Often times it is reliably frustrating: it is frustrating that this opportunity doesn’t magically reflect itself in constructive criticism & activity. It is frustrating that so many of us live isolated lives where the Internet is the closest we get to other like minded people, to other anarchists. It is frustrating that the growth of anarchism in North America isn’t demonstrable in obvious metrics like “winning” or “popularity” but with becoming the next boogey man that sloppy journalists and politicians will use to grow their budgets and sell their… (what does journalism sell again?)

Anarchist News is counter-information. It exists to give an anarchist perspective about the world that we live in and for anarchists to give that perspective. To tell that story better we have a number of new tools, upcoming functions, and a serious request.

TL;DR: Anarchist News is aggravating and important. It continues to add features. Now it will be more cautious about inappropriate comment (both admin & user submitted). This project costs; please donate.

New tools

1. Tracker: http://anarchistnews.org/tracker. This is a good tool in general but a great tool if you are a registered user. I use it as my primary interface with the site (for reviewing comments)
2. links: http://links.anarchistnews.org/ Eventually every anarchist link should live here. This is crowdsourced bookmarking. Help add all the things!
3. @news pad: This is a brand new service. This is intended for anon communiques and other shared, collaborative, work. These links can be source of @news stories. Check it out! http://pad.anarchistnews.org/

Upcoming features

• Site redesign: I’d like to do this but it’s been hard to prioritize this project. While I agree the site looks out of date (it based on slashdot code from 10 years ago) I am not sure how much this matter. There are three kinds of readers of @news as far as I can tell. Those who read the stories (only), those who read (every) comment (may emma save their souls), and those who read the rollers. I am not sure any of these three types would benefit from a big change. Perhaps there is an occasional drive-by reader who is turned off by the site, but obviously there are bigger issues for them to stick around. The bigger issues, for me, are that I would like to add some more functionality like more/different side bars (specifically based on International coverage and not-necessarily-anarchist-but-of-interest-to-many coverage) and probably ads. More on this later.
• Crowdsourcing: A new feature to the general site will be the addition of a new landing page to organize and encourage people to help out with anarchist projects. This will start with more specific information for the Anarchist Library but also will include a yet-to-be-announced crowdsourcing translation project that will be enormous in scope.

Self-Criticism

This project has long since exceeded the size where I should just treat it like it is mine. There are hundreds of visitors here on slow days and thousands on normal days. There are several kinds of users to Anarchist News: readers (and posters) of stories, readers (and posters) of comments, and people in dialogue with the sites “meta” content.

I have occasionally posted “meta” content that led people to believe that I (worker) or the site (http://anarchistnews.org) was advocating for positions that we were not. I regret this and in the future will refrain from using images that exceed a PG (or rarely PG-13) rating. There are tons of (meta) conversations to have about this issue but suffice it to say that in the USA, even in the anarchist context, salacious material is distracting and creates a safe space for moralizing. This is not the Anarchist News project so this material will no longer be posted.

Additionally, I fee like the troll activity on the site was fun for a while, but has exceeded it’s expiration date. This will continue to be a hard line to hold (because the skeleton crew of moderators aren’t interested in becoming cops) but as we intend on growing the number of moderators who are active perhaps there will be additional intelligence on how to solve this problem well.

If you are interested in participating in these conversations (and possibly becoming a moderator for @news) drop me a line at worker@anarchistnews.org.

A Serious Request

It has been over a year since I’ve asked the site for cash. I would like to ask for it now. The best way to donate is to send $ via paypal or the LBC Link that’ll be below. The servers have recently jumped in cost which means that I need to raise nearly $700 to cover the expense (a bit over $100/server, 2 servers, quarterly payment). Later in the month I will ask for assistance more vigorously.

Donate via LBC

When building a tool that is intended to be used as a weapon, the inhospitably of the workplace (competition, assumption of bad faith, hostility) must be expected.

That hostility is one of the tests that we face when we work on projects that are, or become, meaningful.

There are many of these tests; sometimes they are quiet, and sometimes they are loud. You may be tested with an arrest, a health issue, or the exposure of parts of your life that you wanted kept private. What is important is not the way in which you are tested but how you deal with the test, and more-so, how you deal with the aftermath (whether you pass or fail). Most of us do not pass our first test. Some of us divulge too much information, some of us are inappropriate with our friends and need to be checked on it, and some of us stay injured for the rest of our lives. The shame of that failure can haunt us. It can chase us away from association with anyone other than coworkers and family. This is a great tragedy.

This withdrawal comes from society’s puritanical insistence that each of us act like ultra-capable, appropriate machines of ideological coherence. That insistence is destroying our ability to grow strong together. We are spending hardly any time picking each other up, other than to tear others down. We aren’t learning skills about how to age, share, or progress through certain perspectives because instead we shine lights on each other; we are pointing at the shadows instead of the washed out faces or the blinded eyes.

When they kick down your front door you have the hardest choice to make, because the weaknesses of all the options have become very clear. Do you turtle up and wait to fight another day (perhaps in a different situation than drawn guns and bully boots), or do you go down in a (metaphorical) blaze of gunfire, never to be seen again.

Clearly there are arguments that this diffusion of traditional revolutionary anarchism is not a Good Thing; and many of those arguments are fair. The question here, as with many other elements of our revolutionary tradition, is: should we act as canaries in a coal mine or as travelers into an unknown future? Do we react to the world we live in, chirping at every indignity and offense, or are we creating our own world, stumbling and fitful?

In this way anarchism is changing, not just from the time of the first International, or the labor struggles of the early twentieth century, or the counter-cultural anarchism of the sixties and punk, but from the Globalization Movement (which many of us use as the modern marker of where we are). Where we are has changed. Not entirely, nor even cruelly, but enough that the assumptions of the past no longer hold. It is as likely that we will find inspiration in the act of one courageous young person as in a community’s response to bad news.

Anarchism, to remain vibrant and relevant, needs to be in self-critical dialogue about its role, as an explicit political tendency, and as an “outside agitator” of pivotal events. It cannot stand alone as a singular answer to every problem and willnever be the flag beneath which the bulk of humanity rallies. Until we can answer, in compelling ways, the slander of anarchism = chaos and the limitations of those who believe anarchism = total freedom to act like a jerk we will continue to be what we are now, a historical tradition that continues to be modern and vibrant but ultimately marginal.

What is anarchist news then? It is everything that speaks to this set of histories, actions, and possibilities. It oftentimes is the hostile reporting on us by our explicit enemies (but more typically by our de facto enemies in the press& academia). It is a variety of counter-cultural stories that relate to anarchist practice. It is the stories of labor and conflicts with the other remnants of the First Internationale. It is mostly explicit but sometimes implicit information about and of concern to anarchists that, on occasion, requires context and a pause to correlate to the general project of anarchy.

But that is entirely in the realm of illusion. Enormous police budgets haven’t been spent on anything that can actually be considered part of an anarchist project (and media exposure of our prisoners and persecuted do not count). And we have been playing the “anarchists are coming to town” game for nearly a decade and it has largely grown thin, either as a terrorizing narrative (to windows everywhere) or as something that is internally inspiring (outside one or two trips). Around 2000 it wasn’t impossible (even if it seemed odd) to imagine traveling to Quebec, Genoa, and Seattle while keeping a fire in the belly about our chances to impact multinational organizations and the towns that host them. Today it is more common to hear stories along the lines of “one and I’m out” whether it is the RNC 2008, COP15, or Toronto G20. One experience of sound cannons, multiple tear gassings, and direct state repression (by the nightstick, boot and lawyer) is usually enough to teach the lesson of what exactly is going on around here.

Local projects used to be a regenerative place for anarchist folk. Projects that fed people, supported prisoners, and provided local radical infrastructure were all examples of the unappreciated but shared and long term work that would feed back on itself, nurturing an atmosphere of projectuality that made the anarchist space in many towns seem vital and attractive. While this still exists in many locations, there is also a vocal tendency to belittle this kind of work as “not effective” or aesthetically displeasing to anarchists who only see valuable local work in propaganda or direct action (against breakable public space). Both sides of this argument serve to silence anarchist work that is outside of the circles that have taken stands in this innocuous (but heated) disagreement.

The different political persuasions in North American anarchism don’t seem to be doing particularly well either. Groups are breaking up and the groups that are forming seem to be more ethereal and tenuous than ever. Red anarchism seems to have little to celebrate beyond a yearly meeting. Green anarchism appears to have disappeared altogether. Insurrectionary anarchism is such an approximate tendency that to even say that it exists in a distinguishable form requires eliminating well over 50% of the people who are inspired by it. Perhaps the only persuasion that is healthy is the event planning wing. Pick any month of the year and there is probably a book fair being held in at least one town and (nearly universally) the attendees have a jolly good time perusing titles and having conversations they could be having with each other every day if it weren’t for the death of the independent bookstore and the fact that most of us are spending all of our time online anyway…

But are we losing? Of course we are. Both on an existential axis and in real material ways anarchism is not a revolutionary movement that holds a lot of stake in winning per se. How else can we maintain a relationship with a movement that has lost every conflict it has been in (and will probably lose every future conflict too)?

The better question may very well be how are we winning? The mere threat of us showing up can cost the state nearly a billion dollars. More and more we are choosing to make our impact precisely, either by showing up at one event in a distant land, by participating in long term local projects, or by devoting our energy to getting the word out. Anarchists have made a commitment to modernity which can be seen in their propaganda (in content and–strikingly–in form), in their strategy against the death of the independent bookstore, and in their sophisticated presence on the Internet. Finally anarchists are spending less and less time on time-wasting feuds defending a singular orthodox position on any number of questions. This does not mean that there is any less vitality on questions around violence, strategy, tactics, or ethics but those questions no longer have to be written in one color of ink to be read by a lot of the anarchist space.

Anarchists are winning. Not as a political movement abolishing the state and capitalism, but as an eclectic and paradoxical set of practices that reflect a changed world and a world still worth changing (and not abandoning). Our victory is that while we are the most vital political tendency in opposition to the totality of the existing order and have no significant possibility of forcing our solutions onto the body politic we are still visible and insisting on our approach. We win because we are more like the tortoise than the hare (and we decide where the finish line is).

• This months Anarchist News Digest is now availble
• This issue is 7 pages long and has lots of interesting items. It is intended to be printed and distributed in your town. Do that.
• A painful security upgrade was done on the site. I want to thank drush for making the fourth time work like a charm.
• I’d also like to give a shout out to firebug for making css drama… less drama
• We (the @news moderators) are more aggressive than we used to be. If you find some material that you believe should be removed. It probably will be, we just haven’t gotten around to it yet. Even we are occassionally offline, sue us.
• This month we received a lawsuit threat related to slander regarding a thread on an anti-nazi action. That thread has been removed. Anti-racists (and the racists they love to fight) aren’t necessarily (or even particularly) anarchist. This should go without saying.
• If you are posting an event listing… consider creating an “event type” rather than posting your event as a story. If you post an event it will not be moderated (and most events posted as stories just get moved to event listings).
• I strongly recommend checking out the IRC channel. We have have a way for you to get on it instantly. Many conversations happen here.

But is it real? If we were to categorize a range of real experiences—from those having the most impact on our life, health, sanity, and social well being—to those having the least impact, the Internet would sit somewhere between totally unreal and a little bit real. The web is a great place for getting information about events & groups, opinions from people who have a vested interest, and other either factual or specific purposes. I don’t believe it is a great place for conversation.

Just like “reality” the word “conversation” can mean many things. Clearly every day there are dozens of posts happening on the site. I happen to find this type of conversation—anonymous, context-less, and flippant (without trust)—more or less a waste of time to participate in. I choose to participate in conversation that is rich in context, between personalities, and developing levels of trust. I recognize that many anarchists don’t have that privilege. It is sad that we live in a time when sincere human relationships are considered a privilege and when what we have replaced them with is hostile and alienating.

This month we have posted a number of blogs, editorials, and rants that were—strictly speaking—news but also mean-spirited and nearly textbook definitions of ad hominem and bad faith arguments. Real people were impacted by these farces and this reminds us that the question of the reality of the Internet is still open.

Publishing has changed since the dawn of the Internet. We are no longer corresponding via post nor are we writing letters to the editor (although we are actually doing both, but at a pace ten, one hundred, one thousand times that of the days of yore). When it is so much easier to spray out words that can get read by others, then any manner of material is liable to get shared, without much attention to its impact. This has forced a lot of sites, in the name of community spirit, to require registration and terms of engagement. Some newspapers are requiring legal names (and credit card numbers to prove them) before you are allowed to post. Other sites require registration that at the very least requires mapping of a consistent identity to an email address.

Anarchist news is such an active community because of the lack of these restrictions but the consequence is clear. The Internet is not (particularly) real, as far as I am concerned, but people’s feelings really are hurt here and there are undeniable social consequences to some of the behavior on this site. We are mostly comrades here and that is worth considering before we hit the Submit button.

What is privacy and why do I want it?

When anarchist complain about other anarchists using Facebook (or Google) they aren’t railing against our desire to be social or even to share information with each other. They are concerned that the context in which we are sharing, in which we are being social, is so out of our control, is so circumscribed by the hosting company that we have no idea who knows what about us. Our privacy is being sacrificed to sociability.

What is privacy? Privacy is the counterpart to the traditional anarchist value of voluntary association. I believe that cooperating with other people (with whom I have a personal relationship) is more beneficial than competing with them. I also believe that this relationship must be voluntary to truly be cooperative. When strangers are privy to information about me without my knowledge, that is not voluntary. A voluntary relationship is one where you get to choose what another person (or group) knows about you, in context.

The context of information gathering is heavily related to size and relationship. We are moving farther and faster away from “if I want you to know something about me then I tell you,” into situations where whatever control you have over who knows what is determined by checking (or not checking) the correct box at the correct time during your use of one service or another. Of course, the larger the information harvester, the harder it is control your personal information. Not only because the size makes it more difficult to figure out where to say “no” or “yes” at the correct time, but because the larger the harvester, the more likely that your no or yes is irrelevant to the deals made behind the scenes in the name of things like National Security ™. And as the suicide of the web-cammed college student illustrates, what about the issue of story-telling (ie if our friends know something about us, where is the agreement of what they should or should not share with others?).

The largest harvester of all is the State. The State does not ask for your consent nor is it interested in your cooperation¹. The State does have a cooperative relationship to other organizations of size (like Facebook and Google) with procedures in place to garner information from all of its true cooperators.

Transparency

Where privacy relates to self-defense, transparency is about ethical behavior. Transparency is the motivation for being clear with someone about your desire for them, how you behave inside your affinity group, how your above ground group interacts with the world, etc, etc.

Transparency is an anarchist principle for the 21st century. It reflects the reality of an era in which our daily lives involves a flood of information (rather than great physical toil), in which the ways we communicate with each other are more likely to be texts, emails, and private messages rather than face-to-face conversations or hand-written letters.

The recent airings of dirty laundry have been great examples of transparency, of controversial actions being totally aired out in the open with no shortage of salacious detail and ambivalent hand wringing on every side of the issues discussed. What these incidents haven’t been good examples of, is privacy. We, collectively, have provided our not-friends a great deal of personal information about specific individuals, and more importantly, specific kinds of situations that our space is vulnerable to.

Our not-friends have sophisticated tools to parse and shape vernacular, jargon, and approaches to the issues at hand that we should consider before future public discussions about them. The next “Anna” will read these threads along with finding clothes at a thrift store (or will they just shop at American Apparel and wear skinny pants?).

Between us we should maintain a principled transparency. When it comes to the outside world we must work together to maintain our individual and collective privacy. These issues are more salient than ever when it seems like our greatest enemies are coming from within.

Be careful out there. The whole world is watching.

1) It requires your participation but takes it with force.

A recent poll*, the following comments, and a particular comment bring up the best of the criticisms of the status quo.

• Flaming/flame-baiting/trolling needs to be radically excised.
• There’s no contradiction between anarchist principles and the censor-ship/repression of actions designed to impede them.
• [better site] works like this…
• Some would call (this site) incoherence and confusion. (later comment)

On the one hand I can entirely agree with the author of this post. I find it very frustrating that the broader project of the site is continuously forgotten, ignored, or belittled because of the comments made to the stories. I also entirely agree with the commenter that there isn’t a contradiction between principles and removal of hostile comments. I believe that attentive readers would notice that the increase of moderators plus a stronger hand towards moderating comments has resulted in a noticeable uptick in the quality of the discussions in the last month. But at the end of the day the project of this site is to provide a non-sectarian news and discussion service. This means that the comment section, the registered and non-registered users, and the content of the site will, by definition, be incoherent.

This is one of the reasons that “outlier” (or anarchist-only-by-self-identification) anarchist stories have been posted in the past and will be posted in the future. This is not a news site expressing the position of an editorial collective or a particular anarchist position but a feed of what is happening in the anarchist space, primarily in North America. It is intended to inform an intelligent, critical, engaged anarchist audience. It is also intended to entertain them. The assumption continues to be that this audience respects that other people have positions that they may disagree with but are entirely acceptable anarchist positions.

Other anarchist, or anarchist friendly, sites take a very different approach to these problems. I think one of the reasons that Anarchist News garners so much hostility in certain circles is because of the natural tendency of people to want their political preferences to be represented and to feel hostility towards the dissonant nature of a story about the CNT next to a story about the Tea Party and another announcing a communist journal. Couple this variety with the attitude of many of the site’s commenters towards everything (be that hostility or bland positivity) posted, and the effect can be jarring. Even I continue to be surprised at interesting stories that receive little to no attention from commenters while silly stories receive hundreds of comments. But I enjoy this feeling and appreciate Anarchist News even when I don’t relate to the commenters, in a way that I don’t with other sites. That said I regularly visit many other anarchist sites.

There is a general attitude among the moderators of Anarchist News that prisoner stories will (continue to) be heavily moderated; hostile and anti-anarchist comments will generally be removed unless they are respectful; most triggering terms will be replaced, by default, with more awesome ones or removed; burning pseudonyms or calling people out by their (non public) legal name will be re-moved. This is a far longer list than we started out with six years ago but as this community has matured it is increasingly evident that it is a necessary change. Anarchists are targets. We have enemies in the form of Statists and their friends, Capitalists and their friends, Anarchists who believe that theirs is the single correct way to approach problem-solving or that all of our aims are the same. We have a very simple shared desire, to live in a world without the State and Capital. All of the rest is yet to be determined and will be the kind of confusion and incoherence that I can’t wait to experience.

* poll at http://anarchistnews.org/?q=node/11977

1) The August 2010 issue of the Anarchist News Digest is online. It has stories on attacks against the existing order, the states (over)reaction, prisoners, analysis and some errata. Check it out.

2) There will be more on moderation in a later bullet but there is now a moderation group (task, hammer, serf & worker) of 4-6 people. We are still hammering out the details of what this group is going to do but for now there is a larger pool of people removing (aka unpublishing) comments. There has already been a noticeable (to me) uptick in signal over noise. This is a long struggle.

3) The question of moderation continues to be a great challenge. There are two instincts. One is to have a completely free place for people (and by people we do mean anarchist people) to question, debate, and just shoot the shit over the news. On the other is the problem of anti-anarchist commenters on the site. The philosophy of trolling is better dealt with other places but whether it is for the lulz or for implicit or explicit hostility towards anarchists it is important that other commenters on the site don’t feed the trolls. At this point those comments are just going to be removed.

4) Real time chatting. At the request of several users we have set up a web interface to supplement our IRC server. There has been a lot more traffic to the IRC server since this addition but we would like to make the invitation public. That said our IRC server is a little different than more public servers like Undernet, Dalnet, etc. It is a semi-private place for anarchists to find each other and collaborate. That said it is a good idea to familiarize oneself for some of the rules of the road for IRC.

5) We would like to ask the Anarchist News users if anyone has any interest (and skills) to help with a site redesign. The hope is to modernize the site but keep the basic elements of the site the same. We are hoping to have a conversation with someone who has the ability to help us with this. Email us at worker at anarchistnews dot org.

Being a non-sectarian news source has been an important part of the success of Anarchist News. Up till now the story of anarchism has been told by segments of the anarchist space that had a particular axe to grind. Whether red or green, by the communique or the constitution, the newspaper or the journal anarchists have had different messages and mediums by which they communicate their message. It is now easier than ever to get an overview of what each of these approaches is doing, thinking and communicating about their approach. We hope we can continue to be a way in which anarchists can see what others are doing in towns and tendencies across the world.

In addition we believe that communication between anarchists is of vital importance. We think that this communication is at the heart of future activities together and should not be gated or filtered by a moderation policy. That said, Anarchist News is a site for (and by) anarchists, and while we greatly desire participation by non-anarchists on the site we have to demand that this participation be respectful. 95% of the rest of our lives is filled with bad faith arguments about anarchist ideas and disrespect towards our goals. We can create a place that is different and so we have.

Six years is a fair amount of time, especially for an anarchist project. It is enough time to set our sites on the next six years and future goals. We would like to make the Anarchist News Digest more broadly available as a mechanism by which non-anarchists can learn what is happening in the Anarchist Planet. We would like to take advantage of other ways in which digital communication can improve the spreading of our words. We would like to help coordinate anarchist action at future events.

Happy birthday Anarchist News and we look forward to another six years of providing the most entertaining, engaging, non-sectarian news, commentary and information about the entire anarchist space. One day we will be everywhere.