A: This is a great question, and thank you so much for opening the conversation—a lot of non-anarchists see these symbols in the wild without knowing the history, and it creates fear and negative stereotypes. So many of us have seen a circle-A at some point without knowing what it means, and as a result, we’ve assumed it’s an empty attempt to be edgy or a symbol of punk subculture. While anarchism and punk certainly overlap, and edginess is not something to stigmatize, there’s a broader history there. Let’s do a deep dive.

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The circle-A, or “anarchy symbol,” includes an a for Anarchy and an o for order. This combination is intended to name that anarchism actually isn’t antithetical to organization or coordination (in fact, the anarchists in my life are often the most Type A people alive, but that’s beside the point); decentralization does NOT mean people’s needs are neglected or that strategic planning doesn’t happen. The symbol is also an accessible one; the majority of people can easily draw or use it, and it shows up often in street art and graffiti.

That said, the “anarchy symbol” isn’t just one thing; some anarchists (including me at book signings, lol)

use a heart shape rather than a circle to make the symbol look cuter and more personable, some Jewish anarchists use the circle aleph to show the intersection between their politics and their culture, and visual artists have all kinds of interpretations. Cindy Barukh Milstein’s anthology Try Anarchism For Life shows twenty-six different takes on the circle-A by artists in the anarchist community. Like everything in anarchist spaces, this is NOT a monolith and is defined by what the community needs and values.

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The ancom flag is a riff on the traditional anarchist black flag—a symbol originally popularized by anarchafeminist organizer Louise Michel around the time of the Paris Commune. The black flag primarily symbolizes anti-statism; rather than raising the flag of a specific country, anarchists who use the black flag are showing their loyalty to themselves and their community rather than the state. Contrary to (apparently) popular belief, wearing black is not an inherently anarchist symbol; the black flag is primarily meant to subvert and challenge the common use of flags to represent state power.

The red section of the ancom flag is used to symbolize anarchist positions that overlap with communism—it does not imply possible state communism, as a solely red flag might, but instead points to the longstanding literary and activist tradition of anarchist communism. With the usual disclaimer that labels mean different things to different people and asking ten anarchists about their anarchism will yield eleven different opinions, this tends to mean a belief in mutual aid, gift economies, and the abolition of private property (but not personal property), without overruling people’s autonomy about how they distribute resources. As usual, Emma Goldman described it best in Anarchism And Other Essays:

That being the ideal of Anarchism, its economic arrangements must consist of voluntary productive and distributive associations, gradually developing into free communism, as the best means of producing with the least waste of human energy. Anarchism, however, also recognizes the right of the individual, or numbers of individuals, to arrange at all times for other forms of work, in harmony with their tastes and desires.

Got more questions about anarchist symbolism—or any other topic within anarchism? Let me know in the comments or my DMs!

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a: so before going into this, i would like to name that ageism of any kind has no place in anarchist spaces. i have met anarchists who are ten. i have met anarchists who are eighty. i have met anarchists of every age in between. the idea that all anarchists are twenty and in college is inaccurate and disproven by most anarchist spaces. with that out of the way…

teenagers being edgy is a totally understandable trauma response to lived experience of ageism. many of us experience infantalization because of our age, have to deal with nuclear family and compulsory education, or are subject to ageism under the law; as a result, we often push back, form our own identities, decide who we want to become. for some of us this happens to fall within the norms set up by the school system and state power; for others of us, it’s framed as edgy. certainly, some life changes are spurred by a rebellious impulse, a desire to distance oneself from the systems that cause one harm—and this is a perfectly valid motivation to do something.

sometimes people transition because their AGAB role, as defined by society, is harming them. sometimes people’s political views change because they want to be different from the views they’ve seen around them, and know those views don’t resonate with them. sometimes people come out as queer because they don’t feel aligned with the heteronormative culture they see. sometimes people adopt a different aesthetic style because they want to provoke others or show the ways in which what they find beautiful differs from what the people around them do. sometimes people are interested in dark or macabre topics because this is how we, as humans, process the things that scare us. sometimes people start setting firmer boundaries because they haven’t ever set boundaries and it now feels really important for them.

every single one of these choices might be seen as a valid life decision if an adult does it, and rebellious/edgy/goth/emo/just a phase/whatever if a teenager does it.

because none of our identities, aesthetics, or beliefs happen in a vacuum.

seeing something around you or in the dominant culture, not identifying with it, and wanting to distance yourself from it is a really common way to find out what you value, “edgy” or not. and so, yes, anarchism can fall under the umbrella of “edgy teenager” behavior, because sometimes teenagers (and adults) realize they’re anarchists because they feel a profound disidentification with power structures. sometimes a natural desire to feel or be different can be a part of this. and that does not make it any less necessary or important.

does this mean anarchism is only for teenagers? of course not. does it mean anarchism is a phase? no—and even if someone leaves the anarchist movement, that doesn’t mean their anarchism didn’t matter. does it mean that anarchism is ONLY driven by feeling different and doesn’t have a backing in critical theory? of course not. but as a teenager myself, i tend to think that rather than rejecting “edgy teenager” accusations, we should unpack why that’s even considered a problem. anarchism is for everyone, edgy teenagers included.

On 18 January 2023, police killed an environmental activist and land defender named Tortuguita. Tortuguita had been occupying the Weelaunee forest in DeKalb County, Georgia when Georgia State Patrol officers murdered them in the midst of a multi-agency raid on the forest’s protest encampment. In the days and weeks that followed, police and news reports claimed without evidence that Tortuguita shot the police first, that their murder was justified. Police claimed that they had recovered a gun registered to Tortuguita at the scene, and upheld the gun as proof of an exchange of fire. The state’s narrative dovetailed seamlessly with what police had been claiming throughout the course of the then almost two-year occupation of the Weelaunee forest: that the occupants of the forest, living in treehouses and tents to physically prevent its destruction, were dangerous terrorists. Yet the forest defenders and their supporters saw things much differently. As bodycam footage from the Atlanta Police Department surfaced, forest defenders and their supporters raised questions about whether or not the police had shot their own officer in the hail of gunfire. Independent autopsies revealed that Tortuguita had been struck by 57 gunshots, including through their palms, which were free of gunpowder residue and positioned upwards in surrender when they were shot dead while sitting cross-legged (11Alive 2023; Anonymous 2023a; Medical Examiner’s Office 2023; Sperry 2023).

Contrary to the state’s “terrorism” narrative, the Weelaunee forest occupation comprised a collective effort to halt the terror of the state, making this forest a place where a life beyond the state and its violence had germinated. The occupation prevented deforestation by providing an antidote to what is slated to be built in lieu of the trees: a militarised police training facility. The state and the Atlanta Police Foundation, the corporate-funded nonprofit organisation leasing the land to build the facility, call it the “Atlanta Public Safety Training Center”, with police and politicians insisting that its purpose is to keep Atlantans safe and police officers trained. Forest defenders, on the other hand, call the facility “Cop City” for its mock city design—eerily resembling the mock cities established by the United States military in the wake of the 1960s race riots, where police practised using military-grade weapons against fake street protests (Pettengill 2022). Forest defenders note that Cop City resembles a similar response in the wake of the militant uprisings against deadly, racialised police violence in the summer of 2020 (Anonymous 2022a; Defend the Atlanta Forest 2022).

The movement to stop Cop City and defend the Weelaunee forest has attracted backlash from the state in the form of heavy repression. While visiting Atlanta to join the movement in May 2022, Cobb County police arrested me near a protest at the headquarters of Brasfield & Gorrie, the contractor slated to clear-cut the forest and build Cop City. The state charged me with felony property damage and terroristic threats alongside four others. The state’s crackdown only worsened; that year, the forest encampment would be raided by federal, state, and county police with increasing frequency. When the encampment refused to budge and the movement only grew in numbers and ferocity, police began to arrest whoever they could find in the forest and charge them under the Georgia domestic terrorism statute, a felony which threatens 5-35 years in prison. One of these raids resulted in police killing Tortuguita.

In March 2023, a music festival spreading awareness about the movement hosted on the public park side of the forest was raided. Festival goers were randomly mass arrested, charged with domestic terrorism, and denied bond for weeks to months. The Atlanta Solidarity Fund was the first bail fund in US history to be raided by a SWAT team and falsely charged with financial crimes. In April 2023, three forest defenders handing out flyers spreading awareness about Tortuguita’s murder were arrested and charged with felony intimidation, and kept in jail for weeks to months.

On 29 August 2023, the majority of arrestees in all of these repression incidents —myself included—were indicted on RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) charges on the basis of our original arrests. RICO laws were introduced in 1970 by the US federal government in its efforts to target organised crime. Rather than charging individuals for alleged crimes, RICO laws allow the state to group those crimes into one alleged organised enterprise and conspiracy. Since 1970, state RICO statutes have been introduced; Georgia’s RICO statute has accrued particular notoriety and challenges for its broad, loose, and potentially unconstitutional statutory language. It allows prosecutors to target large groups of people with nearly any level of association (Berger 2023).

Drawing on my autoethnographic research as a criminalised forest defender, I use participant observation, field notes, and document analysis to highlight two examples of “abolitionist life-worlds” (Chavez-Norgaard et al. 2022) forged by the Stop Cop City movement’s building and fighting strategy: the 2021–2023 Weelaunee forest encampment, and the solidarity communities created by criminalised forest defenders incarcerated in various Georgia jails. Both places represent abolition geographies which relied on an interdependence of building and fighting. In the forest, “radical place-making” (Chavez-Norgaard et al. 2022; Heynen and Ybarra 2021) took shape in destructive direct actions against Cop City’s construction alongside an encampment, which proliferated a wide array of mutual aid infrastructures, networks, and practices—including sharing food, water, shelter, gardens, festivals, and more. These practices worked in tandem with Stop Work orders brought by challengers within the South River Watershed Alliance. In this way, a mixture of insurrectionary, autonomous, and procedural abolitionist tactics worked together to defend the Weelaunee forest as a space where human and non-human life was nurtured and protected (Chua 2024; James 2005; Lang 2022).

A mixture of these approaches were also present in forest defenders’ fight for life within the jails in which we have been incarcerated. Some radical place-making practices while incarcerated included continuously demanding jail guards to meet basic needs for food, water, and healthcare; noise demonstrations which included subversive material support to prisoners; various forms of “uncivil obedience” (Bulman-Pozen and Pozen 2015), such as a collective turn-in including cheering, laughter, joy, and asserting rights; and emotional, spiritual, and material support. In these examples, I find a blend between insurrectionary, autonomous, and procedural abolitionist praxes, demonstrating how abolition geographies were made through a range of practices—a fight against carceral institutions which manifested abolition’s characteristic “fleshly and material presence of social life lived differently” (Gilmore 2022:351).

a: this question has thirty-second answers (host a rent party, send a mutual aid graphic around, apply for a rent fund, go to a food distro, post on a mutual aid chat, etc), but most anarchists already do these things. this is a stru…

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I’m excited to share that my microchapbook VOIDGAZING is OUT NOW!!

VOIDGAZING is a prose poetry collection about gender, technology, and the emotional architecture of online life. It moves through group chats, alg…

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a: what do anarchists do about technology?

Introduction

Are technology and anarchy compatible with each other? In our modern capitalist society, we live in an era of unprecedented excess; of information, of energy, and of access. Indeed, we can look no further than the development and subsequent commercialization of the open Internet to find what has wrought this massive growth in global connectivity and commerce. At the same time, however, more people have access to more information than ever.

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Generation Z, so-called "zoomers" or "internet natives," were the first generation to not only access the Internet, but be born in a world that already heavily relied on its infrastructure for meeting basic daily needs. Consequentially, they are one of the first generations of people in a long time, or perhaps ever, to excel in independent, critical thinking as a result of the relative wealth of information they grew up with. For example, most American teenagers I meet on a regular basis have some kind of complaint about capitalism, and how much the prison-industrial complex totally sucks! That's some pretty Marxist rhetoric to come from someone who has barely entered high school... and of course, we have the Internet to thank (blame?) for that.

Even still, computer networks are just one example of how technology benefits normal, everyday people, even insurrectionists like you and I. It begs the question, how one should even define technology itself as a phenomena? What do we classify as technology, and how do we relate to it? Finally, how do we use the way we think about technology to empower ourselves and our fellow revolutionaries?

The answers lie directly ahead of us... let's jump in!

What is Technology?

Technology, put simply, is anything invented by anyone, ever, to overcome a limitation of the human body. It may seem broad, but in reality that is the most general way of thinking about technology. From this perspective, anything from the flint and steel, to the wheel, to the most advanced quantum computers of our day, can be considered technology. But why should we think about it this way? Typically we consider something as simple as a zipper to be a mere tool, or daily aid, not a technology! Isn't technology these days more to do with electronics and voltages and what not, than the bare metal of our cutlery?

I like to define technology so broadly because it allows us to trace back the genesis of technology itself to not just our first human ancestors, but our first pre-human ancestors. Technology isn't some corporate buzzword of the capitalist era, it is our basic heritage as human beings. I consider that in itself to be quite empowering; people can overcome most anything if they're just clever enough to build their way around it. Our creativity and engenuity are as intrinsic to our humanity as the act of telling stories to each other. Technology is effectively the most practical day-to-day application of those traits.

How do we relate to Technology?

Given this post-humanist perspective of technology, it might make some readers wonder: "How do I relate to technology?"

There-in lies the beauty of technology, the answer to that question. Technology, in its most basic sense, helps us do things that we normally can't. So then, it really depends on what you want or need to do as a unique, self-contradictory human being, how you really relate to technology. The fact is that, technology mostly benefits all of us on a daily basis. Whether it is the wheelchair or hearing aid for our differently abled friends, or the walls of our houses that keep us warm in the winter, and cool in the summer, or even those icky toothbrushes that we use to keep our mouths healthy for years and years, technology empowers us all to not only survive, but live fulfilling, meaningful lives, regardless of the societies within which we are embedded.

A hammer will always drive a nail, a rope will always bear weight, and our clothes will always act to protect and support our bodies. Regardless of whether we live as capitalists, or anarchists, or socialists, or communists. Regardless of how we organize our societies, technology will always, first and foremost, act to benefit the common person.

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Technology as a Weapon of Revolution

These days, technology doesn't just help us do stuff, it helps us remember stuff and learn stuff. So we should therefore adapt our definition of technology into two categories, practical and informational. Practical technologies include those such as cars, sewing machines, and the like. They help us do practical things. Informational technologies, on the other hand, help us learn new information, or retain information we already know for ourselves. Note that, depending on who you are, the same piece of information could either be new, or retained, via one such technology. Informational technologies include books, vinyl records, clay tablets, and, yes, computers.

Our societies attempt to control informational technologies in an effort to guard their status, power, and resources. Additionally, they sanction certain practical technologies that they deem "too dangerous" or "too powerful" to stay in the hands of common folk. Institutions covet these technologies for themselves to stay in power, and maintain their inherently corrupt state of control over other people. But we have technology- technology makes us smart, and makes us capable.

The worst thing our nation-states could have ever done for themselves is put an Internet-connected computer in the pocket of most EVERY adult and child on planet Earth; and guess what you're likely reading this article on.... ;)

My fellow insurrectionists, we have the powerful technology, the ability to do things, to move stuff, to build communities. We also have all the knowledge in the world to arm ourselves with. Revolution is go for launch! All that remains is ignition...

This party is about to get lit :fire:

~Isabelle "Izzy" Santin

a: thankfully, because i do not participate in surveillance, i do not have the slightest idea where you live. as a result, this newsletter will be a shorter links-and-recs type of thing that anybody can use to find anarchist spaces in their city!

if you specifically want commune-style housing: ic.org is a good place …

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As soon as the maple leaves begin to turn red, I am stopped on my way to class by well-meaning people with clipboards asking me if I’ve registered to vote. As an anarchist, I personally do not vote (although I realize this may not be the case for every anarchist), but to avoid needing to explain this to…

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A: I have been waiting my whole life for this question. Here goes. I’ll sort these into a couple categories for your convenience…

Books for people who are excited about anarchist theory

Of everyone you’ll talk to about anarchism, these people ar…

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I’m really excited to share that my second poetry chapbook, Different With Him, is officially out now.

Different With Him is a collection of haphazard masculinities—an effort to find belonging, and a love song for gender…

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a: if you’re an anarchist, you’ve likely heard a whole bunch of labels—BashBack aligned, prefigurative, egoist, postleftist, anarchonihilist, anarchoqueer, collectivist, primitivist, you know them, you love them—and then tried to explain your views with this level of specificity to a friend who’s not anarchist. and …

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A: The answer to this question largely depends on the quality of our anarchist infrastructure. Because it’s less about the capitalism of the attention economy and more about how being a survival crowdfunder is a gia…

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A: Despite what popular media likes to say, anarchism is, above all, a framework of love. It is built on the belief and trust we have in each other and the confidence that we can create a better …

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Q: “who would be the garbagemen under anarchy?"

A: Anarchists get asked who takes out the trash so often it’s almost funny. It seems emblematic of a larger issue—who would do thankless jobs that obviously aren’t their own reward?—and ties Instead of just writing my own answer, I’m going to share some of my favorite takes on this from anarchist theory—then write my own response.

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From Emma Goldman’s Anarchism and Other Essays (not directly pertaining to the trash, but about the general issue of people who don’t want to contribute to society):

The deterrent influence of law on the lazy man is too absurd to merit consideration. If society were only relieved of the waste and expense of keeping a lazy class, and the equally great expense of the paraphernalia of protection this lazy class requires, the social tables would contain an abundance for all, including even the occasional lazy individual. Besides, it is well to consider that laziness results either from special privileges, or physical and mental abnormalities. Our present insane system of production fosters both, and the most astounding phenomenon is that people should want to work at all now. Anarchism aims to strip labor of its deadening, dulling aspect, of its gloom and compulsion. It aims to make work an instrument of joy, of strength, of color, of real harmony, so that the poorest sort of a man should find in work both recreation and hope.

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From Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed:

“All right, but how do you get people to do the dirty work?”

“What dirty work?” asked Oiie's wife, not following.

“Garbage collecting, grave digging,” Oiie said; Shevek added, “Mercury mining,” and nearly said, “Shit processing,” but recollected the loti taboo on scatological words. He had reflected, quite early in his stay on Urras, that the Urrasti lived among mountains of excrement, but never mentioned shit.

“Well, we all do them. But nobody has to do them for very long, unless he likes the work. One day in each decad the community management committee or the block committee or whoever needs you can ask you to join in such work; they make rotating lists. Then the disagreeable work postings, or dangerous ones like the mercury mines and mills, normally they're for one half year only.”

“But then the whole personnel must consist of people just learning the job.”

“Yas. It's not efficient, but what else is to be done? You can't tell a man to work on a job that win cripple him or kill him in a few years. Why should he do that?”

“He can refuse the order?”

“It's not an order, Oiie. He goes to EMvlab — the Division of Labor office — and says, I want to do such and such, what have you got? And they tell him where there are jobs.”

“But then why do people do the dirty work at all? Why do they even accept the one-day-in-ten jobs?”

“Because they are done together...And other reasons. […] Here you think that the incentive to work is finances, need for money or desire for profit, but where there's no money the real motives are clearer, maybe. People like to do things. They like to do them well. People take the dangerous, hard jobs because they take pride in doing them, they can — egoize, we call it — show off? — to the weaker ones. Hey, look, little boys, see how strong I am! You know? A person likes to do what he is good at doing.”

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From Peter Gelderloos’s Anarchy Works:

If everyone is free to work as they choose, who will take out the trash or perform other undesirable jobs? Fortunately, in a localized, anti-capitalist economy, we could not externalize, or hide, the costs of our lifestyle by paying someone else to clean up after us. We would have to pay for the consequences of all our own actions — rather than paying China to take our toxic waste, for example. If a necessary service like garbage disposal were being neglected, the community would quickly notice and have to decide how to handle the problem. People could agree to reward such work with small perks — nothing that translates into power or authority, but something like getting to be first in line when exotic goods come into town, receiving a massage or a cake or simply the recognition and gratitude for being a stand-up member of the community. Ultimately, in a cooperative society, having a good reputation and being seen by your peers as responsible are more compelling than any material incentives.

Or the community could decide that everyone should involve themselves in these tasks on a rotating basis. An activity like garbage collection does not have to define anyone’s “career” in an anti-capitalist economy. Necessary tasks no one wants to perform should be shared by everyone. So instead of a few people having to sort through garbage their entire lives, everyone who was physically able would have to do it for just a couple hours each month.

The Christiania “free state” is a quarter in Copenhagen, Denmark, that has been squatted since 1971. Its 850 inhabitants are autonomous within their 85 acres. They have been taking out their own trash for over thirty years. The fact that they receive about one million visitors a year makes their achievement all the more impressive. The streets, buildings, restaurants, public toilets, and public showers are all reasonably clean — especially for hippies! The body of water that runs through Christiania is not the cleanest, but considering that Christiania is tree-covered and automobile free one suspects most of the pollution comes from the surrounding city that shares the waterway.

So what are the takeaways from all this? Well, here are some of the main points I got from these anarchist theories of the trash (a sentence I never thought I’d say):

✭ When thinking about this question, as the CrimethInc. graphic established, it’s always important to consider who takes out the trash—and provides care to others—now. Thankless, dirty, and emotionally taking jobs are disproportionally pushed into queer, femme, POC, and low-income people in today’s society—especially child and elder care. Statistically, housework (including, yep, the trash) is disproportionally pushed onto women and femmes—and not only the physical labor aspect, but the mental load. It’s not as if a patriarchal, statist society has discovered the perfect division of household labor whereas anarchy has no good solution. In a statist society, the most marginalized people take out the trash.

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✭ As EG highlighted in Anarchism and Other Essays, people are more willing to do essential care work (including housework) in a society without exploitation and labor alienation—and without privilege. Similarly, without a patriarchal system that socialized cis men to ignore dirty jobs and everyone else to do them without complaint, cis men would likely feel less resentment about doing them.

✭ Importantly, a job can be rewarding even if it isn’t traditionally “fun”—as Le Guin pointed out, without capitalism, social capital and building trust and solidarity with others matters a lot more. In most anarchist spaces I’ve been in, there’s often a social expectation that everyone who’s able contributes labor such as trash (and, you know, other household chores), childcare, logistical planning, tech support, emotional labor, and all the rest—and people do this in part to prove to others and themself that they care about the space and its networks of care.

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✭ According to Gelderloos, given the hyperlocalization of anarchy, it’s much harder to outsource dirty jobs in an anarchist society (at least not the physical ones, technology based stuff is often different)—so if they are being pushed onto marginalized people, that’s much more obvious to the community and can be more easily rectified. And, as he also points out, autonomous zones actually exist and usually don’t struggle with issues such as the trash.

✭ All this is to say: people are capable of providing care for reasons other than capitalism. And not only are we capable of this, an egalitarian and collective ethic of care is the only way to handle domestic and care work while resisting oppression. This labor does not magically “go away” in hierarchical societies. It’s just done by people who hierarchy oppresses.

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A: About a year ago, I went to an activist convergence and heard a talk on egoist anarchism, expecting the usual stuff—some Stirner and Novatore quotes, some trans allegories, a good time to be had. Instead, there …

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A: Wonderful question! The short answer is, there isn’t much of one. The long answer is…well…labels are tools, and the difference depends on who you’re talking to. But first, some quick definitions.

ANARCHISM: the practice of building a world without social hierarchy (including capitalism, the state, …

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the vibes: There are two transmasculine genders: the butch anarchist, and the tiny atemporal gremlin who really needs a hug. In BOY APPARITION, mk zariel tackles both. This chapbook is full of love letters to the BashBack tendency, chronicles of insurgent trans boyhood and i…

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The first time I joined an activist group, I was filled with hope. We were all there for the same reason—to fight for a cause we deeply believed in. We’d get together in someone’s living room, share snacks, and discuss the issues that mattered most. We were all on the same page. The system was broken, and it needed to be fixed. It was…

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