Anarchy in the U.S.

I followed a link from an anti-WTO page to a chat room where a bunch of people were talking politics, specifically anarchist politics. I found out what an idiot I am about anarchy.

They were talking about 'organizing' with anarchy as their 'goal.' I said if you organize with anarchy as your goal, that seems antithetical to the meaning of anarchy...?

No, they said, anarchy is all about organization. It's definitely not about disorder.

I checked my dictionary: 1 a : absence of government b : a state of lawlessness or political disorder due to the absence of governmental authority c : a utopian society of individuals who enjoy complete freedom without government

Omigod, no, they said. You can never believe a dictionary definition. Dictionaries are businesses.

I have a copy of that recent Harper's on my to-read pile, the one where David Foster Wallace explores the politics of dictionaries, so okay, I get that dictionary definitions should be taken with a grain of context. But hey...

They said people, not dictionaries, define terms.

But if you don't have any standard definitions for words, how can you communicate effectively?

Well, you're communicating with us right now...

Yes, I am, but (I wrote a few nonsense words, hoping to make my point).

But those words aren't in the dictionary! someone said.

Well, precisely, that's my point: if you create your own words or your own meanings for words, there can be no communication.

That's why it's important for you to define your terms up front, someone said.

Okay, cool, but I still don't get this thing about anarchy and organization.

It's organizing without hierarchy, someone explained.

Okay, well... maybe that's closer to the definition, certainly closer to the root (from anarchos having no ruler). I guess if no single person's in charge, you could see that as an absence of government. And having no leader might imply a lack of hierarchy.

I could think of other words for organizing by consensus, which seems to be what they're about... words with less unfortunate connotations. You might call it pure democracy, where no single person has more authority for action than any other. We normally think of democracy as 'majority rule,' which can result in a tyranny of the majority, but if you work from consensus, that mitigates the problem. Or you could say that the group is self-organizing.

I figure that, no matter how seemingly reasonable the view of 'anarchy' by small groups of self-professed anarchists, if the commonly-accepted definition has odious connotations, it would be politically expedient to choose another word. (I also pointed out, before I left, that tyrannies impose their own definitions and their own views of history, and I wondered if this set of 'anarchists,' if they were empowered, would behave differently. Of course, they would say that the goal is diffusion of power, but guess what? Sooner or later we have to live in the real world.)

In the course of this discussion, they told me I hadn't read the right texts. Looking around at a site operated by the authoritarian corporate knowledge elite at Encyclopedia Britannica, I found a piece that describes whassup:

Andrew Rutten, in Independent Review, 3/1/99: Can Anarchy Save Us from Leviathan? http://www.britannica.com/magazine?ebsco_id=335596

"For a small but growing group of anarchists, rehabilitating anarchy is only the first step toward reconstructing liberal political theory. For them, liberal theory errs by treating the state as a necessary evil, rather than an unnecessary one. The anarchists argue that the state is evil because it invariably abuses its power, violating the rights of some for the benefit of others, and that it is unnecessary because even without it we would still have social order and respect for each other's tights. From their perspective, "limited government" is a contradiction in terms, a project that simply cannot succeed. Thus, for them, the job of the political economist is not to tame the state but to teach us how to do without it."

and

"When performed carefully, rational-choice analysis suggests that anarchy is far more complicated than either de Jasay or his Hobbesian foes make it out to be. Anarchy's foes err by asserting that it is inconsistent with social order; both theory and evidence show that the richness of social relations may lead even the most brutal egoists to cooperate rationally. And anarchy's friends, like de Jasay, err by asserting that its lack of hierarchy is equivalent to a lack of coercion or that anarchic institutions are accepted in ways that statist institutions are not. The social order in anarchy often rests on appeals to the basest sort of self-interest."

Worth exploring... I'll be thinking about this...

For a few years already this famous, even legendary server and host to numerous cultural endevours is having trouble staying afloat. Funders that were approached for help have neglected it in favor of new kids on the block. Art institutions have failed to see the cultural necessity of giving support to an institution that has an openness they don't understand....

Too Much Coffee Man: I've lost my body!

Speaking of Shannon Wheeler, take a banana to this cartoon at Angry Coffee!

(BTW, you can keep drinking without fear of death...)

Is Anti-globalizationwhat democracy looks like?

Bill McKibben on global warming. And here's a fairly balanced op-ed by Burton Richter. (In the NY Times, requires registration.)

posted by jon lebkowsky on 4/17/2001 09:51:20 AM | ~permalink~ | ~post a comment~

Good news about Blogger: Trellix has licensed Blogger software from Pyra. Dan Bricklin has posted a history of the deal. Blogger's the software that powers this and so many other web logs. The company was struggling through the dotcom trainwreck, but with the Trellix deal, Pyra's healthy again.

More about Joey Ramone: Bill Wyman of Salon made a truly great obit, the others are pale ghosts. "He faced the truth where he found it and kicked a generation, hard, in the ass." Thanks, Bill.

News story about a doctor with brains - 26 of 'em, in fact, and a couple of fetuses. You'd think he would pay his bills...

Viridian Boycott! Bruce Sterling on the European reaction to George Bush's decision to trash the Kyoto global warming treaty.

posted by jon lebkowsky on 4/16/2001 09:49:52 AM | ~permalink~ | ~post a comment~

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Sunday, April 15, 2001


Joey Ramone quit the scene...

Twenty-twenty-twenty four hours to go
I wanna be sedated
Nothing to do
Nowhere to go
I Wanna be sedated
Just get me to the airport
And put me on a plane
Hurry hurry hurry before I go insane
I can't control my fingers
I can't control my brain
Oh no oh no
Just put me in a wheelchair
And get me to the show
Hurry hurry hurry before I go loco
I can't control my fingers
I can't control my toes
Oh no oh no

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Saw Marc Singer'sdocumentary Dark Days two nights ago, followed by Marc's q&a. It's about a community that formed among otherwise homeless people who were living in the Amtrak tunnels beneath New York. What fascinated me was the subtext: Singer's relationship with his cast/crew, the people of the tunnel. He was careful to point out that he didn't set out to become a filmmaker... he made the film for the benefit of the friends he'd made in the tunnels.

posted by jon lebkowsky on 4/15/2001 07:55:07 PM | ~permalink~ | ~post a comment~

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Friday, April 13, 2001


An image of the Virgin Mary showed up in Brookline Tuesday night. She brought a fish with her.

Speaking of which, the Gourds' version of Snoop Dogg's "Gin and Juice" was often miscredited on Napster as a rendition by those krazy jammin' Phish. If p2p's got a problem, it's in fixin' thangs that're wrong all over distributed creation....!

Where would we be if those Greenpeace guys weren't into climbing?

posted by jon lebkowsky on 4/13/2001 10:17:58 AM | ~permalink~ | ~post a comment~

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Thursday, April 12, 2001


Create your own unad using tools at Tibor Kalman's undesign in orbit. "Pick a picture, utter some appropriate un-slogan, and your un-banner will be created."

posted by jon lebkowsky on 4/12/2001 03:02:50 PM | ~permalink~ | ~post a comment~

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Wednesday, April 11, 2001


Outside has an excerpt from Surviving Galeras, about a team that was inside the Caldera of the volcano Galeras when it erupted. Check out Salon's review of this, and another book on the same subject.

The Right Stuff, circa 2001: Slashdot piece on a NASA prototype airplane expected to travel five times the speed of sound. Boom!

Next door, a thread about the semantic web.

posted by jon lebkowsky on 4/11/2001 03:43:07 AM | ~permalink~ | ~post a comment~

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Tuesday, April 10, 2001


John McMurtry, prof. of philosophy at the University of Guelph in Ontario, waxes apocalyptic about the global corporate conspiracy!

Another cold war coming on? Check out the DOE's historic nuclear weapons test films for a different kind of 'global warming'! Parascope has extracted from the films for Cold War, Hot Nukes: An Online Exhibit.

Why did Nazis visit Tibet in 1938-39?

posted by jon lebkowsky on 4/10/2001 06:37:41 AM | ~permalink~ | ~post a comment~

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Sunday, April 08, 2001


Greg Papadopoulos, Chief Technology Offer at Sun Microsystems, figures that Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick got it right in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

RIP Ed "Big Daddy" Roth.

Saw John Firor speak Thursday afternoon. He's Senior Scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, CO. A sample of his work: Climate Change: Does It Matter?

posted by jon lebkowsky on 4/8/2001 08:50:16 PM | ~permalink~ | ~post a comment~

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Monday, April 02, 2001


I was just wondering, after watching Fox Mulder's recovery from a few months dead list night, how we can be so sure that a dead person isn't infected with an alien virus and still alive when buried. Coincidentally, Wired News' lead feature today, Are Dead People Really Dead?, addresses just that question. Yow!

posted by jon lebkowsky on 4/2/2001 10:04:02 AM | ~permalink~ | ~post a comment~

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