has turned out the way it has. And these will be drawn from my book before turning to a discussion of how the internet could perhaps be reclaimed as a radical or anarchist space. So let me get to the theoretical part first. And to do this, I'd like to introduce a term that you may never have heard before, archism. And another term you probably have heard of, I know you've heard it because you were talking about it in the chat, anarchism, but whose meaning I think changes when it is paired with archism. Archism is a term that could be applied to virtually every government and society in the world today. It is a form of political and economic organization that is entirely hierarchical. Sorry. And and who and which taxonomizes and divides its subjects into the rulers, the archons, and the rest of us. The reason you might not be familiar with the term is that one of the key features of archism is that it does not wanna be recognized as such. It seeks to just be background, the only way a political or economic community could be organized, just the way things work. Archism is not simply about states, but is in fact inherent in most structures in our society. In our political life, we hand political power and responsibility over to elected officials if we live in a democracy or to authoritarian leaders if we don't. Either way, the people themselves are largely excluded from making meaningful decisions that affect their own lives. Similarly, in our workplace, we are controlled and monitored by bosses, managers, and administrators. At school, faculty and students are subsumed to deans and provosts. In each of these examples, we see a sentiment that the people as such are neither capable of nor willing to determine their own lives. They need supervisors and overseers to help coordinate and control them, just as justifying the ever higher salaries of managers, CEOs, college presidents, and the like. Archism is everywhere, but it is not everything. Even by naming it, we are calling attention to the fact that it is not in fact ubiquitous, but has a particular form and that therefore an alternative, what I've been calling anarchism, is not only possible, but is in fact equally ubiquitous, even if it lives under the shadow of its domineering and attention hogging alternative. Anarchism is different. It is simply the idea that communities make their own political and economic decisions for themselves. Whenever anarchist forms of control are lifted, we see anarchists responding with self organizing forms of their own. The idea that anarchism is simply a society run amok is just a projection of archism of its own chaos and disorder outside of itself. Similarly, the idea that anarchists are simply a bunch of people droning on and on endlessly at meetings is a similar misconception. Whenever anarchists have gotten actual power, they make a lot of very big decisions very quickly. And the Spanish revolutions of the 1930s, which is something I studied a lot, is a very good case in point. I don't consider anarchism and archism to be a binary. I think archism is one terrible form of economic and political organizing, and anarchism is every other form. There are an infinite varieties of these other forms as attested to by the recent brilliant book by David's Graber and Wengrow, the Dawn of Everything, which I highly recommend. This is why I think the term anarchism itself changes when it's compared to archism, Rather than simply being a European left political movement led by luminaries, such as Bakunin, Kropotkin, and Goldman, it is rather a much vaster set of alternative practices, which as the two Davids point out in their book were slowly but surely throttled by the rise of top down capitalist practices coming out of Western Europe, namely archism. They don't use by the way, the word archism or anarchism in that book, but I think they've, they fit very well. In this way, anarchism is a name I would give to any horizontal practice that occurs even under conditions of direst archism. In fact, I would argue that everything that is not purely destructive or parasitical comes not from archism, but from the anarchist ferment that archism rules over, that is to say the practices that we all engage with. When I teach, I often ask my students about their working conditions and they tend to agree that collectively the workers know everything there is to know about a particular company or store restaurant or factory. By definition, they can collectively are the knowledge of that place, but they tend not to have forums in which they can talk to one another, much less the ability to make those decisions for themselves. This is something that management tries very hard to prevent from happening. And unlike the giant anarchist union, the CNT that helps spur the Spanish revolution in the 1930s, today's unions are not at all forums about how to organize work, but rather simply ways to get better wages and working conditions. And Danny was referring to me changing my mind about something, which I'll just allude to very briefly. I used to love anarcho syndicalism and it was all in, but, but in my study of, of the Spanish revolution, I've kind of decided that even the union form is, is too artist and that anarchism needs to go deeper into itself into, well, I can talk about that more if you want. Anyway, to me, it's important to speak of archism and not just the state or just capitalism because it helps to explain how the Internet becomes a tool of both. When you think in terms of archism, the de facto coordination and similarity of purpose between very disparate groups becomes clear. The current explosion of right wing populism, for example, can be explained as a way to head off what is perceived as a threat both to white supremacy and capitalism, two of the key pillars of archism. These people are devoted to whiteness, yes, but they are just as devoted to preserving capitalism. The Internet proved to be a valuable resource for them because whereas workers are not supposed to talk to one another, fascists could and readily did. They gathered as individuals instead of as a collectivity. And because their sync their cause was in sync with larger capitalist goals, they had more support from the tech world itself. So besides people like Peter Thiel, I also think it's not surprising at all that Elon Musk, as Danny was just alluding to, as soon as he brought Twitter planned to weaken the defenses against racism and other forms of right wing discourse. And he himself like tweeted something about Paul Pelosi's attacker, etcetera, you know, all that. I don't think any of that is surprising. I think that's just kind of part and parcel of the kind of artist mentality that is ruled by the tech giants. In his essay on the Jewish question, Marx makes the point that when the state formally divorces itself from a certain practice, it effectively depoliticizes it, allowing it to thrive in civil society. He says, for example, that when The US proclaimed the separation of church and state, it allowed an untrammeled life for religion far more robust than one found in Europe, which had formal state religions. The idea of archism helps to explain this. Social elements in civil society, which are just as much part of archism as the state itself, can continue to promote desired goals, say the promotion of one religion over another, for example, without the state having anything to do with it. And in fact, if the state has something to do with it, it would make it a political cause, which would then sort of galvanize people to fight it in certain ways. So it depoliticizes the whole question. By the same token, the state's formal hands off approach to the internet has not stopped in any way the forces of archism from dominating and controlling it, often making enormous profits through their domination at the same time. Okay. So that was the mostly theoretical part of my talk. And what I wanna do now is turn my attention to thinking about how, whether, and if the internet could ever be reclaimed as an anarchist space. For me, the good news is that in some ways, the internet already is an anarchist space. The problem is is that this anarchism, this community organizing is overshadowed by forces. In the same way that I believe that every firm is actually and only and entirely run by its employees, even as the managers and owners take full credit, so too does the Internet largely run on anarchist lines even as it is effectively employed for purely archist purposes. To me, the secret to all of this lies in organization. To put it in a nutshell, archism is extremely well organized both in the Internet and throughout society more generally. Anarchism, because it is in some sense not aware of its power and even its existence, is not currently organized. Let me once again dispel the idea that anarchism is chaotic while archism is ordered. I actually think the opposite is true. Archism is deeply chaotic because it arbitrarily puts the value of some person's lives over and above others. And because it quickly turns to violence and racism whenever its core hierarchies are being threatened, which is arguably what's happening right now. Anarchism doesn't reach its full potential when it's not allowed a way to organize itself formally. Ad hoc sets of agreements are in effect, much of what sustains our contemporary economic and political practices, but how much better would it be if we could actually talk to one another about those practices? I like to think of anarchism as a form of decentralized planning, a way to allow the collective wisdom and experience of workers and political subjects to become aware of itself and become operationalized. This is something I think the internet could readily allow for. I should say that I don't think that most technologies are either good or bad. They are tools that can be used well or badly. And I don't mean this the way that the NRI says guns don't kill people, people kill people, because I do think that some technologies are bad, like weapons of mass destruction, for example. But I would say that the Internet itself is probably neutral in terms of the impact that it has on its human subjects per se. I think that the original promise of the Internet to allow individuals to connect without a middleman or centralizing power structure is great and very apt for what anarchism is all about. In fact, I think it might help to solve what I was saying before has long been a shortcoming of anarchism, its difficulty in scaling up. In the Spanish Revolution, there was the CNT. Yet, as I was arguing before, this very same union, that's the name of the giant anarchist union, was in fact ultimately a source of the downfall of the Spanish anarchists. For all that they tried to protect themselves from what they call leaderism, which is the tendency of leaders to sell out the rank and file and make common cause with other leaders and other groups in the end, the union, the CNT, and therefore the anarchist themselves was done in by its own leadership. It may be that technology in the 1930s did not permit the kind of mass decision making and scaling up that occurred on the local level. And it may be too that the Internet could in a way allow for much greater, upscaling for anarchist communities, allowing for a degree of mutual coordination and consideration that might not once have been possible. To that end, let me spell out three ways that the Internet could be approached differently so as to maximize the anarchist potential that it has always had. The three areas I'd like to talk about are involved the question of truth versus lies, the question of individuals versus the collective, and finally, the question of organization versus disorganization. So starting with truth and lies, it's no surprise to any of you that the Internet is full of the latter. Conspiracy theories have been given a huge and new life, thanks to various platforms like four Chan and eight Chan and even more mainstream apps like Facebook and Twitter. Arguably, US democracy has been especially undermined by this feature of the Internet. And so a lot of pundits write as if the Internet itself is an instrument of deception and should be shunned and avoided at all costs. Other is a bit less extreme than that. We'll see if the Internet can support lies, but the solution to that is to shore up fact checking and other modes of truth telling, to force false content to have labels saying this information is suspect, or better yet to come up with algorithms that do not support invented stories, allowing for a technological fix to what is actually a social problem. In my view, however, none of these solutions will really work. The idea of turning off the Internet is itself completely impossible implausible. You can't put the toothpaste back in the tube once it's been squeezed out, nor do I think that better controls or technological solutions will fix the problem. When you think of this issue in political rather than technological terms, you can see that too many people are invested in the kinds of lies and conspiracy theories that really well to really welcome these kinds of fixes. In other words, too many people want certain things to be true, and so are more than willing to overlook their sketchy origins in order to advocate for and even spread these false stories. And I would to be really honest, if there was false stories that favored the left, I would probably be the same. You know, like, I wouldn't be so concerned with their origins. I would just say, yeah, okay. Here too, there is a toothpaste out of the tube aspect to the situation and the in in that many of the people that may once have been more inclined to truthfulness have in effect been converted to greater comfort levels with lies and conspiracies. Yet none of these conditions have anything to do with the Internet per se. With the rise of fascism in Europe in the 1930s, a period that unfortunately has a lot of similarities to our own, there are two people ate up conspiracy theories and lies, and there wasn't an Internet back then to blame it on. In my own opinion, the alternative to lies on the Internet shouldn't be to advocate for truth, or rather it should be, but not in the form that most liberals advocate for. Rather than posing a truth that is always and absolutely true and oppose that to lies and fictions, I think it's better to think of truths as collective decisions. This is important because to believe in an unproblematic truth, one that is forever and eternally true, is a way to subscribe to archism itself. Archism pedals in such truth all the time. The idea that truth requires some external yardstick that judges and determines what is true and what is false requires or presupposes an archist structure. In my view, both the democratic center left and right and far right in this country, all partake in some version of archism. And I should be clear that I prefer obviously the democratic center left, but, you know, only, only, only vis a vis fascism. Arguably, one of the reasons that we're seeing a populist right wing reaction is because of the conviction that liberal elites have that they and they alone have access to the truth, which is something that obviously really pisses off a lot of people. So to assert truth versus lies is basically to assert one form of archism against another. I hope I haven't given the impression that archism is a monolith because it certainly isn't. This means that asserting truth is not going to be read as such. Instead, it gets read as asserting a liberal line over a conservative one. We end up with a toxic swamp of recrimination and trolling that is helpful to exactly no one. An anarchist solution to this problem would be to assert that truths are not eternal and everlasting things, but rather are political and economic decisions that come out of specific communities. A community, if it has a forum in which to speak to itself and a meaningful form of political participation, can and will decide what it wants to collectively believe in and why. And these decisions, once made, because they come out of a collective process, are much more resilient against falsehood and lies than the truths that are being imposed from above. This is something that I think the Internet could help facilitate very well. Rather than spread these false beliefs or reposting some purported truth, these forums could start over and figure out what a community wants to believe in and furnish whatever evidence or arguments for these beliefs as part of a larger process of determining for themselves how they want to organize themselves and their workplaces. Reposting in a sense is a form of inherent archism, even if the source of that post is horizontal that comes from sideways rather from above, because it simply involves taking something on its surface and sending it along without submitting it in any way to any kind of community judgment. And this leads to the second issue that I was want to talk about, which is the questions of individuals versus collectives. Archism as a rule tends to isolate and depoliticize us by keeping us from talking to one another in any kind of meaningful forum. I can think of endless political organizers who used to look wistfully at flash mobs where hundreds of people got together to do group dances or whatever. And these political organizers, on the other hand, could only get a few people to come to a meeting. The pandemic has only exacerbated the political and social isolation that we tend to feel. Many people who have become QAnon followers did so because they're lonely. When they would say even the smallest thing on a QAnon related site, they get love bombed and felt that at last they belong to a community. This kind of pseudo community is a sort of booby prize for our political and social isolation and disempowerment. There's a huge hunger out there for connection and common purpose. And as horrible as it is, QAnon supplies that sense in view of the real thing. But the problem besides the fact that it's fascist is that it's, it serves to prevent any real and meaningful forums to get together by making people think they already have one. And I sort of feel that way about flash mobs too, but not not as not as strongly. Here again, I don't think the liberal solution to this problem is going to cut it. As an anarchist ideology itself, liberalism is a very individualistic philosophy. Any capitalist system will favor individualism, not so much because it favors individualism per se, but because individualism prevents the kind of political organizing that would threaten the disparities that capitalism inevitably produces. I don't think archism is actually individualistic at all. If I can re dip briefly back into political theory, a lot of liberal capitalist ideas are derived originally from Puritanism and Calvinism. These were religious movements that held that the Holy Spirit would send identical messages into each member of the congregation's mind. In other words, they received it as individuals, but it was in fact exactly the same message. One that ranked them from best to worst in terms of how much of God's favor was manifest in each of them. American liberalism is a variant of this form where an individual choice is merely a matter, mostly a matter of personal and consumer choices and not a matter of deciding for oneself oneself how one should organize politically and economically in conjunction with other people. With these choices foreclosed, people can only choose what to wear, what to eat, who to hang out with, etcetera, etcetera. So on the Internet, this kind of thing is rampant. Rather than having meaningful political and economic forums, you get and I recognize all of my references are gonna be very outdated, so don't make fun of me. But cats eating cheeseburgers, TikTok dance crazes, ice water challenges, and so forth. It's fine to have all of that, but not at the expense of self determination. So the answer to isolation and too much individualism is not community as such, not if that community is not a real way to confront and compose itself. If community is just a feeling, then QAnon already supplies that feeling. When you get bogus community, you also get bogus politics opens to all kinds of violent, racist, and destructive tendencies. Here too, community only becomes real when it's allowed its own channels of self expression. One thing that I hear all the time when I talk about anarchism is what if the anarchist community decided to be racist? Then what? I think that's a totally valid question, but I think we should avoid populating a self organizing anarchist community with the people the way they are in our own moment. So much of racism and hate more generally comes because people are disenfranchised and isolated from one another. Racism is a way to keep that disenfranchisement going by separating white workers from workers of color. I'm not saying that anarchist communities will always make good choices. They definitely won't. But I do think they'll be less prone to the kind of political diseases that run rampant in our time, which are themselves a symptom of life under archism, and more specifically life under archism when it feels threatened, when it's kinder liberal face gives way to a fascist one to protect the capitalist core. I really do think that we can only be individuals when our collective is itself actualized and visible to us. Otherwise, we get foe individualism, a kind of group think that describe disguises itself as infinitely varied, and the internet does a great job of producing the sense of variety. But in fact, individualism is quite restricted. As Hannah Arendt says, when you don't have a political life, you turn to things that you can control, like what you purchase, how you decorate your home, how to exercise, and so forth. These things don't have to disappear when archism retreats, but they certainly wouldn't have the pride of place that they do today. And here too, I think the Internet might even be a necessary feature of this kind of reorientation because it does a such a good job of creating folk communities. Imagine what it could do to create real ones. Finally, in terms of the question of organization versus disorganization, as I've already suggested, we tend to have things backwards. We think of anarchism as wildly free at best and violently chaotic at worst, while our various present political states seem rational, ordered, and nonviolent. But as I've already said, it's really arcism that is disordered. It has to be by definition because it has to protect systems of hierarchy that reflect not God given categories of truth and permanence, but rather arbitrary historical pathways that have led to white supremacy and capitalism itself. Under liberal democratic regimes, these hierarchies are rationalized and justified by ideas like the American dream, which is kind of a dumbed down version of the Calvinist election theory of election, and also a reconceptualizing freedom through a purely capitalist lens, the freedom to invest the freedom to keep one's ill gotten gains and so forth. So what you have in archism is organizations that serve to protect and maintain this organization. You have states, armies, police, educational systems, and so forth that are designed to keep people from rising up and taking back what has been stolen from them. You have racist systems that once again split white workers from workers of color and so forth. With anarchism, instead of organizations that serve disorganization, you get organization that serves organization. This leads back to one of the main points I was making earlier, which is that even if, as we live under archism, we are also living out our anarchist lives. The organization that we see today is largely anarchist. It serves our goals, but its own origins are anarchist. To better explain this, let me give an example outside of tech. In law, we have a system where the police are often the real enforcers of Arcus power and white supremacy, along with a lot of Karens and the like who helped to be the eyes and ears of the state. But not all law is like that. You have lawyers who fight to protect abused women who suffer from domestic violence. You have people who fight the death penalty and argue for better living and working conditions for the poor and middle class. How can the law be both things at once, that is to say super violent and super caring and generative? Well, I would say that the good things that are happening in law are largely coming from the anarchist life that goes under conditions of archism. It is a form of counter organizing, even as is done in the name of the law itself. As such, it is actually necessary for the ongoing survival of archism to have these anarchist practices because the archons can point to these things and say, see, the law is just. It is nonviolent, etcetera, etcetera. As I said before, archism is a largely parasitical system. And so it needs that anarchist life and the good things that it does to give it a benign face and thereby continue its rule over the rest of us. So if this is true, then organization itself really only comes from our anarchism and not from archism. Archism uses that organization to sustain its own disorganized and violent core. Here again, the Internet could be a key component of changing this as long as we recognize what organization really looks like. It is not a top down affair like management and administration, but rather the self organizing that happens all the time on the Internet. Now I don't actually know the ins and outs of Wikipedia, but it strikes me that it could be an example of what anarchist self organizing could look like on a larger level, even if it's not an explicitly political or economic form of association itself. Imagine if that model, assuming that I have it right about Wikipedia, were used for political and economic purposes. In such a case, I think it would really help not only to foster more self organization at the community level, but also to deprive archism of its core of its cover to counterpose a faux form of organizing with a real one. For many people, the idea of an anarchist polity is purely pie in the sky. We tend to think it'll never happen, Or if we think it could happen, that possibility is often caught up with a sense of dread as we imagine Mad Max and Lord of the Flies. But really, we're already living in the world of Mad Max and its mask is slipping. It is archism that is the source of so much that is wrong with the world rather than the solution to our problems. ARCISM, of course, always blames us. People are crazy, evil, violent by nature. So they need to be restrained by states and police and managers and administrators and so forth. The Internet in this sense could really be the key to establishing the fact that we are already living anarchist lives, even as we live under Arcus conditions. That immense power that we see in the Internet, all the cat videos, the dance offs, and so forth are a power that we could redirect towards our own lives and material conditions. If we did that, this device could fulfill the promise that it was initially considered to have. Governments are right to fear the Internet. It is dangerous, but that danger can be a tool for or against anarchism, depending on how we organize ourselves or don't. I think leftists write off or too many leftists write off the Internet as a world of trolls and fascists, idle gossip, and conspiracy theories, and they do so at their peril. This is one of the most revolutionary instruments in world history. Whether we let it be used by our enemies or whether we take it upon ourselves to turn it into a tool for radical political change is entirely up to us. I, for one, hope that we take advantage of the powers of decentralized planning and organization that the Internet offers and use it to change ourselves and the world around us. Thank you.

Those those are both excellent questions, Danny. I always love thinking with you. So, yeah, so in terms of the first question about, about, personal attachment and, and so on, one of the things that I've really kind of come to believe is that charisma, which is a word that we tend to use about leaders is actually something that is stolen from the community itself. In other words, we ascribe our own, feelings of power and odd everything to some other figure and thereby alienate from ourselves. Right? So we see that it's the leadership that has charisma, but really the leadership is just a reflection of our own charisma. I think charisma and authority are actually collective. And you mentioned DeRudi, Buenaventura DeRudi, he was one of the great heroes of the Spanish anarchist revolution. And the great paradox of that which was a terrible paradox. R. R. Is that the more so he was obsessed with avoiding leaderism he thought that was you know he he wouldn't take any part in the leadership of the cnt for that reason. R. R. But the more self effacing he became and the more he gave himself 100% over to the community, the more he was worshiped by that community and the more he was a leader, you know? So I think, you know, this kind of goes hand in hand with my concern with the CNT in general as a as a form, because I think when you have an arcist form like leadership or or union, it interferes with the with the self trust and the agency of the community itself. It's it's like I was using this analogy of in a baseball game, if you have two outfielders and the ball's coming, they both got, I got it, I got it. And one is the people and one is the leadership, you know, the ball, there's a hesitation on the part of the people because they defer to these leaders. And I think that's like a problem where they're actually, like I said, alienating their own power and agency to someone else. And I think actually this is one of the great things about the Internet, which is that the Internet does you don't need leadership. In fact, it's sort of like hostile to leadership, the Internet, the way it works, like, because it's so, it's so parallel and horizontal. I, I think it's harder for leadership to emerge. I, you know, that gets to your second question, which is another great question, which is, is there something inherent in communication itself about power and authority? I mean, this is something that has like that anarchists have been talking about forever, you know, because, you know, in group dynamics there often are people who sort of like become quote unquote natural leaders and talk more and they dominate more, you know, and all that stuff. And a lot of that has to do with like, you know, gender and race and all these kind of things like who gets listened to, who has authority, and these are all these are all problems. But I think that so I, I, I don't think it's like magic that you, you create these forums and then just people all talk to each other and it's all, it's all good. But, you know, I was really struck by, I, I love the dawn of everything so much. I can't recommend that book enough. And one of the things I was struck by in that book was that when the French explorers sent Jesuit priests to convert the indigenous communities in North America to Catholicism, they learned the indigenous languages. And the thing that they were struck by was how incredible once they learned the languages, how everyone, man, women, and child, all spoke so beautifully and had such amazing rhetorical elegance, which is very different from the way class, language worked in, in France. And the reason that they realized it is is because there were these forums where everyone spoke and everyone got listened to and everyone learned how to speak, like, you know what I mean? So I think sometimes we because we don't have that and we're disempowered and disenfranchised, we kind of fall into these patterns that are like reproduce archism amongst ourselves. We have leaders and blah, blah, blah. But I think if like you actually had a genuine form, which these communities did have where everyone got to have their voice heard and everyone got to speak, we would all communicate very differently. And that's something that I would, I'd like to think about more too.

That is such a good question. You actually asked on this part that I was most anxious about articulating. So it's a very, very perceptive question. What is the difference between right wing community organizing and left wing community organizing? But I think, I think the answer is, and, and, you know, I think this is kind of the crux of it is that because the right wing are above all about capitalism, they perpetuate this individualistic model. In other words, they don't organize as a class. I guess they do technically organize as a race, but even as such, they tend to do it as individuals, right? And so they kind of perpetuate the disempowerment of the individualistic model. And what I mean by that is I'm very struck on the right by how everything is a form of hierarchy,

Like the right is very hierarchical, so it's Q who has all the answers, or Trump has all the answers, or Hitler has all the answers. And so what that does is it's very much like back to like the Holy Spirit and Calvinism where like God sort of beams or the Holy Spirit beams like the same thought into each mind and they all receive it as individuals, which is not to say that they're not a community or they're not effective or they're not organized, but it means that they've perpetuated that kind of de politicized de politicized status of the individual that kind of, giving themselves over to some, some higher being or some artist being. And, and I think that's important. And I think that, you know, the internet obviously has facilitated that, but I think it can, it is in a way it would actually give the edge to sort of more like leftist forms of organizing, which is to organize as collectives, like, right, sort of to not stress the individual as a depoliticized subject, but the individual as somebody located in a collective and that I think that's a different form of organizing and a different form of politics that comes out of that. And that I think is something that internet by its nature can do because like the internet isn't particularly hierarchical. Yes, you can all wait for Q to say whatever the hell Q says, you know, and work accordingly. But there's a way in which, you know, just to give a kind of a silly example, I was really interested in this phenomena that happened like a year ago when all these people on QAnon thought that John F. Kennedy, Jr. Was going to come back from the dead and become like the president and Q apparently was saying, no, this is not true. Don't listen to this. But they were doing it anyway. So it's just an example of how the Internet can be very subversive even to these kind of fascist movements And I think that subversion is something that helps, our anarchist organizing better than it does, fascist and right wing organizing. I hope I answered your question. It's probably the most, critical question in the whole thing I was saying. So.

Yeah. There's a wonderful Maoist I'm not a Maoist, but there's a wonderful Maoist expression that I love, which is called waving the red flag to oppose the red flag. And I think that's what you see a lot in these kind of things where you create, like, community and diversity and inclusion. And but it's done by people who are devoted to those things not happening. Right? Like in other words, you know, you know, QAnon is an example of that, like a community that is designed to sort of prevent community from occurring because people think they're in a community, but it's actually an anti community, you know? And I think that works in corporations all the time. Like corporations do not want they don't you know, they kind of tend to be too like white supremacy does too much for them to really want diversity, equity and inclusion. So they kind of use those offices to sort of thwart that thing, but to look like they're doing it, you know, and I think that I think there's a lot of that, like, and I think, you know, to me, the bottom line is if if workers were actually able to speak to each other and make decisions about things, including about these kind of issues, I think you would have a very, very different result than you do when you have these kind of top down management, you know, because that to me is like a basis of my deepest faith, which is that, you know, literally collectively the workers know everything there is to know about a company and the administrators and managers only know, like, this little bit. So, by definition, they're dumber and they're sort of imposing what they think onto everyone else. Right? And that includes ways to control what they fear as collective actions, which they then try to take over and make sure that they don't produce that result, you know, something something like that. Anyway

Yeah. Maybe maybe I would like to ask a question. Okay. Because we were in this a year ago, we were in this consideration on what would be the best structure. And, I read a lot of marks and I I love the idea of having worker democracy. And so we're looking at DAOs, which has been discussed a lot in this form of MetaGOV. And we found that they are really very centralized. You have investors that get voting rights and you only get voting rights if you invest. And basically a lot of the DAOs are very transparent and very centralized. And so the idea then was, okay, let's just have people invest with their work, have everyone be a founder. So we are now 40 people. Everyone is voting democratically. Everyone is a shareholder. So basically everybody gets the same kind of deal. But there are some problems. One of the problems of course is that we are not able to pay the same kind of salary as the market. So if you want to have the best developers working for our organization, we're competing with Facebook, with Twitter, with Google, all the capitalist organizations that have investors, that invest billions and they're able to pay really, really good salaries. So to get really, really good talent, it's kind of hard. And it's that's why I think it's one of the reasons why it's hard for organizations that are not capitalistic to thrive next to capitalistic organizations financed by Silicon Valley, where where all the money goes, which are then able to pay the best salaries. And most people, if they're if they're able to decide between having voting rights and being part of the team, being an owner, and getting a really big salary of several 100 thousands, they just say, oh, I'm just take the salary. And and I don't have any voting rights, but I just take the salary. Any ideas how this can be overcome? How it like, kind of Marxist cooperative can survive if at the same time you have capitalist organizations?

That is a, that's a fantastic question. I, I, yeah, I do have a quite a few thoughts about that. You know, it's true. Like, you know, when you're thinking about how to sort of act anarchistically in an ARCUS world, I think things like, worker owned corporations are definitely an improvement, you know, for sure. But I think they still tend to replicate ARCUS logics. And I think that becomes an issue. And like you said, there's competition, but you know what was, what was really striking about the Spanish Revolution, because it was one of the moments when you really had anarchism expressing itself, was they did not take over the state. They did not, they did not, make capitalism illegal. They didn't do anything like that. They just started setting up worker cooperatives, but these were genuine worker cooperatives that worked through the concept of direct action, which is to say, not to sort of try to look like or compete with capitalist firms, but to be something totally other. And they had in a million different varieties, right? Some were more successful than others, of course. And in all that variety, what happened was people started flocking to them. Right? Because they were just, because why would you, you know, work for a boss that treat this, you know, it's actually, when you're talking about tech workers, it's different because like you do have this option for like much higher salaries and stuff, but for ordinary workers, this was not even, there's not a thing like they immediately like moved over because, because, you know, these were not exploited of organizations. Right? So, and, and the same with the political models, like when, when people actually get to have a say in their own lives, it's it really is radicalizing. And, you know, there's a wonderful quote that I often say about anarchism and it it's back to Bee's question, which is about anarchist theory. And the quote is it's from Kathy Ferguson. I don't know if you know she is. She's a wonderful anarchist and she says, everyone says that anarchism is great in theory, but bad in practice, but the opposite is true. It's a wonderful, it's a terrible boring theory, but it's an amazing practice. So when you practice anarchism, that that really kind of catches fire. Right? And so I would say that, you know, when you get these kind of partially anarchist and anarchist forms like you're referring to, you can often be on the losing end of the stick because they haven't fully committed to going into the true worker democracy. But I think when you do have that, I think it's sort of, it's, it, you know, it's, it's so great that every, you know, people, people really flocked with the problem is, is that that's a, that's like an existential threat to archism and it tends to get violently or, you know, shut down or, or, you know, it tends to get isolated and ganged up on or various things like that. So that's, that's the challenge. But I think that that, you know, I think that I think the response to your question is to, is to go deeper into the anarchist roots of things and not, not less so not to try to look like something that they're not.

100% agree. I mean, I think that's right. I think I think I think the more you organize yourself energetically, the more you become immune to the kind of lures of capitalism, whether it's money or or threats or lies. You know, I think I think it really is organized. It's organized life as opposed to disorganized. And that's that's the built in advantage. And that's exactly what I think the the Internet can help facilitate. So, but thank you all. This has been wonderful. It's really great to to see you all and hear from you and everything.

Sure. What we actually do have a a tradition here of unmuting and clapping for our presenter. So in the count of three, we can go ahead and all do that. Three, two, one. Yeah. Yes. Thank you so much, James, and thank you so much, Danny, for moderating the discussion. I'll share a link to the community website if anyone's interested in engaging with MediGov and the community more. And, yeah, looking forward to continuing the discussion amongst ourselves and just, again, thanks a lot, James. A lot of food for thought and some really interesting frameworks for thinking about the work that we're doing.

Thank you. Thanks so much, everybody.

Yeah. Amazing. Alright. Bye, everyone.