Anarchist Technologies Repair Manual
fixing the world through resistance and repair
CFP: Call for Papers for an Edited Book
Anarchism is experiencing a renaissance in locations all across the world. Facilitated by information technologies, new anarchist communities are forming and more established ones are gaining greater recognition. The decentralized, non-hierarchical, peer-to-peer nature of the relationships and social bonds which characterize these communities has inspired a recent surge of interest within both scholarly geographic and activist circles. Articles, conference sessions, and special issues of geographic journals have all appeared in recent years provoking debate and research within scholar-activism. Meanwhile, on the streets, these social forms which have recently become a subject of geographic study are broadening their scope, coalescing to form non-hierarchical movements which directly enable more equitable resource distribution while demanding an end to structural violence.
Anarchism in its most basic form is the theory and practice of resisting, organizing, living and creating worlds without domination. Anarchist practice of resistance is twofold: firstly, fighting the range of exploitations and oppressions imposed by nation-states, corporations, international oligarchies and other systems of domination. Secondly, applying techniques of self-critique, acknowledging that the exercise of power results in an internalization of oppressive mechanisms, and fighting these as well. Organizing in spaces where the state does not provide reliable basic services such as health care, education, or access to food and clean water, collectives of people practicing horizontal decision-making work to meet basic needs and repair their communities.
Within the domain of information technologies anarchism has also driven projects to protect populations from structural violence by creating security infrastructures which shelter their communications from surveillance. Rather than approaching internet surveillance with a "nothing to hide" attitude, anarchists understand governments as oppressive institutions; based on an arcane calculus of power justified as morality, governments are liable to arbitrarily categorize any number of activities sanctioned one day as prohibited the next. As people living on lands that have been privatized by capitalist property relations backed with state force, we are constantly subject to the whimsical decisions of those in power about who will constitute the oppressed class, be that on gender, class, racial, sexual, ethnic or spiritual lines.
Information technologies have largely facilitated communication across many regions of the Earth, inspiring new ways of approaching problems, increasing access to resources and forming a new space for radical subjectivities to emerge. With the exponential expansion of information technologies over the past decades we have seen the practices of resisting violence and oppression change in spontaneous, dramatic and creative ways that have captured the attention and inspired the imagination of people all around the world. We need not describe here the manifold ways in which the networked world enables collaborations and intersections only dreamed about in the past, but it is important to be reminded of the material base it is built upon. Alluded to in the saying "there is no cloud, it's just other people's computers," data centers share with popular movements the fact that there are actual physical locations where they exist. Counterposed to this, the non-physicality of internet communications creates a theoretical and practical space like none we have known before.
However, alongside growth of information technologies it is important to also recognize that the creation of these technologies themselves are subject to the often blood-drenched flows of capitalist commodity production and distribution. From the war-zones of coltan ore-mining operations in the Congo to the sweatshop conditions of the Shenzhen assembly line, the construction of the microchip leaves in its wake a fallout of both human and environmental destruction. The use of these devices enables massive industries to capture billions of dollars even with business models based solely on metadata, creating a massive concentration of wealth and new lines of exclusion. And finally when the machines are discarded, toxins are released damaging and transforming both the living and non-living environment.
This book requests proposals for chapters exploring anarchism in both theory and practice as it relates to all aspects of information technologies for audiences that include the general public, activists and early career scholars. While the call is open, preference will be given to proposals for chapters that specifically focus on anarchism and information technologies within repair (in all metaphorical and material aspects), security, communications, organizing resistance movements, access to hardware and approaches to dealing with the destruction of both the human and more-than-human that occurs from creation to wasting.
Please submit abstracts of up to 350 words, a short bio of up to 200 words and any other pertinent information to the editors by July 1st, 2016. Authors will be informed of selection by September 1st, 2016. First drafts of chapters will be due February 28, 2017, then following revisions, a final publication date will be around September 1st, 2017. Please feel free to contact the editors with any questions.
Contact information:
Erin Araujo: ela120 <at> mun <dot> ca
Bill Budington: bill <at> inputoutput <dot> io
About the Editors:
Erin Araujo is a PhD Candidate in the department of Geography at the Memorial University of Newfoundland in Canada as well as a member of the Cambalache Collective, a money-less economy located in San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas as well as other parts of Mexico. She has resided in Chiapas for around nine years, is a life long anarchist and artist and has participated in a number of resistance movements throughout the Americas.
Bill Budington is a technologist working on software that empowers people to resist surveillance in practical ways with the use of encryption. He has been involved in various anarchist projects over the years, from community-run book stores and hacker spaces to social movements such as Occupy Oakland. Throughout his work on these projects, his focus has been to utilize anarchist practice to reclaim spaces (both physical and immaterial) that have been stolen from us.
Similar Works:
- Digital Solidarity by Felix Stalder
- The Telekommunist Manifesto by Dmytri Kleiner
- Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous by Biella Coleman
- Whose Streets? Anarchism, Technology and the Petromodern State by Michael Truscello and Uri Gordon