Reclaiming an open-source digital culture will take the equivalent of an online social revolution.

Karl gmkarl at gmail.com
Fri Dec 17 18:08:15 PST 2021


This article sounds cool.  I have not read it and am pasting it in
related to it arriving after my iguana story.  Are iguanas healthy?


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Understanding the Modern State
Understanding the Modern State
Dec
17
2021
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By thecollective

from Anarchist Agency

an Interview with Eric Laursen

It’s become increasingly common to see news stories about the record
levels of dissatisfaction and distrust in governments and
institutions. One of the most recent came from a Harvard Kennedy
School poll of young people in the U.S. between the ages of 18 and 29
in which more than half of respondents believed they are living in a
failed democracy. While many people may refer to specific institutions
when expressing dissatisfaction about the state of the world, such as
governments, corporations, military, and police, each of these
institutions are just a part of a larger system that aims to control
every aspect of our lives—the State.

Agency’s Eric Laursen’s recent book, The Operating System: An
Anarchist Theory of the Modern State published by AK Press, provides
an accessible and fascinating overview of the development of the
modern State, drawing a provocative equivalence between the State and
a computer operating system aiming to oversee and control our
existence. Agency recently produced a short animated video that
captures some of the core elements of Eric’s book (see below). We
caught up with Eric to take a look at how the modern State functions
and why we need to move beyond it.

Agency: Your recently published book The Operating System: An
Anarchist Theory of the Modern State. Why the State? What inspired you
to tackle such a monumental subject at this time?

Eric Laursen: Mainly the fact that it hasn’t really been done before.
I’ve identified as an anarchist for just about my entire adult life,
and early on, I was struck by the fact that the so-called “classic”
anarchists – Kropotkin, Bakunin, Goldman, etc – never analyzed in an
extended way what the State was. I had my own ideas, and I found
myself agreeing with their basic argument: that overthrowing
capitalism is impossible without at the same time overthrowing the
State. But I needed to understand better what the relationship was
between the two, and very little in the anarchist body of writing and
theory—or in Marxist theory, for that matter—explained this to me in a
satisfactory way. So I’ve been thinking about this for a long time. My
new book is really the result of years of puzzling over this, and then
taking a much deeper dive into the issue about two years ago.

The other reason I decided to take this on is that I felt we were
reaching a crisis point in humanity’s relationship with these systems:
capitalism and the State. It was their decision, over the last 200
years, to build an economy built massively on the use of fossil fuels.
It was their decision to impose neoliberal economics on the developing
world, undermining local economies and social orders and leading to
vast population displacements throughout the world. It was their
decision to apply neoliberalism in the developed world as well, which
has led to widening economic inequality, the hollowing out of
communities, and a massively swollen financial sector that’s
essentially turned the economy into a casino.

It’s urgent that we better understand the dynamic that created these
crises, which are global and existential. And that’s synonymous with
understanding the relationship between the State and capitalism.


Agency: Why is a computer operating system a good analogy for the State?

Eric: Because a system like Windows or iOS, like the State itself,
aspires to supremacy: to be all-seeing, all-knowing, ever-present in
our lives. To build a global monoculture, which it then peddles as a
kind of utopia. This isn’t a coincidence since computer operating
systems are a product of the State, developed through an intense
public-private collaboration in the decades following World War II.
Like the State, they’re one of the defining developments of the modern
world that began a bit more than 500 years ago, and they embody so
many of the ambitions of the State itself.

Let me explain what I mean by that. There’ve been all kinds of states
in human history, going back to the Egyptian dynasties, the Roman
empire, the Chinese empire, and so on. But the modern State is
something very particular that arose in Europe around the end of the
15th century. What made it different is that in these new
states—France, England, Spain, initially—the monarchs tried to weld
together a unitary regime that used commerce and finance as a tool to
attain and extend its power. It wasn’t just about armies and tribute
and taxation anymore, it was about the commodities you produced, the
size of the markets for them, and the leverage that they gave you to
defeat your enemies and expand your power, internally as well as
externally. That’s why I say the State was the original capitalist,
and still is the biggest.

But to use this new weapon effectively, rulers needed to have much
greater control over the lives of their populations. Every aspect of
them. That meant, as the modern State developed, greater control of
where they lived, how many children they had, what religion they
followed, what occupations they pursued, what they thought and what
they believed. As the centuries passed, that meant more tracking, more
surveillance, more regulation, more social engineering, more
efficiency, and it meant absorbing more of their traditions into the
infrastructure of the State, or else destroying those traditions if
they got in the way. And it meant imperialism and colonization, as the
State tried to absorb more parts of the world into its economic and
political model. The State itself is a colonial export—maybe the most
successful bill-of-goods that’s ever been sold in the history of the
world.

Computer operating systems have the same ambition: to provide a
framework for every part of our digital lives. We become “citizens” of
Windows, “citizens” of Mac iOS. These become the deep culture inside
of which we live more and more of our life—and if Mark Zuckerberg and
his ilk has his way with the “metaverse,” all of it.

Like these systems, the State wants to make us feel so completely at
home in the acceptance of  an unsustainable mode of existence—built on
fossil fuel extraction and consumption—that exploits millions of
people in poor and developing regions and endangers our very
existence, that we can’t conceive of existing outside it.

Agency: In The Operating System you discuss the issue of a Core
Identity Group being at the center of power in every State. Can you
share any examples of these Core Identity Groups and how they have
concentrated power in the State?

Eric: Well, there’s always been something artificial about these Core
Identity Groups. I’ll give you an example: what’s known in the U.S. as
“white people.” That’s actually a pretty disparate group, by class, by
ethnic origin, by wealth.  But we’re taught to think of white people
as a privileged caste, the “real” Americans, the ones most entitled to
the privilege of calling themselves American—as the “nation” that the
State supposedly embodies—even though whiteness is an invented
concept, that can be stretched to include new groups as needed.

Every State has had its version of a Core Identity Group, going back
to the origins of the modern State. What it really is, is the group
that the State relies on for its base of support, that it encourages
to identify most closely with itself, and it’s the reservoir from
which the State obtains each new iteration of its leadership. The
problem with the notion of a Core Identity Group is that it inevitably
excludes somebody: actually, a lot of people. Everybody else forms an
underclass that is eternally knocking on the door of privilege but
never gets in. The result is that the price of the State is racism,
sexism, and gender-identity discrimination: because women and the
non-binary are only provisionally part of the Core Identity Group.
Capital, of course, needs an underclass to help it hold down the cost
of labor, so this arrangement serves business and financial interests
as well. What I want to stress is that these are not problems that the
State can help us to resolve. They are endemic to the State itself,
part of its internal logic.

Agency: The Operating System discusses how the State so often fails to
address even the most basic needs of communities. Are there specific
areas that you think the State fails particularly hard in relation to
community needs?

Eric: I’ve just mentioned one of them—racism—and that includes the
targeting and elimination of the world’s remaining Indigenous groups
and their cultures. But there are so many others. Another, of course,
is poverty. The State is not geared to eliminate poverty, in spite of
all its resources—which in theory are sufficient to do so—and in spite
of the “trickle-down” ideology that liberals as well as conservatives
tacitly accept. The State has always been geared to pursue economic
growth as fast as possible, since this is the basis of power in the
modern world, and because it relies on capital to do so, it’s
inevitably subject to a boom-bust cycle that tosses human beings aside
and requires the bailing-out of the too-big-to-fail perpetrators. And
that disregards the toll the system takes on the environment. Which of
course is another problem; we pay a staggering price for the growth
and maintenance of the system based on the State, and as climate
change accelerates, that price becomes devastating. So I want to
emphasize another thing: that the State is not capable—has no
incentive—to solve the problem of global warming, or reverse it. It
just has no real incentive to do so, because this would deflect
attention from its pursuit of rapid economic growth.

Agency: It feels like most people take the existence of the State for
granted, as if it’s a given and there are no alternatives that aren’t
terrifyingly brutal. Do you have any thoughts on how agents of the
State have managed to create so much fear around stateless societies?

Eric: Yes! The State enforces its vision of society through a
combination of hard and soft power, and by cultivating the loyalty of
the Core Identity Group. We’ve seen that recently, of course, in the
way Trump stroked white Americans’ sense of themselves as the “real
Americans,” the “regular people,” and how the Brexit campaign in the
UK encouraged white people in Britain of Anglo backgrounds to adopt a
very exclusive sense of what it meant to be “English.”

But there’s a problem. Faith in government is at a historic low in
most so-called advanced economies. So the State encourages the Core
Identity Group to identify closely with two particular institutions:
the military, and the police forces. They are seen as the Core
Identity Group’s protectors against the other “elements” that threaten
them, as the upholders of the society’s best values, as a kind of glue
that holds the world together for a group of people whose loyalty the
State buys by constantly encouraging them to feel embattled.

When all else fails, of course, there’s hard power: the kind that
people outside the Core Identity Group are most liable to feel the
force of. Lately, we’ve seen the military adopt more impersonal ways
of killing, and the police adopt more military techniques for
maintaining order. In the U.S., we’ve seen the prison population
expand to the point where there literally is no more room to house
them. But even hard power has a “soft” aspect to it: the effort to
reassure the Core Identity Group that it’s being protected and looked
after.

Both hard and soft power have been part of the mix since the
beginnings of the modern era. But like everything else about the
State, the tools and techniques become both more sophisticated and
more pervasive over time. The hard and soft powers of the State are
everywhere today, in ways that they never were in past centuries,

Agency: If an operating system is an analogy for the State, what would
be a digital analogy for your idea of achieving an anarchist society?

Eric: We already have one, in open-source systems, such as Linux, at
least in its ideal form. But the problem with digital is the same,
really, as with any other institution or product of the State. The
digital world was conceived and designed by the government-private
sector collaboration that’s at the center of the State. It was built
to achieve the goals of that partnership, not to set us free or create
a global community, as some tech barons like to claim. So it’s not a
question of knowing how to make the digital culture we want, rather
than letting the tech barons harness us to the production of economic
value. As long as the State exists, it will try to frustrate our
efforts to do so, in this area as in so many others. So that we accept
the State’s profiteering, intrusive, domineering vision of the digital
future instead. We don’t have to, but reclaiming an open-source
digital culture will take the equivalent of an online social
revolution.

Agency: What do you hope for readers to take away from your new book?

Eric: That depends on the reader. If you’re an anarchist, I hope my
contribution encourages you to think about and develop your own ideas
about the State. As anarchists, we’re ideally suited to analyze and
understand this thing, because anarchism is the only stream of
political thought that doesn’t take the State as a given. We’re the
only ones who don’t automatically look for ways to solve the world’s
problems through the State, who don’t assume that a complex society
somehow needs the State to organize itself.

If you’re not an anarchist, I hope The Operating System provides a
fresh way to look at the way the State organizes us, and articulates
some of the inherent problems with the system it imposes. And I hope
it encourages non-anarchists to think more broadly about solutions to
the problems facing human beings and the earth. We’re taught to think
that any collective solution to our problems that doesn’t include the
State and capital is an impossible form of utopianism. In reality, the
State and capital are what stand in our way.

Agency: What needs to shift in society in relationship to how people
think about and relate to the State?

Eric: To start with, we’re accustomed to think of government and
capital as two separate things, usually existing in tension with each
other. There are tensions, of course, but what I’ve tried to show is
that they’re really two parts of one unitary system, which I call the
State with a capital S, that’s geared to manage all the resources of
the earth—including human lives—in a relentless quest to build wealth:
everything else be damned.

But it’s also seductive; it provides us humans with a 360-degree model
for living our lives. Why bother to think outside the State, when the
State makes it so easy for us to just accept the system as it is? But
that of course is exactly why we have to learn to think outside the
State. The State isn’t just an obstacle to the kind of society we’d
like to have; it’s what we have instead.

We already know what we have to do, and to some extent we’re already
doing it: identifying nodes of resistance, and forming networks
between them so that we can recognize and organize around the
commonalities between, for example, Standing Rock and Brazil’s
Movement of the Landless, the farmers’ revolt in India and Black Lives
Matter, Greta Thunberg’s guerrilla fight against climate summiteers
and the struggle to abolish the police. One of the common threads of
the history of the modern State, for instance, has been a relentless
war on the Indigenous and on minority communities. Their struggle to
save themselves is everyone’s struggle who doesn’t want the State to
achieve its monocultural vision. So that’s absolutely critical—as is
making all these connections and alliances.

Eric Laursen lives in Massachusetts. He is an anarchist organizer,
writer, and scholar. Eric has been active in movements against war and
imperialism and for global economic justice for many years and is an
organizer of the annual New York City Anarchist Book Fair. He is the
author of the new book The Operating System: an Anarchist Theory of
the Modern State (AK Press).
Tags:
Eric Laursen
interview
Anarchist Agency
AK Press
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