A History of The Online Anarchists
Hello and welcome to my webpage! Yes, it looks like this on purpose– look to any number of old websites and you'll see they all look just as shitty as mine! Hope you like my silly litte school project :-)
aww, aren't they so charming? It's mostly just fun, but I think this kind of format is important to what anarchism is– for everyone. Even if you have the most god-awful gaudy colors and a black webpage with pages of text, you still are able to access a community of millions.
The internet when it began to pick up steam quickly became home to a wide variety of communities, once fractured across state, national and global lines with no way to find each other. One could argue that the internet itself is anarchist, a place created to have equal opportunity to speak and be noticed as anyone else. Decentralization of power, filesharing, pirating, free access to information– all were core tenants of the internet also quite similar to anarchist beliefs. A service like this available to anyone who could afford it was tempting to wealthier tech geeks at the time, while others were boxed out. But by 1995, the rapid development of personal computing, the world wide web and browser convenience caused a massive boom in the market. This is where I find traces of some of the oldest anarchist sites I can find.
The concept of anarchism and the subsequent ideologies it encompasses have a seemingly perfect place on the internet. What's a movement with no leader that wishes to break down borders better suited for than the wild west of web 1.0? The message was able to spread despite it's fundamental opposition to society and the heirarchies that benefit from it, and to an even larger audience than ever before. These communities sought to collectivize information about anarchism, what it was, its history, and where to find more– often crossing the barriers of language and distance.
I think that anarchy became a more nebulous term to the general public as it was associated with rebellion, punks, teenagers and even hackers. This is why, it seems every anarchist site begins with defining anarchism in detail, what it is, and sometimes more importantly, what it isn't. Certain communities have taken up the aesthetics of anarchy and this is not entirely appreciated. "Neither cypherpunk nor “Hacker” communities were particularly anarchist, in either ideology nor practice. Instead, they largely imported and mirrored mainstream ideas such as gender, economic, and racial stereotypes, spending most of their time naively imagining themselves in a far-flung utopia in which the mere existence of technologies relying on anarchic methods would inevitably lead to a reformation of society with equality and justice for all even as reality turned increasingly towards nightmarish dystopias." (Tech Learning Collective) There is a clear dileniation between anarchism and anarchy, and such is quickly pointed out. To me, it both feels like every site is an advertisement to jump into anarchism while simultaneously being insanely complex. The barrage of links to integral anarchist literature, with endlessly scrolling pages of text seems at points unaccessible to the average person.
How do they define anarchism?
"a principle of theory of life and conduct under which society is conceived without government - harmony in such a society being obtained, not by submission to law, or by obedience to any authority, but by free agreements concluded between various groups, territorial and professional, freely constituted for the sake of production and consumption," (Anarchist FAQ)
"In the struggle for a free and human society, we distribute articles covering a wide range of areas including workplace, environmental and anti-imperialist struggles and the struggles against racism, sexism and homophobia."
(A-Infos)
"just what anarchy is and is not. It is not chaos, for instance, or violence, even though the revolution that we all hope for will not have a peaceful resolution - that's a no-brainer! Worse still are the "anarcho-conformists" who only want to tinker with the existing system, just enough to make it seem more "fair" and "just" and "participatory". The current domination of the world by a few wealthy white men and their lackeys (banks, nation-states, military - both national and civil, etc.) didn't just happen, or happen due to some inherent superiority or divine guidence. It happened because of superior firepower and the ability to mobilize great numbers of vicious killers, thoroughly indoctrinated to follow orders and kill on command, or for the heck of it. The rules of engagement under capitalism are no less cruel or lethal."
(ANARCHY & CHAOS)
Often ideologies such as libertarian socialism, libertarianism in general, other forms of leftism such as liberalism and communism are confused or conflated with anarchism. There is efforts in a few sites to differentiate between these or at the least specifically define anarchism as to be distinctive from them. "project members may not promote ideas or activities, which are incompatible with anarchism or even opposed to it." (A-Infos)