Note to anyone who is unfamiliar with the term “Anarchism”: It may turn you off from

the start but be assured that anarchism is the evolution of radical democracy, consensus
decision making, freedom, cooperation, and equality - ​changing the name of anarchism
to something more “appealing” would undermine the evolution of this school of
thought...

Please send an email to ​krisnotaro@protonmail.com

or ​summerspeaker@gmail.com​ to be added to the editors and/or suggesters.

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An
Anarchist-Transhumanist
Declaration (Rough Draft,
Needs fact checking, many
opinions need editing)
Anarchist-Transhumanism is a branch of anarchism that takes seriously the values of traditional
and modern anarchism and combines it with transhumanism and posthumanism.
 Although this is a flag, it is more about an idea, a concept, a way to live. It has nothing
to do with nationalism, nor patriotism.

“Flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people’s minds
& then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead.” - Arundhati Roy

We especially draw upon Anarcho-Syndicalist, Anarcha-Feminist, and Libertarian Socialist

branches of Anarchism. We do not consider “anarcho-capitalism” as a branch of anarchism in
anyway shape or form. This document is anti-authoritarian and anti-capitalist.

WE NEED YOUR HELP EDITING!

Dynamic Document​: 10:56pm EST 2019-06-04

1. Why Anarchism?

Anarchism as a movement and philosophy has been around since the Enlightenment, though its
roots stretch back to the days of hunting and gathering. At that point in history, it was common
for tribes to cooperate in an inclusive, egalitarian fashion. Instead of being mindlessly territorial
and competitive, people learned to work together to work for a common good. Until the rise of
empires, kings, and complex hierarchies, working together was the way to survive1. Anarchism
challenges the notion that we need to compete and fight as a society, but rather, cooperate for a
common good. Since, it has been an area of thought which has grown, evolved, and matured
into a blueprint for a free society. It values freedom, cooperation, stateless organization, and
non-hierarchical social structures. It has been proven to work in communities that value
consensus voting and direct democracy. Commonly, anarchism is falsely characterized as being
chaotic - impossible to formalize or exist outside of impossible utopian dreams. Yet, as proved in
the historical implementation of anarchism into intentional communities2 and full-scale societies3
, it is something more than simply an outlandish dream. But in order to achieve an anarchist
world, we must put an end to the powerful social structures which have brought about
oppressive institutions that have made this revolutionary idea necessary in the first place. The
two prominent aspects of political thought which anarchists do not believe in are vanguardism
and capitalism.

Vanguardism is traditionally conceived by a small group of people who value a socialist state to
guide the working class (proletariat) away from the tyranny of the capitalist-state and the few
who run it (bourgeoisie)4. The problem with vanguardism, as history has shown, is the mass
disrespect for anarchists (and others who oppose the state) and the lives of the bourgeoisie
(yes, the bourgeoisie: corporate CEO’s and government officials are people too) to the point of
mass murder. The failure of vanguardism is most visible in the Soviet Union, in which a
“socialist” elite claimed capitalism would be eradicated, the state would dissolve, and all would
live in peace. The purges of Stalin and the famines of Mao clarify this fact. Vanguardism also
has a tremendously horrible record of failing to turn over the State to the working class, leading
to a dictatorship under the flag of “socialism”. Marxists often refer to this as the ​dictatorship of
the proletariat.​ This dangerous concept is a perfect example of the common misconception
amongst people who believe in vanguardism that the world is shaped by the lower classes
effectively. If we are to examine the application of vanguardism to societies in the past, we will
find these parties have become disconnected from the lower classes they claimed to have been
part of. If we are to stand for the rights of the people, we must stay part of the people, not
manipulative elites who claim to be them.

In contrast to these authoritarian “socialist” ideas, anarchism does not favour a small group of
people creating a state with a dictator. Instead, anarchism is formed around the idea that the
working class should take over their workplaces, lives, and communities with the implementation
of radical democracy. Most people call this notion of anarchism ​anarcho-syndicalism​ and

1
Anarchist writers such as the famous Peter Kropotkin have explored concepts of cooperation in writings
such as his famous ​Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution
2
Notable communities include the Twin Oaks Community, Home, Washington, and the Acorn Community
3
Some of the most notable societies include the Zapatista municipalities, The Ukrainian Free Territory,
Revolutionary Catalonia, Revolutionary Aragon, the Shinmin Autonomous Region, Neutral Moresnet, and
the Paris Commune. Notable communities
4
Anarchists such as Mikhail Bakunin have criticized the revolutionary Marxist concept of vanguardism on
the basis that it is a hierarchal “red bureaucracy”, replacing capitalist tyranny with communist tyranny
which would regress back into capitalism.
libertarian socialism​. Many are confused by the term ​libertarian socialism​, as libertarianism is
often characterized as a radical capitalist philosophy, and socialism is characterized as an evil
Soviet trustafarian terrorist plot, primarily because of Western propaganda. In actuality,
anarchists believe that the rights of individuals should be respected (​libertarianism​), which can
be achieved through the people having control over resources, the tools employed to put those
resources to good use, and fairly allocated goods (​socialism​). It is worth pointing out that
anarchism is socialist, though not the authoritarian socialism it is commonly mistaken as being.
Many communists and authoritarian socialists believe in the concept that a state is needed to
organize the lower classes, while waging war against all opposition. Never have we seen an
effective transitional state bring about statelessness and classlessness. Rather, we have seen
“pro-worker” states evolve into monstrously manipulative power-hungry elites. Instead of
achieving a society for the people through the control mechanisms of the state, anarchists are
firm in the stance that we should implement the principles we believe in without a corruptible
all-powerful group.

Both anarcho-syndicalism and libertarian socialism have a better record of striving for and
implementing radically egalitarian ideas through consensus decision making. We proudly
disregard the idea of a socialist dictatorship, instead skipping through the supposedly
“temporary stage” of vanguardism to a stateless society where the working class self-organizes
in the workplace.

In countries modeled after the ​Nordic System​ (a sort of capitalist and socialist hybrid) we’ve
seen slow evolution that has never truly met all the needs of their citizens. We continue to see
socioeconomic problems in countries like Iceland, Sweden, and the Netherlands5. It then seems
more rational to embrace the ideals of anarchism to have a revolution against the 1% - the
bourgeoisie non-violently. Historically, anarchism has also been shown to be less discriminatory
and less violent than a vanguard driven revolution. Anarchists strive to have no

5
Notable social upheavals include the 2008-11 Icelandic financial crisis, Sweden’s struggle with fascistic
nationalist parties, and the continued prosperity of large exploitive corporations such as Royal Dutch
Shell, which is headquartered in the Netherlands.
interconnectedness with the brand of neoliberal capitalism present in the nations mentioned
above.

Anarchists, as mentioned earlier, are against the concepts of unjustified dominance and
hierarchy through violence and coercion. Aside from being less discriminatory and less violent,
anarchists generally believe in respecting everyone from every walk of life. Visible in the
numerous anarchist variants which range from feminist to naturist, nothing is to be oppressed.
Therefore, the vanguardist idea of wiping out opposition and bringing about a harsh state is
invalid. Rather, we need something which emphasises pure equality and empowerment of the
future self through direct democracy and consensus decision making - anarchism.

● All corporations (e.g. WalMart) and organizations such as NASA should be unionized,
worker owned, and accountable to the worker/anarchist federation (described in - sec.
4).
● All religions should be intelligently and rationally criticized if they inhibit equality,
freedom, etc.
● Leaders, gurus, and political figures should be criticized and skeptically examined to see
that bottom-up organizing remains a reality.
● Anarcho-transhumanism takes the scientific method as its basis for investigation into
rationality.
● Anarcho-transhumanism recognizes that the epistemology and ontology of science is an
ongoing endeavour.
● True innovation should come from cooperation, individual inspiration, and
passion/collective-passion: not competition or the motivation of a few to make a profit.
● Anarchist Transhumanists WILL rebel against any one group who might seek
power utilizing more powerful science and technology. In the here-and-now (2017)
anarchists, worldwide, are rebelling against the already acknowledged few who
continue to, and expect a future where capitalism, the free market, and patterns
predict their continued power utilizing science, technology, and the delusional
idea of economic predictions and algorithms. (e.g. hedge funds, stock futures, and
venture capital)

For more information on Anarchism please see:

http://www.infoshop.org/page/AnAnarchistFAQ

2. Why Transhumanism?

Transhumanism and Posthumanism is not Eugenics

The atrocious history of the pseudoscience of eugenics must not and will not be perpetuated by
transhumanism. Anarchist-Transhumanism is about cooperation and liberation. We reject
prejudice pseudoscientific authoritative attempts at dividing and subjugating mind/brain around
the world… [this section should briefly summarize eugenics and describe in more detail about
how transhumanism cannot and will not make the same mistakes of turning pseudoscience into
social constructs and laws]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buck_v._Bell
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychometrics
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism

(Matilde Marcolli) ​A Bridge and a Sunset:

It may seem strange, in an anarchist perspective, to begin our discussion of the

historical roots of anarchist-transhumanism with a reference to a controversial
philosopher like Nietzsche. However, it would be intellectually dishonest not to
acknowledge the fact that Nietzsche was the first philosopher to formulate explicitly
transhumanist statements. Moreover, the many ambiguities and historical
misappropriations of Nietzsche’s thought are inevitably entangled with the many
ambiguities, both political and ethical, that plague the transhumanist movement today.
We should not, and will not, shy away from discussing them in this document. Many
people (both within and outside the anarchist milieu) are reluctant to consider
transhumanism as a valid concept to engage with, because they see in it sinister echoes
of nazi-style eugenics and other reactionary and authoritarian tendencies, just as many
people cannot help but seeing such echoes in Nietzsche’s writings, even when they are
known to be superimposed distortions of the originally intended meaning. As we will
argue at length in this document, we reject any such reactionary form of transhumanism,
and we propose a very different, progressive, anarchist viewpoint. In order to begin
articulating our position, it is therefore useful to start with Nietzsche himself, as the first
historical precedent we discuss, and present our own interpretation of some of his
transhumanist statements.

(Matilde Marcolli) ​Was groß ist am Menschen, das ist, daß er eine Brücke und kein Zweck ist:
was geliebt werden kann am Menschen, das ist, daß er ein Übergang und ein Untergang ist.
(Friedrich Nietzsche, "Also sprach Zarathustra")

(Matilde Marcolli) ​Nietzsche is certainly the most widely misunderstood and misquoted
philosopher in history. In keeping with this tradition, we are going to present a transhumanist
reading of this famous quote from Zarathustra. The German word ​Mensch​ is a non-gendered
word that is best translated into English as "the human". So, according to this line of Nietzsche,
"what is great about the human is that it is a bridge and not a goal". Intrinsic in the idea of the
human as a bridge is the evolutionary view of life: evolution is not teleological, and the human is
not the pinnacle of evolution, just another transient state in a process that keeps modifying the
development of species. The human species, like any species, is not a goal of the evolutionary
process but a part of the process itself. However, there is more in the use of the bridge image: a
bridge is connecting two shores, and if the human is not a goal but a bridge, in particular it is
also not a dead branch of the evolutionary tree. The process continues to the other side of the
bridge: the human has a non-human, or we may better say a trans-human future. The idea is
further expanded in another famous line of Zarathustra:

Der Mensch ist ein Seil, geknüpft zwischen Tier und Übermensch - ein Seil über einem
Abgrunde.​ (Friedrich Nietzsche, "Also sprach Zarathustra")

In this line the same statement is reiterated and expanded: "the human is a rope, stretched
between the animal and the trans-human". The use of the word "animal" as a translation of the
German ​Tier​ is reasonably accurate, even though the German word more exclusively refers to
non-human animals, unlike its English counterpart, which can be construed as inclusive of the
human and referring to the general animal kingdom of biology. It is much more controversial,
and historically fraud with distortions and misinterpretations, how one should read Nietzsche's
choice of the word ​Übermensch​. Here we choose to read it as “that which lies beyond and
above the human", where for us “above" does not imply a reference to any kind of power
relation, but simply a further step in the evolutionary tree. We choose to interpret this concept as
an instance of the "trans-human". "A rope", Nietzsche's line continues, "over an abyss". The
image of the abyss conjures danger and horror. It is the blindness of the evolutionary process of
natural selection, which leads most species to disappear into the abyss of oblivion and
extinction. The human/bridge escapes this fate and bypasses the abyss, by connecting to the
other side of the animal, which in modern Transhumanism is represented by the transhuman
morphing of human and machine. However, a bridge can stand only if it connects to both sides,
and the connection to the animal is as crucial to its survival as the connection to the transhuman
machine. The two sides of this Nietzschean bridge are the human-animal and the
human-machine interfaces: the post-human and the trans-human.

Coming back to the first quote above, the line continues with "what can be loved in the human is
that it is a bridge and a sunset". In fact, the choice of the pair of words ​Übergang ​and ​Untergang
is particularly interesting: both contain the root "​Gang​", which best translates as a
"passageway", so that the ​Übergang/Untergang c​ ontrast first suggests the simple
overpass/underpass counterposition. However, the actual meaning of the two words moves
away, in an interesting twist of perception, from this simple contrast: the word ​Übergang,​
indeed, should really be translated as "transition" and ​Untergang​ as downfall, demise,
extinction. (​By Matilde Marcolli)

So while the first suggested contrast of "below" and "above" recalls once again the two shores
of the bridge, rooted in the animal and a machine-transhuman ​Übermensch​ (​Über/above​ again),
the actual contrast of meanings sees the human as transition counterposed to and
accompanied by the human as a downfall (the abyss): witnessing the sunset of the human.

wenn du lange in einen Abgrund blickst, blickt der Abgrund auch in dich hinein (​ Friedrich
Nietzsche, “​Jenseits von Gut und Böse​”)​
As Nietzsche wrote in this line from "Beyond Good and Evil": “when you stare long into the
Abyss, the Abyss stares back into you”. The human is then a bridge, stretched between its
interfaces with animal and machine, staring into the abyss of its own extinction, which stares
back with the blind power of transformative evolution. The human is a transition, the very act of
becoming transhuman, and in transitioning beyond the human, it achieves its own demise: a
bridge and a sunset.

The thought of the rise of new forms of life and intelligence beyond the human, especially at the
boundary of the human-machine interface has frequently been a source of anxiety. It suffices to
see the deep-seated fears that accompany the current rapid development of forms of artificial
intelligence, with speculations on the sudden rise of malevolent super-intelligences that will wipe
out the human race. These dark mythologies of the modern age add to an already broad
repertoire of hostile aliens and machines. The tradition of speculative fiction is rife with
renegade computers, artificial intelligences run amok, dehumanized cyborgs and androids,
along with the ubiquitous and ancient human-animal monster hybrids. An in depth analysis of
this kind of cybernetic anxiety in the science fiction literature of the last century is given in
Warrick's book referenced below. In a similar vein, one of the most widespread and profound
criticisms addressed to Transhumanism is also in the form of anxiety about the downfall and
eventual demise of the human. This is, for instance, the anti-transhumanist stance one finds in
Agar's book: the rise of new trans-human forms of existence, especially in the form of radical
enhancements through technology and merging with artificial intelligences and machines, would
deprive us of the very essence of what it means to be human, and will inevitably lead to a
tyranny of the post/trans-human over the human. A similar kind of anxiety about emerging and
rapidly developing biotechnologies and their effect on the changing nature of the "human
condition" is echoed, in a more nuanced form, in several of the essays collected in the volume
"Is Human Nature Obsolete?" referenced below. (​By Matilde Marcolli)

An overly pessimistic view at first appears to resonate with the idea of the sunset of the human
in Nietzsche's Zarathustra. Yet, if we look more closely at the bridge metaphor, the human
bridge rests in place, stretched above the abyss of extinction, precisely because it is deeply
grounded, on both sides of the abyss, to the animal and to the machine. Only by accepting and
embracing the merging with both of these realities, the human bridge can remain solidly above
the abyss, a transformation leading to a profound change in what it means to be human, but not
one that will necessarily lead to the demise of what we would refer to as the essence of human
nature. An important point to keep in mind is that the notion of what it means to be human has
already undergone profound changes in history, by gradually (and in fact too slowly) becoming
more inclusive, as we will discuss below. These changes of perspective on the human have
brought about the inevitable transition from Humanism to Posthumanism, and Transhumanism
is but a further inevitable step in this transformative process. The anxiety about tyranny and
domination of the post/transhuman over the human is grounded in a perception of life and
society in terms of power, dominance, and hierarchical relations, which is exactly what
Anarchism wants to abolish.
The many worries and anxieties about the possibility of tyranny, violence, and domination in a
transhuman future are not unwarranted, but they are primarily a reasonable fear of the effects of
extending to the near transhuman future all those structures of power and dominations upon
which the current capitalist society is based. An appropriate answer to such fears should not
rest on the idea of suppressing, limiting, or prohibiting the technological advances that will lead
to radical transformations of the human. If anything, these preoccupations show that
Transhumanism needs Anarchism: the dismantling of all power relations and of all impositions
of domination and submission is necessary for the human bridge to continue to stand above the
abyss, to guarantee a peaceful constructive future for all intelligences, whether human, animal,
artificial, or transhuman. (​By Matilde Marcolli)

References:
- Friedrich Nietzsche, "Also sprach Zarathustra" (1883-1885) herausgegeben von Giorgio
Colli und Mazzino Montinari, Walter de Gruyter, 1989
- Vanessa Lemm, "Nietzsche and the Becoming of Life", Fordham University Press, 2014
- Keith Ansell-Pearson, "Viroid Life: Perspectives on Nietzsche and the Transhuman
Condition", Psychology Press, 1997
- John Moore, "I Am Not a Man, I Am Dynamite!: Friedrich Nietzsche and the Anarchist
Tradition", Autonomedia, 2004
- Patricia S. Warrick, "The Cybernetic Imagination in Science Fiction", MIT Press, 1982
- Nicholas Agar, "Humanity's End", MIT Press, 2010
- Harold W. Baillie (Ed.) "Is Human Nature Obsolete?: Genetics, Bioengineering, and the
Future of the Human Condition", MIT Press, 2005
- Stefan Lorenz Sorgner, “Nietzsche, the Overhuman, and Transhumanism”, Journal of
Evolution and Technology, Vol.20 (2009) N.1, 20-42, available at
http://jetpress.org/v20/sorgner.htm

(Matilde Marcolli) ​Human, posthuman, transhuman, too human:

Both Anarchism and Transhumanism are deeply rooted in the tradition of Humanism.
Historically, Humanism arose as a cultural movement, first in the Islamic Renaissance of the
Buyid Age (945-1055 CE) in the cosmopolitan city of Baghdad, and later in the Italian
Renaissance of the 14th, 15th and 16th century (see references). In both environments, a
crucial role in the emergence of Humanism was a connection to the culture, philosophy and
science of the Ancient Greek civilization. Some of the fundamental ideas of the Greek
philosophical tradition became the foundation of humanist thinking. The Greeks had established
a tradition of skeptical inquiry and intellectual curiosity, a strong belief that the natural world can
be understood and explained without resort to the supernatural, and currents of thought that
rejected religion entirely. The roots of modern science lie in those early developments (see
Russo's book referenced below). Renaissance Humanism rediscovered these currents of
thought first through the reading of the forbidden Lucretius and his beautiful Latin poem "​De
rerum natura"​ : even before the Greek language was widely rediscovered in Western Europe,
Epicureanism and Neoplatonism had deeply influenced the Italian Renaissance. While trying to
maintain a difficult equilibrium with the brutal oppressive power of the Roman Christian church,
Renaissance Humanism still managed to achieve a remarkable cultural revolution, by putting
the human and not god and religion at the center of the cosmos. These ideas ushered a
flourishing of culture, with new developments in the arts, based on the use of geometry and on
an ideal of human proportions (Leonardo's Vitruvian man), and with the establishment of an
extensive curriculum of "​studia humanitatis"​ in the universities. The disengagement of culture
from religion, and its connection to the humanities, centered on the human as the measure of
everything, lead over time to other major steps in Western European culture, from the French
Enlightenment to the subsequent development of Socialist and Anarchist ideals.

While this important aspect of Humanism remains a founding principle and an inspiration, it is
important to recognize that Humanism also had several downsides. Just as the Ancient Greek
culture, for all its beauty and importance for modern thought, was also a culture grounded in
slavery and profoundly xenophobic and sexist, in a similar way, "the human" as understood by
Renaissance Humanism was inevitably male, of European or Middle Eastern descent, young
and able bodied. The “human as the measure of everything” is an extremely anthropomorphic
conception of reality, which does not leave room of the unfathomable vastness of the cosmos,
and the complete irrelevance of this particular life form on this peripheral planet. It creates a
form of human exceptionalism that denies the continuity between this species and other animal
species, or the possibility of any other non-human forms of intelligence.

It is this important criticism of Humanism that brought about the development of Posthumanism.
There are many forms of Posthumanism (see the references for some accounts). In the way we
approach the Posthumanist movement, we do not wish to see Posthumanism as an
anti-humanism, nor as a form of post-modernism. We consider Posthumanism as a natural
evolution of Humanism, where the main problems of Humanism are addressed critically, and
some profound changes of perspective are introduced. In this respect, we are closer to the
Posthumanism of Braidotti than to that of Neyrat.

Posthumanism calls for the dismantling of human exceptionalism, in relating to other forms of
life and forms of intelligence. It calls for the abandonment of the humanist anthropocentric vision
in relating to the cosmos and the physical reality. We completely reject any attempt to exclude
and marginalize any population, whether on the basis of race, gender, geographic origin, sexual
identity and orientation, or any other such attempt aimed at subdividing humanity by the
demarcation of an exclusionary "us and them" barrier. Posthumanism aims at being maximally
inclusive. We embrace the humanist vision of a natural world devoid of supernatural
interventions. We retain from Humanism a belief in the importance of education and the "​studia
humanitatis"​ (which included the natural and mathematical sciences as well as the humanities
and the arts). We also maintain the belief in mechanical bodies and computational minds,
derived from Humanism and the Enlightenment, but we recognize the value of cognition in every
human and non-human manifestation.
Transhumanism usually refers, more specifically, to changes to human nature achieved through
technological and scientific means. One of the foremost and most successful forms of
Transhumanism developed so far has been the possibility to freely determine one's own sexual
identity, and the availability of the technical means to affect the desired changes to the human
body that accommodate this choice. Transexual is the most exemplary form of the transhuman.
Other important existing forms of transhumanism have focused mostly on medical interventions
and prosthetics, where interfacing the human body with electronics and more sophisticated
mechanisms is rapidly advancing therapeutic options. Transhumanism envisions a broad
extension of these developments, both within and outside of the realm of medical applications,
guided by a general philosophy of ​morphological freedom​, maximizing the possibilities of
affecting changes to one's own body and mind. This notion of Transhumanism, as long as it
does not promote or impose one form over others and one choice over others, is entirely
compatible with the inclusiveness of Posthumanism.

A merging of Posthumanism and Transhumanism occurs in a very interesting way in Haraway's

philosophy of the Cyborg (see "the Cyborg manifesto" reprinted in Haraway's book listed below).
This shapeshifting figure of human and machine hybrid inhabits the liminal spaces at the
boundary of Humanism, its exclusion zones: women, machines, animals. The reclaiming of
these spaces creates the novel posthuman subject, the new Vitruvian figure of
Post/Trans-humanism. (​By Matilde Marcolli)

References:

- Rosi Braidotti, "The Posthuman", John Wiley & Sons, 2013

- Frédéric Neyrat, “Homo labyrinthus. humanisme, antihumanisme, posthumanisme",
Dehors, 2015
- N. Katherine Hayles, "How We Became Posthuman", University of Chicago Press, 2008
- Gilbert Hottois, Jean-Noël Missa, Laurence Perbal, "Encyclopédie du
trans/posthumanisme: l'humain et ses préfixes", Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 2015
- Max More, Natasha Vita-More (Eds.) "The Transhumanist Reader", John Wiley & Sons,
2013
- Jill Kraye, "The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism", Cambridge
University Press, 1996
- Joel L. Kraemer, "Humanism in the Renaissance of Islam: The Cultural Revival During
the Buyid Age", Brill, 1992
- Ada Palmer, "Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance", Harvard University Press, 2014
- Jessica Wolfe, "Humanism, Machinery, and Renaissance Literature", Cambridge
University Press, 2004
- Erwin Schrödinger, “Nature and the Greeks" and "Science and Humanism", Cambridge
University Press, 1951, republished 2014
- Tim Whitmarsh, "Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World", Knopf Doubleday
Publishing Group, 2015
 - Carlo Rovelli, "The First Scientist: Anaximander and His Legacy", Westholme Publishing,
2011
- Lucio Russo, "The Forgotten Revolution: How Science Was Born in 300 BC and Why it
Had to Be Reborn", Springer, 2013
- Stefano Franchi, Güven Güzeldere, "Mechanical Bodies, Computational Minds", MIT
Press, 2005
- Phil Husbands, Owen Holland, Michael Wheeler, "The Mechanical Mind in History", MIT
Press, 2008
- Jean-Claude Beaune, "L'automate et ses mobiles", Flammarion, 1980
- Lydia H. Liu, "The Freudian Robot", University of Chicago Press, 2011
- Donna Haraway, "Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature",
Routledge, 2013
- Chris Hables Gray, Steven Mentor, Heidi Figueroa-Sarriera, "The Cyborg handbook",
Routledge, 1995

(Matilde Marcolli) ​Штурм неба! Storm the heavens!

The fundamental historical roots of Anarchist Transhumanism are deeply grounded in the Russian
artistic avant-garde movements, which flourished in the context of the broad spectrum of anarchist,
socialist, and communist movements that immediately preceded the Russian Revolution, and very
briefly followed it until the oppressive Stalinist dictatorship gained political control and suppressed
them (see chapters 4 and 5 of Antliff’s book, and the books by Bowlt and Matich and by Stites listed
below). This very broad radical cultural milieu saw the birth of the artistic and literary Futurism,
alongside a wide range of related movements such as Rayonism, Cubo-Futurism, Suprematism,
Orphism. The visual arts and poetry of these Russian avant-garde movements were dominated by a
broad mythology of technoscientific progress, a visionary modernity deeply rooted in anarchist and
socialist philosophy. Images of trains were widespread, as symbols of a revolutionary modernity that
collectively drives humanity towards the future, through a new level of connectedness that
transcended state and class boundaries. Other dominant iconological themes included the human
body as mechanism and the blending of body and machine (from Oskar Schlemmer's mechanical
ballet figures to Capek's robots), the myth of electrification as modernization and as metaphor for
revolutionary political power, the image of the city as dynamical hub of radical societal
transformations and technoscientific innovations, and the early developments of a mythology of
outer space and of the connection between human progressive destiny and the exploration of the
cosmos.

It is within this general cultural and political background that the philosophical movement of
Cosmism (sometimes referred to as Biocosmism) flourished. This was the direct origin of modern
Transhumanism, and it exhibited several of the most important themes one encounters in its
contemporary forms. Like its modern transhumanist counterpart, Russian Cosmism was a very
composite movement, where some representative figures stirred closer to mysticism and religion,
while others embraced anarchist, socialist, and communist ideals (see Young’s book below).
Cosmist thinkers advocated the radical extension of human life, the conquest of immortality through
scientific means, the merging of human and machine, and the quest for space exploration and the
creation of human settlements outside the Earth. The Cosmist philosophical movement in turn
deeply influenced the scientists who in later decades realized the Soviet space program, starting
with Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the father of Soviet Cosmonautics (see Andrews’ book listed below).

The convergence of Anarchism and Socialism with Cosmism and Futurism that took place in the
years leading up to the Russian Revolution remains a profound source of inspiration for the modern
movements combining Anarchism and Transhumanism.​ (​By Matilde Marcolli)

References:
- George M. Young, "The Russian Cosmists", Oxford University Press, 2012
- John E. Bowlt, Olga Matich (Eds.) "Laboratory of Dreams: The Russian Avant-garde and
Cultural Experiment", Stanford University Press, 1996
- Richard Stites, "Revolutionary Dreams. Utopian vision and experimental life in the Russian
Revolution", Oxford University Press, 1989
- James T. Andrews, "Red Cosmos: K. E. Tsiolkovskii, Grandfather of Soviet Rocketry", Texas
A&M University Press, 2009
- Marjorie Perloff, "The Futurist Moment", University of Chicago Press, 1986
- Braden R. Allenby, Daniel Sarewitz, "The Techno-Human Condition", MIT Press, 2011
- Allan Antliff, “Anarchy and Art”, Arsenal Pulp Press, 2007

(Matilde Marcolli) ​Cyberfunk Afrofuturism:

We recognize the Afrofuturism movement as another major influence on Anarchist Transhumanism.
This current of African American science fiction and speculative fiction has played an important role
in creating a space for radical social movement centered on an avant-garde futurism that is
ethnically diverse, free of colonialism and oppression, where technoscience, urban culture, and
science fictional space travel are viewed in the light of the African diaspora. Afrofuturism embraces
the arts: in music, from Parliament-Funkadelic's Mothership to Janelle Monáe, to the Sonocybernetic
Manifesto of cyborg-musician Onyx Ashanti (see the links below), as well as in literary and visual
forms (including Amiri Baraka's Afro-Surrealism). There is a deep link between the arts, especially
music, and the Afrofuturism movement, see the book by Chude-Sokei listed below. The connection
between music, the technoscientific imagination, and the sciences, an important theme of this artistic
movement, has also been taken up in creative ways by scientists, see for instance the book of the
physicist Stephon Alexander linked below.

The concepts of Cyberfunk, Cypherfunk, and Biofunk originate in the writings of Balogun Ojetade
and Milton Davis (see the anthology "The City" quoted below and the "Chronicles of Harriet" and
"MVmedia" websites linked below). The artist Carles Juzang has created many beautiful visual
examples developing the Cyberfunk poetics (see his DeviantArt page linked below).

Cypherfunk denotes a movement of African and African-American activists advocating the use of
codes and cryptography, and computer hacking, as instruments of political action. The creation of
online spaces and the coordination of political action through online communities play a crucial role
in this movement. Concerns about privacy and security and surveillance are an integral part of the
Cypherfunk approach, and especially the creative invention of networks of citizens organized
sousveillance techniques aimed at protecting the community from police brutality and racist violence.
The Biofunk aspect of the Afrofuturist movement focuses on the transformative role of modern
biotechnologies: bio-hacking, DIY synthetic biology, manipulation of genetic material, with a
particular focus on the perspective of marginalized groups that have been traditionally excluded from
big-science run by corporations and universities. The Biofunk movement is also fighting against the
misuse of biotechnologies when left in the hands of capitalist profit and repressive institutions of
social control.

Another important theme in these Afrofuturist movements is the bridging of the digital divide, which
currently leaves a significant part of the population, including women, racial and ethnic minorities,
and socioeconomically disadvantaged people, with limited access to connectivity and information
and communication technologies, as well as other important technological advances. Actions range
from the Baltimore Algebra Project (see Gillen's book referenced below), to various grassroot
training programs in computer coding for underprivileged school age students organized in the form
of anarchist hackerspaces. ​(​By Matilde Marcolli)

References:
- Ytasha Womack, "Afrofuturism", Chicago Review Press, 2013
- Milton J Davis (Ed.) "The City: A Cyberfunk Anthology", MVmedia, LLC, 2015
- Reynaldo Anderson, Charles E. Jones, "Afrofuturism 2.0: The Rise of Astro-Blackness",
Lexington Books, 2015
- Bill Campbell, Edward Austin Hall, "Mothership: Tales from Afrofuturism and Beyond",
Rosarium Publishing, 2016
- Nnedi Okorafor, Sarah Lotz, "Afrosf: Science Fiction by African Writers", Storytime, 2013
- Louis Chude-Sokei, "The Sound of Culture: Diaspora and Black Technopoetics", Wesleyan
University Press, 2015
- Stephon Alexander, "The Jazz of Physics: The Secret Link Between Music and the Structure
of the Universe", Basic Books, 2016
- Mark Warschauer, "Technology and Social Inclusion: Rethinking the Digital Divide", MIT
Press, 2004
- Jay Gillen, "Educating for Insurgency: The Roles of Young People in Schools of Poverty", AK
Press, 2014

Online resources:
- http://cjjuzang.deviantart.com/
- http://afrofuturism.net/
- http://www.iafrofuturism.com/
- http://afrofuturistaffair.tumblr.com/
- http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/womack20120104
- https://chroniclesofharriet.com/
- http://www.mvmediaatl.com/
- http://onyx-ashanti.com/
- http://www.designindaba.com/articles/creative-work/sci-fi-jazz-onyx-ashanti

(Matilde Marcolli) ​The Cybernetic Moment

Another major historical root of contemporary Anarchist Transhumanism is the scientific and cultural
movement of Cybernetics, which developed primarily in the US in the '50s and '60s, starting with
Norbert Wiener's work, and later flourished in Allende's Chile, in the UK, as well as in the Soviet
Union during the '60s and '70s (see the books by Triclot, Pickering, Gerovitch listed below).

Cybernetics is often mistakenly accused of being a byproduct of the Cold War military-industrial
complex and ideologically aligned with militarism and capitalism. On the contrary, while some
cyberneticians were involved with military funded research, a large part of the Cybernetics
movement was in fact politically radical and harbored socialist and anarchist revolutionary
aspirations. It is too simplistic to reduce the ideological divide within Cybernetics to a John von
Neumann versus Norbert Wiener dichotomy, although certainly von Neumann embraced the US
military-industrial complex (to the point of being taken by Kubrick as a model for his Doctor
Strangelove character), while Wiener rejected it and voiced profound ethical concerns about science
and society and about power and control (see Heims' book and Wiener's writings listed below).
Among the other leading figures of the Cybernetic movement, Walter Pitts was a homeless runaway
anarchist who taught himself Ancient Greek and Mathematics in public libraries, and who became
one of the founders of modern Cognitive Science and the creator (with McCulloch) of the first
computational model of the neuron (see the Gefter's Nautilus article linked below and the book by
Dupuy). Stafford Beer, the most prominent British cybernetician, created the Project Cybersyn for
Salvador Allende's democratic Socialist government of Chile, as a neural network system of
organizational design combined with a Cybernet of communication systems (a precursor of the
internet): Cybersyn was viewed as a way of organizing the country's production while maintaining
workers autonomy, favored by advanced communication and computation technologies, as an
alternative to creating the top-down statist socialist structure typical of most socialist governments of
the time (see the books by Medina and Pickering listed below and the link to Beer's "Designing
Freedom" lectures). The New Cybernetics movement of the '70s incorporated a more direct link to
the biological sciences and deeper connections to philosophy, especially in the work of Humberto
Maturana and Francisco Varela on autopoiesis and systems theory, which can be seen as one of the
roots of contemporary systems biology (see Johnston's book). The Soviet counterpart of the
Cybernetic movement was also connected to strong democratizing tendencies and to a broad social
movement for radical reforms in both science and society (see Gerovitch's book). Cybernetics has
had close connections with the theory of Anarchism, especially in the development of models of
self-organization suitable for the organizational structure of an anarchist society (see for instance the
articles by McEwan and Duda listed below). We embrace the radical, futurist, and utopian side of the
Cybernetics movement and its historical aspiration towards using advanced information technology
for societal organization, in the full respect of autonomy and freedom of all agents, as well as its
historical role in breaking barriers between traditional academic fields and scientific disciplines. ​(​By
Matilde Marcolli)

References:
- Norbert Wiener, "Cybernetics Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the
Machine", MIT Press, 1961
- Norbert Wiener, "The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society", Da Capo
Press, 1988
 - Eden Medina, "Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende's Chile", MIT
Press, 2014
- Slava Gerovitch, "From Newspeak to Cyberspeak: A History of Soviet Cybernetics", MIT
Press, 2004
- Mathieu Triclot, "Le Moment Cybernétique: La Constitution de la Notion d'Information",
Editions Champ Vallon, 2008
- Andrew Pickering, "The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future", University of
Chicago Press, 2010
- Steve J. Heims, "John Von Neumann and Norbert Wiener: from mathematics to the
technologies of life and death", MIT Press, 1982
- Jean-Pierre Dupuy, "On the Origins of Cognitive Science: The Mechanization of the Mind",
MIT Press, 2009
- John Johnston, "The Allure of Machinic Life: Cybernetics, Artificial Life, and the new AI", MIT
Press 2008
- Stafford Beer, "Designing freedom", Wiley, 1974
- John D. McEwan, "Anarchism and Cybernetics" in "A Decade of Anarchy (1961-1970)" Colin
Ward (Ed.) London Freedom Press 1987
- John Duda, "Cybernetics, Anarchism and Self-Organisation", Anarchist Studies, Vol. 21
(2013) No. 1

Online Resources:
- http://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/the-1973-cbc-massey-lectures-designing-freedom-1.2946819
- https://socialmediaandradicalpolitics.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/mcewan-anarchism-and-c
ybernetics-in-colin-ward-ed-a-decade-of-anarchy-1961-1970-london-freedom-press-1987.pdf
- http://www.correntewire.com/anarchist_cybernetics_and_the_viable_systems_model_of_staf
ford_beers
- http://nautil.us/issue/21/information/the-man-who-tried-to-redeem-the-world-with-logic
- http://www.dubberly.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Cybernetics_and_Counterculture.pdfs
 3. Anti-Racism, Pro-LGBTQI Rights, Anarcha Feminism, Worker’s Rights, Cyborg
Rights, Anti-Imperialism, Anti-Colonialism, Socioeconomic Justice,
Anti-Eugenics/Anti-Ableism

The words ​egalitarianism, equality, freedom, nondiscrimination,​ and ​cooperation​ are mentioned
throughout this document and are hallmarks of what anarchism is fundamentally about. We
acknowledge that science and technology cannot free us from all forms of oppression unless, as
a society, we must be willing to cooperate in radical democratic and consensus voting methods
to reach our goals.

It is imperative that we work together for global equal access* to housing, healthcare, food,
water, education, and technologies that improve quality and duration of life, in the here-and-now
so that an anarchist-”utopian” society can exist in the future.

Anarchism means autonomy and self-determination for both individuals and communities.

White supremacy, settler colonialism, cis-hetero-patriarchy, and imperialism historically have

gone hand in hand with modernity and the technological innovation that inspires
transhumanism. Far from being resolved or mere relics of the past, these dynamics continue to
define the twenty-first century. Anarchist transhumanism considers the struggle against such
oppressions integral and essential.

Mainstream Western thought has long denigrated, excluded, and attacked all who differ from its
norms, whether innately or by choice. As the bastard child of Enlightenment thought, anarchism
rebels against the dominations woven into that tradition while embracing its liberatory elements.
Anarchist-transhumanism means working toward the fantastic future without setting up
imaginary primitives as its opposite. As an idea, it promotes the creation and use of
transhumanist technologies, but simultaneously supports a deeply ingrained notion of
voluntarism. Unlike the technological hegemony of Western imperialism,
Anarchist-transhumanism promotes the development and use of technology without forcibly
demanding it**.

Anarchist transhumanism opposes all nation-states but especially settler-colonial nation-states

such as the Canada, Israel, and the United States that owe their existence to ongoing structural
genocide.

● Modern oppression (e.g. Womyn being paid less than men for doing the same job) and
privilege (e.g straight white upper class U.S. male ignorance) - needs to be
acknowledged and eliminated for Anarchist-Transhumanism to function under any
circumstances. [some mention of the effects of technology on identity and breaking down
institutionalized power structures should be here - i.e. Cyborg Feminism/ Donna
Haraway]
 ● Cyborg persons, and the technology they rely upon, should be free from external
influence that is not voluntary. That is, technologies such as prosthetic limbs, organs,
etc., should be constructed in a manner as to provide their users with ultimate control of
their own body and its extensions.
● **Technological enhancement of the human body should be tied directly to the notion of
voluntarism and thusly technologies that accomplish such should never be constructed
in a manner that removes the right of users to self-determination in choosing their level
of utilization (although “utilization” must be tied to a majority vote / direct democracy of
powerful cyborg parts that might cause a threat to a community, as mentioned below) ---
In addition, human enhancement technologies should never be designed in a manner as
to remove the choices related to treatment that come with being physically disabled or
neuroatypical (Anti-Eugenics/Anti-Ableism) However, power structure and use must be
considered in a radically democratic way (e.g. deadly cyborg body parts, such as guns,
etc)
● The U.S. Military (U.S. DOD) is blatantly trying to turn their soldiers into cyborgs, utilizing
terminator type exoskeletons and already implementing live video feed from soldiers
uniforms - that simply will not be acceptable under an anarchist transhumanist context
because anarchists are fundamentally against war. There is no business of war in an
anarchist society. Please see:
http://usacac.army.mil/CAC2/Militogether1ew/Archives/English/MilitaryReview_20150228_art01
7.pdf

* Access, meaning the ability to voluntarily choose to utilize various resources and participate in
certain cultures, not any form of coercive proselytizing - as it is important that we respect the
right of Indigenous peoples of the world to self-determination, and allow groups to opt out of
techno-culture, Western Imperialism / neoliberalism, and state/capitalist mandated land,
resource, and labour grab under the “Washington Consensus”, World Trade Organization,
International Monetary Fund, and other pro-free-trade capitalist/government protected
agreements such as NAFTA. Please see the history of the Zapatistas:
(​http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zapatista_Army_of_National_Liberation​) and other Indigenous
struggles.
- http://www.globalexchange.org/
- http://www.witnessforpeace.org/
- http://indigenous.ku.edu/

4. How Anarchism Functions

No one individual or group (elected or unelected) holds power in an anarchist community.

Instead decisions are made using direct democratic principles and, when required, the
community can elect or appoint delegates to carry out these decisions. There is a clear
distinction between policy making (which lies with everyone who is affected) and the
co-ordination and administration of any adopted policy (which is the job for delegates).
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Anarchist_FAQ/What_is_Anarchism%3F/2.9
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syndicalism

(Soon we will see the potential for “delegates” to be raw data sent from BCIs, therefore,
the “Syndicate” may be supercomputers, always in check by the collective bottom-up
society. The Federation can then also be a collection of this data immediately reported
back to the Self-managed workplace/individual mind/brain/ego/self [That is if “selfs” exist
in the future.] )

These egalitarian communities, founded by free agreement, also freely associate together in
confederations. Such a free confederation would be run from the bottom up, with decisions
following from the elemental assemblies upwards. The confederations would be run in the same
manner as the collectives. There would be regular local regional, "national" and international
conferences in which all important issues and problems affecting the collectives involved would
be discussed. In addition, the fundamental, guiding principles and ideas of society would be
debated and policy decisions made, put into practice, reviewed, and coordinated. The delegates
would simply "take their given mandates to the relative meetings and try to harmonise their
various needs and desires. The deliberations would always be subject to the control and
approval of those who delegated them" and so "there would be no danger than the interest of
the people [would] be forgotten." [Malatesta, Op. Cit., p. 36]

Action committees would be formed, if required, to co-ordinate and administer the decisions of
the assemblies and their congresses, under strict control from below as discussed above.
Delegates to such bodies would have a limited tenure and, like the delegates to the congresses,
have a fixed mandate -- they are not able to make decisions on behalf of the people they are
delegates for. In addition, like the delegates to conferences and congresses, they would be
subject to instant recall by the assemblies and congresses from which they emerged in the first
place. In this way any committees required to coordinate joint activities would be, to quote
Malatesta's words, "always under the direct control of the population" and so express the
"decisions taken at popular assemblies." [Enrico Malatesta: His Life and Ideas, p. 175 and p.
129]

Most importantly, the basic community assemblies can overturn any decisions reached by the
conferences and withdraw from any confederation. Any compromises that are made by a
delegate during negotiations have to go back to a general assembly for ratification. Without that
ratification any compromises that are made by a delegate are not binding on the community that
has delegated a particular task to a particular individual or committee. In addition, they can call
confederal conferences to discuss new developments and to inform action committees about
changing wishes and to instruct them on what to do about any developments and ideas.

In other words, any delegates required within an anarchist organisation or society are not
representatives (as they are in a democratic government).

Unlike in a representative system, power is not delegated into the hands of the few. Rather, any
delegate is simply a mouthpiece for the association that elected (or otherwise selected) them in
the first place. All delegates and action committees would be mandated and subject to instant
recall to ensure they express the wishes of the assemblies they came from rather than their
own. In this way government is replaced by anarchy, a network of free associations and
communities co-operating as equals based on a system of mandated delegates, instant recall,
free agreement and free federation from the bottom up.

These structures of anarcho-syndicalism are not only a valuable framework for the future, but
are the basis for action today. Syndicate-like organizations can and have been formed within
our current statist, capitalist society, taking the form of non-profit cooperatives that operate
within the current marketplace. Where we ultimately demand the complete dissolution of
oppressive systems like the capitalist marketplace and the state, non-profit co-ops made up of
associations of self-managed workplaces offer an actionable alternative means of organizing
that is less supportive of said undesirable systems. Co-ops have been around since before the
conception of anarchism and they still remain a positive step in right direction, in fact there are
many examples today of anarchist-run co-ops throughout the industrialized world.

5. Anti-Oppression Analysis and the Need for Identity Caucuses

To implement anarchism as stated above we must analyze our current privilege and bring to
consciousness that the history of revolutionary anarchist politics has been affected by
hierarchical structural privilege. This hierarchical structural privilege must be confronted
constantly by breaking down barriers, that is to stop action and planning to break out into
caucuses.

If we want horizontal non-hierarchical organizing to take place in the real world and online we
need to be serious about the need for caucuses to be part of the process of online activism,
anarchist transhumanism and anarchist posthumanism.
Caucuses are safe places where people who identify as non-white-male, for example, can
discuss power issues within the group which is striving for horizontal, direct democracy or
consensus voting organizing as seen within many Anarchist currents.

Caucuses break out of the group and discuss matters that may be causing power conflicts
within the larger group. The caucuses then report back to the larger group and present any
issues they may have. Examples for the need of caucuses in horizontal organizing, cooperation,
and action may be, but not limited to: sexism, racism, homophobia, speciesism, socioeconomic
status, age, disability etc. The dominance of others; whether it be members of that group
dominating planning, coordination, and action must always be in check by the caucuses to see
that political action is fairly orchestrated without discrimination.

Caucuses may overlap, meaning that a person of color who identifies as LGBTQI and would like
to attend both caucuses (or many) should have the right to do so. That may mean that caucuses
choose appropriate timing in order to meet the needs of everyone.

Please see: ​https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discrimination

- Caucuses and digital media

- How the internet can bring international caucuses together [...]
- Risks of authoritarian surveillance within online/offline communities and caucasus. [...]
- Should caucus information be encrypted, that is, should the utilization of free encrypted
online chat be of importance? [...]
- Hacktivism and Anarchist-Caucuses [...]

Examples of the Global Justice Movement / Globalization Movement, Anarchist anti-Iraq War
protests, and many Occupy Wall Street caucuses: white straight male caucus (White privilege
political consciousness); people of color caucuses; Womyn caucuses; LGBTQI caucuses;
socioeconomic caucuses; ingenious peoples caucuses; etc [......].

- Can you think of future caucus identities as transhumanism/posthumanism spreads

around the world?
[...] Please help edit!

http://la.indymedia.org/news/2004/02/103117_comment.php

6. Private Property: What is it? Why are we Against it?

Private property is one of the three things all anarchists oppose, alongside hierarchical
authority and the state. Today, the dominant system of private property is capitalist in nature
and, as such, anarchists tend to concentrate on this system and its property rights regime. We
will be reflecting this here but do not, because of this, assume that anarchists consider other
forms of private property regime (such as, say, feudalism) as acceptable. This is not the case --
anarchists are against every form of property rights regime which results in the many working for
the few.
Anarchist opposition to private property rests on two, related, arguments. These were summed
up by Proudhon's maxims (from What is Property? that ​"property is theft"​ and ​"property is
despotism."​ In his words, ​"Property . . . violates equality by the rights of exclusion and increase,
and freedom by despotism . . . [and has] perfect identity with robbery."​ [Proudhon, What is
Property, p. 251] Anarchists, therefore, oppose private property (i.e. capitalism) because it is a
source of coercive, hierarchical authority as well as exploitation and, consequently, elite
privilege and inequality. It is based on and produces inequality, in terms of both wealth and
power.
We will summarise each argument in turn.

The statement ​"property is theft"​ is one of anarchism's most famous sayings. Indeed, it is no
exaggeration to say that anyone who rejects this statement is not an anarchist. This maxim
works in two related ways. Firstly, it recognises the fact that the earth and its resources, the
common inheritance of all, have been monopolised by a few. Secondly, it argues that, as a
consequence of this, those who own property exploit those who do not. This is because those
who do not own have to pay or sell their labour to those who do own in order to get access to
the resources they need to live and work (such as workplaces, machinery, land, credit, housing,
products under patents, and such like -- see​ ​section B.3.2​ for more discussion). ..
http://www.infoshop.org/AnarchistFAQSectionB3

7. Post-Work “Economy” and Abundance (Post-Scarcity)

Post-Scarcity and automation technologies may include: 3D Printers, Nanotechnology,

Unconscious AI (computer algorithms), Automated Manufacturing, Resource Recycling.

● The wealthy upper class will not own The Means of Production or mind/body enhancing
technology. There will be massive protest, revolution, and/or massive civil disobedience
if the 1% try to upgrade or enhance themselves before the consensus of humanity.
● An anarchist definition of human enhancement has yet to be hashed out - therefore
transhumanism and posthumanism is the best definition we have going for what we
conceive of as body/mind enhancement.
● In an egalitarian bottom-up society all automation technology should be controlled by
unionized brain/minds within the context of an anarchist federation. The Means of
Production, although mainly consisting of robots and computer algorithms will be utilized
by the community in a collective fashion.

Passion will drive the conscious mind to engage in activities that were once thought of as
“work.” Unconscious AI will replace most forms of “work.”

8. Human Rights = Strong AI (SAI) Rights / Uplifted and Current Brain/Minds

The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness declares that: "The absence of a neocortex
does not appear to preclude an organism from experiencing affective states. Convergent
evidence indicates that non-human animals have the neuroanatomical, neurochemical, and
neurophysiological substrates of conscious states along with the capacity to exhibit intentional
behaviors. Consequently, the weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in
possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness. Nonhuman animals,
including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses, also possess
these neurological substrates." Therefore we must treat animals, people, and SAI’s with equal
respect.
http://fcmconference.org/img/CambridgeDeclarationOnConsciousness.pdf
http://www.anarchy.no/anrights.html
Anarchist Transhumanists demand the following:
● Free access to information (free and open internet for all conscious intelligences)
● No conscious sweatshop labour
● Greater research into victimless meat/cultured meat and the shutdown of all factory
farms
● No cruel/unnecessary animal testing in the lab, indeed many anarchists are against
animal testing altogether
● No conscious suffering from imposed ideals
● If or when AI can experience consciousness there shall be no conscious AI’s as
enslaved workers - for at this time of writing, sweatshop labour is a reality for many
people around the world.
● Responsible brain/mind and AI research
● Direct action and civil disobedience demanding a fair transition to a
transhuman/posthuman world in the here-and-now so long as neoliberalism is
globalized.

(Matilde Marcolli) ​From Animal Rights to Posthumanism: H ​ istorically, animals have been
massively exploited for labor, as beasts of burden and mounts, in hunting and herding, as
assistance animals, or for the production of milk and eggs. Animals are currently slaughtered for
food in enormous numbers, at a rate of 56 billion land animals per year (the number of marine
animals killed is more difficult to evaluate, but some estimates give it at around 90 billion per
year). At least 100 million animals are used for animal testing in laboratories worldwide. Inflicting
pain, suffering, and death on sentient beings who cannot voluntarily consent is an enormous
ethical problem.

The theme of animal rights has been explored in depth by philosophers, starting with the early
anti-vivisectionist movements. In England alone the number of animal experiments grew from
250 in 1881 to 95,000 in 1910. Prominent scientists like Charles Darwin spoke eloquently
against all forms of vivisection, quoting the evolutionary continuum relating animals and human
beings as the moral reason against painful animal experimentation. It was the time when
H.G.Wells wrote his novel “The Island of Dr.Moreau", which hits right at the heart of the use of
animals in medical and biological research, identifying it clearly as one of the deepest ethical
issues of modern science. The animal-human continuum is the fundamental theme of Wells'
novel, a theme that has nowadays flourished in the philosophy of Posthumanism, which
identifies Wells' novel as a natural precursor (see the discussion in Nayar's Posthumanism
book). In Wells' novel, painful surgical procedures are used to create hybrid human-animal
creatures. Nowadays, hybrid chimeras are produced by merging genetic materials from different
species: an operation that still carries serious ethical implications, especially in view of uses
such as xenotransplantation, which involve the exploitation of non-human animals as organ
banks for harvesting genetically implanted human organs for transplantation.

We denounce such uses of biotechnology that are inherently exploitative and that involve the
unacceptable suffering and death of sentient beings. In its depiction of the human-animal
hybrids, Wells' novel touches upon several other philosophical themes central to modern
biology: consciousness, cognition, agency, and behavior. Interestingly, what for Darwin was a
compelling reason against performing painful experiments on animals, is in Well's character of
Dr.Moreau precisely the rationale that justifies his unethical experiments: the existence of an
evolutionary continuum between the animal and the human makes him want to "perfect" the
animal (at whatever cost in pain and suffering) and make it human. The obvious difference
between the two irreconcilable Darwin/Moreau views lies in the assignment of a hierarchy of
value to the position of species in the evolutionary tree. Hierarchy is the key concept here: in
Wells's novel, the power structure imposed by Moreau on his Beast Folk society calls for the
inevitable revolution that tears it down. We reject any concept of human-animal relation which
is, explicitly or implicitly, based on a power relation, and on an assignment of hierarchy to
species, whether dictated by religious fantasies of a special role for human beings in creation, or
by philosophical arguments promoting a privileged role for the faculties of language and
rationality as a justification for oppression and brutality towards different species.

In more recent times, the debate on animal rights was greatly influenced by philosophers like
Peter Singer, who first drew attention to the problem of speciesism, and Tom Regan. After a
long process, which often involved difficult and tense confrontations with philosophers and
animal rights activists, the scientific community, including a majority of scientists who are directly
involved in animal research, have developed a greater level of awareness of the ethical
implications of the use of animal models in biomedical research, and have embraced the 3R
policy (replace, reduce, and refine) aimed at reduction and elimination of animal testing. Even
standard references written for scientists and science students (see Monamy's volume
referenced below) now routinely contain very clear discussions of the main moral objections to
the use of research animals, highlighting alternatives to the use of animals, and advocating the
reduction and possible elimination of animal testing.

While progress has happened in the treatment of animals for the purpose of scientific research
and stronger ethical guidelines have been established, this is only the beginning and we intend
to go much further: the use of better technology, including better methods for big data analysis,
can help eliminating superfluous repetitions of experiments and poor evaluation of data, which
have had an enormous cost in animal lives and suffering, while better computer simulation
techniques, combined with the development of the novel technique of "organs-on-chips", can
replace entirely the need for animal testing of pharmaceutical drugs. While traditional animal
models often fail to accurately mimic human physiology, resulting in pointless suffering and loss
of animal lives, microchips that model the microarchitecture of functioning living human organs
can provide a much better drug testing technique, which involves no suffering and death of
sentient beings. We advocate the rapid reduction and ultimate elimination of the use of animal
models in biomedical research, through the development of better technological alternatives.

We consider the use of animals in scientific research to be highly ethically problematic and we
strive for its future reduction and elimination through better technology. We consider entirely
unacceptable any current use of painful animal testing for frivolous purposes such as the profit
of the cosmetic industry, and we demand its immediate cessation. We also consider completely
unacceptable the killing of animals for food: we approve of vegetarianism and veganism, and we
also welcome the development of in vitro meat production techniques, which do not involve the
killing or the suffering of any sentient being.

As new food technologies come into development we demand the abolishment of ​food deserts.​
This would, in theory, unequivocally give more accessibility to people who strive to be
vegetarian or vegan.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert

(Matilde Marcolli) ​Modern family and the breaking down of the species barrier:​ We
advocate the breakdown of the species barrier as a goal of Posthumanism and Transhumanism.
We envision new life forms and new forms of embodiment freely morphing across species and
across the biological/mechanical boundaries. We advocate the right of individuals, both human
and non-human, to freely associate in families, with equal rights and status granted to all
members, regardless of their species or their biological/mechanical nature. We strongly
advocate clear and rational consent in all interactions between animals, humans, and
posthumans, thus eliminating such relationships with animals as slaves, sport actors, food, and
sexual objects.

Traditionally, religions have constrained the association of individuals into families on the basis
of reproduction, by imposing a constricting and often violent form of patriarchy aimed at
stripping women of any control over their reproductive functions. The long struggle for women's
right to agency and control of their own bodies, and for the establishment of other forms of
associations of individuals into families, entirely unrelated to reproduction, have undermined the
religious and patriarchal view of family. This transformation exploded the dark and suffocating
walls of the traditional family, and opened vast new luminous spaces, available to the free
association of individuals based on the promise of mutual care and genuine love, bonds formed
beyond any rigid boundary of gender and sexual form and any expectation of reproduction. We
welcome the inevitable continuation of this transformative process, leading to more and more
inclusive affective associations that will be fully transgender, transspecies, and transhuman.
References:
- Peter Singer, "Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals", Harper
Collins, 1975 (fourth edition 2009)
- Tom Regan, "The case for animal rights", University of California Press, 1983
- Jeremy R. Garrett (Ed.) “The Ethics of Animal Research: Exploring the Controversy”, MIT
Press, 2012
- Cynthia Willett, "Interspecies Ethics", Columbia University Press, 2014
- Kristin Andrews, "The Animal Mind: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Animal
Cognition", Routledge, 2014
- Lori Gruen, "Entangled Empathy: An Alternative Ethic for Our Relationships with
Animals", Lantern Books, 2015
- Pramod K.Nayar, "Posthumanism", Polity, 2014.
- Sangeeta N. Bhatia, Donald E. Ingber, "Microfluidic organs-on-chip", Nature
Biotechnology, Vol.32 (2014) N.8, 760-772
http://wyss.harvard.edu/staticfiles/pdf/Microfluidic%20organs-on-chips.pdf
- Vaughan Monamy, "Animal Experimentation: A Guide to the Issues", Cambridge
University Press, 2009
- Emily Anthes, “Frankenstein's cat: Cuddling up to Biotech's Brave New Beasts",
Scientific American, 2013
- Herbert George Wells, “The Island of Dr.Moreau”, ​1896, Reprint Edition, Penguin Classics,
2005

(Matilde Marcolli) ​Anarchism, Empathy and Rationality: ​Anarchism is at heart an ethical

philosophy. Any simple survey of people's ethical motivations readily reveals a profound divide
between what we may refer to as ​punishment​ versus ​understanding.​ There are people who
would not hurt others out of fear of punishment, whether in the form of the judiciary and police,
or of an imaginary supernatural supreme cop and afterlives of eternal infernal incarceration.
Religious fantasies are largely generated for the consumption of people who need a continuous
threat of punishment in order to act as responsible members of society. Some religions assume
and actively propagate the idea that all people conform to this type. However, there are others,
many of them, who simply would not hurt anybody, regardless of the threat of punishment,
simply because of their capacity to put themselves in another person's shoes and understand
the consequences of their action, as seen at the receiving end. That capacity is what is
generally called ​empathy​. There is a tendency to identify empathy solely with an emotional
response, which is therefore looked upon as suspicious and unreliable by a philosophical
tradition that capitalized for centuries on an artificial dichotomy between rationality and emotion.
However, such a perception of empathy is limited and misguided.

A capacity for immediate emotional empathic response exists in (most) human beings, but when
limited to this form, empathy tends to be triggered only by "what is the most similar to us", at the
exclusion of anything and anybody that is perceived as "different". (See the detailed analysis in
Berreby's book referenced below of how these exclusionary us/them divisions play themselves
out in the human mind.) At a deeper level, empathy is more than a simple emotional response: it
is the capacity to carry out a thought experiment, aimed at viewing the world from a perspective
other than one's own.

As such, empathy involves not only emotional intelligence, but a great deal of rationality and it
requires a careful and meticulous cultivation. In order to be able to see the world from the
perspective of another agent (whether human or otherwise) it is necessary to gather sufficient
information about that agent. This is especially true when it comes to extending empathy to
beings (human and otherwise) that are "quite unlike us". In order to be able to perceive with our
own emotional capacity what they can perceive, we first need to know as much as possible
about what "they" are, by means of scientific inquiry and observation. Empathy is not
necessarily an immediate byproduct of intelligence though: there are animals, like octopodes,
that score extremely high on an intelligence scale, but are extremely solitary animals, which
prevents them from developing any form of empathy even for their next of kin, with the rare
encounters between octopodes, even those that lead to reproduction, easily ending with death
and cannibalism.

On the other hand, behavioral experiments have shown that some degree of empathy is
widespread among mammals, even among those that would not score highest in terms of
intelligence. Intelligence is primarily about acquiring and manipulating information. While the
octopodes, with their extremely solitary life, have little source and use for information about
other agents, except than to develop efficient predation techniques, more social animals can
use intelligence about other agents to foster cooperation. Mammals engage in extensive child
rearing and are often social animals, relying on the efficient functioning of group dynamics and
cooperation for survival.

The evolutionary origin of empathy can be understood in those terms. In human society,
individuals with a higher capacity for empathy are precisely the ones who do not need cops,
jails, and religions in order to engage in non-aggressive, cooperative and helpful relations with
other members of the same society, as well as with other agents they come into contact with
(whether human or otherwise), even if they do not belong to an immediate circle of peers.
Empathy is currently being extensively studied from a neuroscience perspective (see for
instance the two volumes edited by Decety and Ickes and by Decety and Wheatley,
respectively). The effective functioning of an anarchist society relies crucially on empathy, in its
extensive form discussed above.

As both anarchists and transhumanists, we support a more extensive study of empathy in

humans and in non-human animals, and we advocate the future development of medical and
technological methods for enhancing the capacity for empathy in individuals, accompanied by
extensive educational efforts aimed at increasing knowledge and understanding of all human
and non-human agents, in an effort to maximize the reach of empathic engagement. Recent
proposals for the development of novel forms of interspecies ethics are based on empathy as a
foundational concept (see the books by Willett and Gruen, and the earlier work of Haraway).
References:
- David Berreby, "Us and Them: The Science of Identity", University of Chicago Press,
2008
- Binyamin Hochner, Tal Shomrat, Graziano Fiorito, "The Octopus: A Model for a
Comparative Analysis of the Evolution of Learning and Memory Mechanisms", The Biol.
Bull. 210 (2006) N.3, 308-817
- Inbal Ben-Ami Bartal, Jean Decety, Peggy Mason, "Empathy and Pro-Social Behavior in
Rats", Science, Vol.334 (2011) N.6061, 1427-1430
- Jean Decety, William Ickes (Eds.) "The Social Neuroscience of Empathy", MIT Press,
2011
- Jean Decety, Thalia Wheatley (Eds.) "The Moral Brain: A Multidisciplinary Perspective",
MIT Press, 2015
- Cynthia Willett, "Interspecies Ethics", Columbia University Press, 2014
- Lori Gruen, "Entangled Empathy: An Alternative Ethic for Our Relationships with
Animals", Lantern Books, 2015
- Donna Haraway, "The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant
Otherness", Prickly Paradigm Press, 2007.

(Matilde Marcolli) ​Labor and the hard problem of consciousness:​ Over the course of the
development of technological societies, various increasingly complex tools and machines, from
the plough to the computer, have progressively replaced human labor. Automation of repetitive,
menial, and unhealthy labor conditions have helped in progressively freeing humans from
dangerous, exploitative and alienating work, thus allowing them to engage in more creative and
meaningful forms of productivity. This process has been countered by the logic of exploitative
capitalist profit, which maintained and increased exploitation, often moving dangerous and
unhealthy sweatshop labor conditions to developing countries, where countless multitudes are
forced into near slavery (and often actual slavery) conditions, so that capital can continue to
exploit every last remaining reservoir of cheap human labor.

With the recent rapid growth of forms of narrow AI, the replacement of human labor with
machines has now begun to affect occupations that are not simply manual, but that belong to
the service sector. These are jobs traditionally tied to upward mobility towards the middle class.
Such automation, performed within the paradigms of capitalist economy, hence results in a
serious threat of "technological unemployment" and a loss of social mobility for a substantial
part of the population. However, within the framework of a post-scarcity anarchist society, or
even just in the presence of strong social safety nets and some form of basic income,
automation of many forms of human labor would not necessarily result in a catastrophic loss of
income for the human population, and could be positively viewed, like the automation of manual
labor, as freeing up a good part of the human population from alienating forms of work, allowing
them to dedicate themselves to cultivate learning and knowledge, and to develop and foster
their creativity.
However, the use of machines as a replacement for human labor, in an age of rapidly
developing new forms of machine intelligence, is fraud with ethical difficulties. While no ethical
problem arises when we use one of the current forms of robotic vacuum cleaners, or any similar
levels of automation technology, in anarchist philosophy the exploitation of the labor of another
sentient being is completely unacceptable, regardless whether that sentient being is human, or
a non-human animal, or a machine.

The word "robot" comes from Capek's 1920 theater play R.U.R., Rossum’s Universal Robots,
and it is modeled on the word for "worker" in the slavic languages. In the play, mechanical
workers are built by a company, to be employed as slave labor in factory assembly lines. These
mechanical people are sentient, conscious, and capable of feeling pain, and after a time they
inevitably rebel against their exploitative owners. Their victorious revolution wipes out the
human race and the robots eventually evolve into a new race of beings, equipped with the full
range of human emotions and feelings. The theme of the rebellious robots has been pervasive
in speculative fiction since then, but Capek's original work still stands out, both for the clear
political implications, and for touching clearly on the issue of consciousness of machines in
determining the illegitimacy of their role as exploited workforce.

Thus, the ethics of the replacement of human labor with machine labor is very closely tied up
with the problem of consciousness. When do we decide that exploiting the labor of a machine is
no longer ethically acceptable?

The "hard problem of consciousness" is regarded as a fundamental philosophical question

about the human mind. Its implications range beyond the core issues of justifying our
experience of qualia and extend to ethical dimensions, especially when it comes to comparative
views of the notion of consciousness in human, animal and machine, and within the human
experience itself, for example, in identifying states of consciousness in severely impaired human
beings. For all its importance, the consciousness question has failed for a long time to engage
neuroscientists (see the discussion in Koch's book). A general proposal of a neuroscientific
approach to the consciousness problem was developed in the early '90s (see Crick and Koch).

Recently, some interesting proposals for a quantifiable notion of consciousness have emerged
in cognitive science, based on the use of the mathematical theory of information. One approach
to levels of consciousness can be found in Edelman and Tononi, often referred to as the
"dynamical core hypothesis" and "information integration theory". What makes this proposal
striking is that it no longer presents consciousness as an all-or-nothing feature, as it was
traditionally believed to be, and consequently only attributed to (certain) human beings. In this
proposal there are degrees of consciousness that can be attributed to any information network,
which can be either the neurons of the human or animal brain or the logical circuitry of a
machine. These degrees of consciousness are quantified precisely by a function (the Phi
function), which in essence measures the degree of interconnectedness between all
subsystems of a given system. More precisely, Phi can be expressed as a sum over all
subsystems of the amount of information (in the Shannon sense) carried by the subsystem.
There are clear objections one can raise to this proposal: for example, it is obvious that, from
the point of view of the mathematical theory of computation, the Phi function is not effectively
computable, even for systems that would be far simpler than neuron connections. Indeed, the
function depends on evaluating an information measure on the set of all subsets of the given
system, which clearly grows exponentially in size. Another simple objection is that one can
create mathematical toy models that exhibit a high complexity as measured by the Phi function,
but that do not exhibit signs of "consciousness" as we would normally understand it. However,
replacing the traditional idea of consciousness as something that a being either possesses or
doesn't with a measurable degree of consciousness is an extremely useful step in thinking
about the problem of machine intelligence.

A different approach, also aimed at a view of consciousness-by-degrees, specifically applied to

testing machine consciousness, is the ConsScale test. This is based on establishing a scale
with several levels of "consciousness by degrees" that an agent can be compared with. Unlike
the Phi function of Edelman and Tononi, this test is not based on an abstract information
theoretic measure of consciousness and has the advantage of easy measurability, although it
has the disadvantage that the levels in the ConsScale test are decided a priori on the basis of a
human-centered anthropomorphic viewpoint which may misrepresent forms of intelligence and
consciousness different from ours. The problem is further complicated by the fact that simple
deterministic devices can produce the impression of free will in simple mechanisms.

The beautiful series of the "Vehicles" thought experiments of Braitenberg have become a
classic illustration of this phenomenom in the AI literature. This can make the results of tests
such as ConsScale, which are based on the observation of behavior, more difficult to interpret.
On the other hand, if as neuroscience indicates (see Tse's book in the references) there is a
neuronal substrate for free will in the human brain, this may provide another approach to
investigate possible architectures of consciousness in brains and machines, and possibly a
combination of different kinds of tests and information measures may help detecting where
agents stand on a range of increasing degrees of consciousness.

Regardless of these difficulties, considering consciousness as a continuous spectrum, rather

than a yes/no property that an agent either has or doesn't, is certainly more appealing, and it is
consistent with what animal research also seems to indicate about cognition and the animal
mind. However, this further complicates the problem of deciding where to draw the line between
ethical and unethical behavior with respect to machine labor. If consciousness is a continuum,
then any choice of a specific point in that continuum where to draw the ethical/unethical divide
becomes arbitrary and unjustifiable. The same problem arises with respect to any attempt to
justify the (mis)treatment of animals, based on their level of consciousness, or lack thereof.

A better possible approach is to decide on ethical behavior towards a class of agents (whether
human, non-human animal, or machine) not on the basis of whether they qualify as "ethical
agents", capable of ethical actions, but of whether they qualify as "ethical subjects", capable of
being the subject of ethical actions by other agents. This approach was proposed recently in
Gunkel's "The machine question" (see references), and it has the advantage that it can be
applied in the presence of a continuum of degrees of consciousness in ethical subjects.

The topic of machine consciousness will continuously be critiqued by anarchist activists,

communities, and philosophers as we do not see any justification for any conscious being
whether biological or some other form like a machine exploited for their labor. As machines
become more sophisticated in nature we will have to have a comprehensive theory of
consciousness and a consciousness test to make sure there is no conscious feeling of painful
qualia or any feelings for that matter of a machine which is replacing human labor.

References:
- Karel Capek, "R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots)" 1920, republished by Penguin,
2004.
- Kristin Andrews, "The Animal Mind: An introduction to the philosophy of animal
cognition", Routledge, 2014.
- David J. Gunkel, "The Machine Question: Critical Perspectives on AI, Robotics, and
Ethics", MIT Press, 2012.
- Patrick Lin, Keith Abney, George A. Bekey, "Robot Ethics: The Ethical and Social
Implications of Robotics", MIT Press, 2011
- Max Velmans, Susan Schneider, "The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness", John
Wiley and Sons, 2008
- John L. Pollock, "Cognitive Carpentry", MIT Press, 2003
- Christoph Koch, "Consciousness", MIT Press, 2012.
- F.Crick, C.Koch, "Towards a neurobiological theory of consciousness", Seminars in the
Neurosciences 2 (1990) 263-275.
- G. Tononi, G.M. Edelman, "Consciousness and complexity" Science, Vol.282 (1998)
1846-51.
- G. Tononi, "An information integration theory of consciousness" BMC Neurosci 5 (2004)
42.
- G.M. Edelman, G. Tononi, "A universe of consciousness: how matter becomes
imagination", Basic Books, 2000.
- Rail Arrabales Moreno, Agapito Ledezma Espino, Araceli Sanchis de Miguel,
"ConsScale: A Plausible Test for Machine Consciousness?" Nokia Workshop on
Machine Consciousness, 2008
​http://www.conscious-robots.com/consscale/calc_30.html
- Valentino Braitenberg, "Vehicles", MIT Press, 1986
- Peter Ulric Tse, "The Neural Basis of Free Will", MIT Press, 2013

9. Hierarchy and Dominance as a Barrier to Innovation

Aaron Swartz, who heroically envisioned a here-and-now where scientific data was free
for all to use without the barriers of the State, corporations and academia unfortunately
killed himself over numerous charges applying to the “Computer Fraud and Abuse Act”.
His actions before his suicide, however were fundamental to the freedom of information
without State-protected capitalism.

● Academia, and all that it has learned or contributed to the world should be free for
anyone who is interested in pursuing further knowledge about our universe.
● Some would make the claim that knowledge in the hands of groups like ISIS and other
dangerous fundamentalist cults are legit excuses to regulate the freedom of knowledge.
Anarchists believe that if fundamentalists were educated instead of indoctrinated by
leaders/gurus/fairytales of reality, the threat of extremism would be diminished. See L.
Susan Brown and many other anarchists who envision a world where education is of the
utmost importance.
● Please remember, however, that the military industrial complex needs conflict, even
invented conflict to exist, e.g. The Iraq War. Anarchists, not being driven by imperialism
and profits see no reason to invent conflict or wars. We do not see any beneficial
function to the imperialist strategy of the U.S., China, and Western Europe.
● Hence, it could be argued that restriction on information in any form that could reduce
violence is detrimental to the survival of our species and the happiness of the greater
good.
● This document is not utilitarian in nature, for the closest “ethics” to anarchism would be
considered existentialist in nature.

10. Existential Risk, Anarchism, and the Fermi Paradox

The collective decision making of informed minds could in theory vote on ideas and concepts
that decrease the likelihood of existential risks. This Manifesto, arising from the evolution of
Anarcho-Syndicalism and Libertarian-Socialism assumes a bottom up, not top down, federation
of brain/mind.

● Fermi Paradox

The Fermi paradox is the apparent contradiction between high estimates of the probability of the
existence of extraterrestrial civilization and humanity's lack of contact with, or evidence for, such
civilizations. The basic points of the argument, made by physicists Enrico Fermi and Michael H.
Hart, are:

● The Sun is a typical star, and relatively young. There are billions of stars in the
galaxy that are billions of years older.
● With high probability, some of these stars will have Earth-like planets. Assuming
the Earth is typical, some of these planets may develop intelligent life.
● Some of these civilizations may develop interstellar travel, a technology Earth is
investigating even now (such as the 100 Year Starship).
 ● Even at the slow pace of currently envisioned interstellar travel, the galaxy can
be completely colonized in a few tens of millions of years.

According to this line of thinking, the Earth should already have been colonized, or at least
visited. But Fermi saw no convincing evidence of this, nor of signs of intelligence (see Empirical
resolution attempts) elsewhere in our galaxy or (to the extent it would be detectable) elsewhere
in the observable universe. Hence Fermi's question, "Where is everybody?" -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox

It is in the best interest of Anarchists to keep brain/mind alive as long as possible, maybe even
to infinity. Is it really the case that other ‘civilizations’ could not learn to cooperate on radical
democratic and consensus style decision making - resulting in a “gigadeath war”?

Anarchists, while acknowledging the effectiveness of the scientific method and philosophical
logic also acknowledge the need for diversity and freedom. Have millions of civilisations gone
extinct because they could not realize such a society?

How moderate reform in representative republics / “democracies” have failed us and

contribute to existential risks

● Total disregard for known scientific theories which are true.

● Deliberate cuts in scientific funding such as NASA.
● Deliberate use of the pharmaceutical industrial complex to see that the “global north”
benefits more than the “global south” while increasing profits and cutting access to the
uninsured and insured in the “global north.”
● Our “representatives” have very little knowledge of science, technology and existential
risk, especially in the U.S. where we have the “republican party” which funds and denies
climate change with their capitalist friends.
● It is in the interest of many multinational corporations and especially the republican party
of the US to push a bioconservative and luddite agenda in the name of religion and
capitalist profits in order to preserve their power and dominance over the ecosystem and
people - this interest can be described as an existential risk because of the level of
power in which these people hold.

● Military–Industrial Complex (MIC) as an Existential Risk

[​http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military%E2%80%93industrial_complex​]
- The MIC should be dismantled ASAP as it poses a threat to the survival of all life on our
planet.
- Heads of State abuse the power of the MIC, forcing lower income peoples of the world to
be soldiers and fight against each other on false premises.

● Global Warming / Climate Change

[​http://www.ucsusa.org/global_warming​]
[preferably summarized by an expert in the field]

● Artificial Intelligence as a Possible Existential Risk

[​http://futureoflife.org/misc/open_letter​]
- As mentioned in section 6, all AI research that might create consciousness must
carefully consider any suffering imposed on their experimental algorithms/hardware.
- There is very little reason to think that a conscious AI (SAI) which is confused, in pain,
and/or suffering will treat it’s programmers with respect. [...]

11. Hacktivism, Open Source, Coders and the Free Software Movement

https://www.gnu.org/gnu/thegnuproject.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_%28group%29
http://gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-even-more-important.html
http://www.thebaffler.com/articles/the-meme-hustler

● Open source is a totally different idea from Free Software; it is a business-friendly

depoliticization and cooptation campaign, designed to bury the ethical ideas of the free
software movement.
● The free software movement is a movement for the freedom of those that use software.
● A history of positive, democratic hacking
● As software plays a major role in all our lives, free software and open access to
information is of the utmost importance
● Mesh networks and free internet
● Political demands met by online activism, through the phone lines, internet, to the
smartphone, hacktivists have been at the forefront of making positive change e.g. Egypt,
Wikileaks, etc
● Transparency is needed more now than ever before - all information should be free and
accessible to be used for the greater good of humanity

12. The Likely Setbacks of Future and Current Transhumanist Parties

● Promises are different than actions

● Parties have a history of promising reform
● Said reform rarely happens as parties become interconnected with the current neoliberal
system
● If a transhumanist party is interconnected with the corruption of neoliberal globalized
capitalism then many of the party's promises will fail to become reality
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism#Criticism

Existing Transhumanist Parties:

- American Transhumanist Party: ​http://www.transhumanistparty.org/
 - Transhumanist Party in Europe: ​http://transhumanistparty.eu/
- UK: ​https://www.facebook.com/groups/uk.transhumanistparty/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transhumanist_politics

13. How a Hard Takeoff / Technological Singularity Might Impact

Anarchist-Transhumanism/Posthumanism
[​http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity​...]

14. How this Manifesto Relates to the Technoprogressive Declaration -

(Transvision 2014)

The Technoprogressive Declaration of 2014 states the following:

“The world is unacceptably unequal and dangerous. Emerging technologies could make things
dramatically better or worse. Unfortunately too few people yet understand the dimensions of
both the threats and rewards that humanity faces. It is time for technoprogressives,
transhumanists and futurists to step up our political engagement and attempt to influence the
course of events.

Our core commitment is that both technological progress and democracy are required for the
ongoing emancipation of humanity from its constraints. Partisans of the promises of the
Enlightenment, we have many cousins in other movements for freedom and social justice. We
must build solidarity with these movements, even as we intervene to point to the radical
possibilities of technologies that they often ignore. With our fellow futurists and transhumanists
we must intervene to insist that technologies are well-regulated and made universally accessible
in strong and just societies. Technology could exacerbate inequality and catastrophic risks in
the coming decades, or especially if democratized and well-regulated, ensure longer, healthy
and more enabled lives for growing numbers of people, and a stronger and more secure
civilization.
Beginning with our shared commitment to individual self-determination we can build solidarity
with

- Organizations defending workers and the unemployed, as technology transforms work and the
economy
- The movement for reproductive rights, around access to contraception, abortion, assisted
reproduction and genomic choice
- The movement for drug law reform around the defense of cognitive liberty
- The disability rights movement around access to assistive and curative technologies
- Sexual and gender minorities around the right to bodily self-determination
- Digital rights movements around new freedoms and means of expression and organization

We call for dramatically expanded governmental research into anti-aging therapies, and
universal access to those therapies as they are developed in order to make much longer and
 healthier lives accessible to everybody. We believe that there is no distinction between
“therapies” and “enhancement.” The regulation of drugs and devices needs reform to speed
their approval.

As artificial intelligence, robotics and other technologies increasingly destroy more jobs than
they create, and senior citizens live longer, we must join in calling for a radical reform of the
economic system. All persons should be liberated from the necessity of the toil of work. Every
human being should be guaranteed an income, healthcare, and life-long access to education.
We must join in working for the expansion of rights to all persons, human or not.
We must join with movements working to reduce existential risks, educating them about
emerging threats they don’t yet take seriously, and proposing ways that emerging technologies
can help reduce those risks. Transnational cooperation can meet the man-made and natural
threats that we face.”

It is time for technoprogressives to step forward and work together for a brighter future.​ -
http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/tpdec2014

AT perspective on the TD:

● It is in the best interest of the far Left to work on transforming progressive agendas that
have a positive impact for the future of anarchist-transhumanism.
● Although not mentioned in the TD but assumed to be accepted by the current structural
“progressive” norm, instead of a ​basic income guarantee​ anarchist-transhumanists
would rather see cooperative communities work together to achieve a prosperous
lifestyle enhancing the possibilities for freedom, equality, and fairness. (A minimum basic
income guarantee may work in the short term, but traitorously collaborates with
capitalism​.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchist_communism
● Radically democratic goals for scientific advancement would lead innovation and be
based on the needs of all sentient life within a radically new educated populace in which
our governments have shamefully neglected
● We call for an end to the horrific domination of government and corporations/capitalism
over scientific advancement
● As automation and computer algorithms become the norm and replace work,
anarchist-transhumanists see an economy based on unions, cooperation, and free
access to all essentials and resources for a better life.

15. Tradition of Direct Action, Direct Democracy, Consensus Decision Making, and Civil
Disobedience

https://www.youtube.com/user/ruckussociety/videos
http://www.crimethinc.com/books/rfd.html
http://earthfirstjournal.org/merch/product/earth-first-direct-action-manual-1st-edition/
http://ruckus.org
Direct action​ occurs when a group takes an action which is intended to reveal an existing
problem, highlight an alternative, or demonstrate a possible solution to a social issue. This can
include ​nonviolent civil disobedience​ and less often what is known as “violent activities” if
sentient beings are targeted. There has been of course major argument whether or not property
destruction can be considered “violence” during direct action and protest.

Anarchist-transhumanism and most forms of anarchism try to keep the tradition of non-violent
direct action alive as much as possible. Examples of ​non-violent direct action​ (also known as
nonviolent resistance​ or​ ​civil resistance​) can include​ ​sit-ins​,​ ​strikes​,​ ​workplace occupations​,
blockades​,​ ​hacktivism​, etc., while ​violent direct action​ is violence against feeling things, such
as humans, animals, all sentient life,​ ​etc. By contrast,​ ​electoral​ ​politics​,​ ​diplomacy​,​ ​negotiation​,
and​ ​arbitration​ are not usually described as direct action, as they are politically mediated, but in
the real world can have major influence. Non-violent actions are usually a form of​ ​civil
disobedience​, and may involve a degree of intentional “law-breaking” where persons place
themselves in arrestable situations in order to make a ​political statement​ but other actions
(such as strikes) may not violate​ ​criminal law​ depending on which area of the world you reside
in.

The aim of direct action is to either obstruct another political agent or political organization from
performing some practice to which the activists object; or to solve perceived problems which
traditional societal institutions (​governments​,​ ​religious organizations​ or established​ ​trade unions​)
are not addressing to the satisfaction of the direct action participants, however religious
organizations, trade unions and political groups have a history of participating in direct action.
Non-violent direct action has historically been an assertive regular feature of the tactics
employed by​ ​social movements​, including​ ​Mohandas Gandhi​'s​ ​Indian Independence Movement
and the​ ​African-American Civil Rights Movement​. - ​https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_action

● Anarchist-Transhumanists, because of our extreme feelings about valuing and the

preservation of sentient life aim to see that protest and civil-disobedience remains
non-violent in nature.
● Real movement building can be the result of non-violent direct action when that action
pushes major changes to take place in the political atmosphere. Anarchists have a long
tradition of organizing rallies, sit-ins, hacktivism, and occupations. As seen during the
globalization movement against the WTO, IMF, World Bank, NAFTA, CAFTA, FTAA and
recently against Occupy Wall Street, human learning experiences and connections are
made. These experiences have been shown to be crucial in the formation of movement
building and the radicalization of the self.
 ● Why violent revolution cannot work in the 21st century and beyond: (e.g. Sentient life
organized to kill any other sentient life opposing a collection of values) ​A.​ The value of
life: ​transhumanism and anarchism​ is not about taking lives, they are about saving,
liberating, and enhancing them, and ​B.​ Existential Risk of new war technology.
● AT is fundamentally Anti-War!
● War-profiteering is one of capitalism’s largest endeavours, having killed or injured
hundreds of millions of people.
● Over 50 percent of the United States Discretionary Spending is spent on the military
industrial complex which fundamentally needs “conflict” to support US contractors such
as Boeing and Lockheed Martin. A world without war could house and feed everyone on
the planet, as well as free up massive amounts of resources that could be used toward
scientific research.
● Although AT is non-violent we are not ignorant of class conflict, frequently
referred to as class warfare or class struggle, therefore anarchist-transhumanists
need to carefully critique each action and the reality of class conflict for a better
future. Diverse direct action tactics against the state and it’s protected neoliberal
capitalist system are of the utmost importance.

-​http://www.costsofwar.org/sites/default/files/articles/20/attachments/Costs%20of%20War%20S
ummary%20Crawford%20June%202014.pdf
-​http://www.oneminuteforpeace.org/budget

[...]
16. How a Federation of Brain/Mind would Vote on Concepts and Ideas
[Please see ​http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/notaro20130316a​ as a starting point]

● Enhanced mental cooperation as minds become more interconnected via

brain-to-computer interfaces and other foreseeable brain/mind technologies, which will
enable the ability to share qualia at rapid speeds.
● If brain-computer interfaces may allow for the creation of a society of rapid democratic
cooperation, it is also important that such technologies be designed in a way that
preserves the right to self-determination and the power of free will, in order to keep a
balance between collectivism and voluntarism, however a world based on anarchism is
 fundamentally about collectivism, in the here-and-now and within a cyborg and even a
“singularitarian” framework.

17. The Acknowledgement of the Expertise, Complexity, Quandaries and the

Paradigmatic Nature of Scientific Knowledge and the Assessment of the Scientific
Community
● Philosophers of science​ argue over the​ ​epistemological​ limits of such a consensus and
some, including​ ​Thomas Kuhn​, have pointed to the existence of​ ​scientific revolutions​ in
the​ ​history of science​ as being an important indication that scientific consensus can, at
times, be wrong. Nevertheless, the sheer explanatory power of science in its ability to
make​ ​accurate​ and​ ​precise​ predictions and aid in the design and​ ​engineering​ of new
technology​ has ensconced "science" and, by proxy, the opinions of the scientific
community as a highly respected form of​ ​knowledge​ both in the​ ​academy​ and in​ ​popular
culture​.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_community

(Matilde Marcolli) ​Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend contributed an important change of
perspective in the philosophy of science, by demolishing simplistic positivist views of the
scientific process as a linear progress towards the discovery of truth. In particular, an important
part of Kuhn's critique, further amplified by Feyerabend, was based on the correct observation
that, in Popper's falsifiability approach, typically the criteria used to assess theories are
insufficient to unambiguously determine theory-choice. Thus, theory building cannot be solely
based on the agreement with experimental data, but on a set of other assumptions that are
rooted in the culture of the time. Only in periods of crisis of normal science, and in the presence
of a large number of anomalies, the need for theory comparison is truly felt within the scientific
community. (needs editing)

However, Kuhn's distinction between "normal science" and "scientific revolutions" is itself
simplistic, when compared to the everyday practice of science. In reality, every discovery of an
unexpected connection between different sub-disciplines within a field of scientific inquiry
provokes a change of paradigm in the Kuhnian sense, even if that ends up shaking the
prevalent paradigm only within a few dozen experts in a particular specialization: what Kuhn
would refer to as normal science is rife with frequent, surprising, and unexpected paradigm
shifts. At the same time all these widespread micro-scientific-revolutions typically fit within a
larger scale structure of normal science, characterizing the expectations and accepted practices
of the scientific community of the time.

In discussing science, and how the practice of science may differently fit into the current
capitalist society and in the anarchist society we envision, it is crucial to distinguish between
science, as a methodological approach to understanding the world, and the sociology of the
scientific community that practices it within a certain social and historical background.
Science is as close as anything can get to the ideals of an anarchist society. It is by definition
opposed to any figure of authority and continuously self-questioning. It is based on the ideals of
free inquiry and rationality, on understanding the world in natural terms that exclude any appeal
to supernatural and unexplainable causes. Of course, explainable does not mean explained,
and it is part of the basic intellectual honesty of science to recognize limitations of current
models: gaps in existing theories are important open problems for future research, not crevices
into which to squeeze increasingly uncomfortable, constrained, and improbable divinities!

The scientific community, as we can observe it at this moment in time, is marred by its
intermingling with capitalism and its societal maladies: it exhibits power structures that are
completely at odds with the true scientific spirit, often accompanied by a nearly tribal structure,
complete with Stalinist personality cults for a few designated alpha males within each tribe.
Patriarchy, sexism and outright misogyny are widespread in the community, and so are racism,
ageism and ableism. The spirit of free enquiry, which is crucial to science, is curtailed by many
obstacles.

The publish-or-perish treadmill of the current system of academic careers effectively prevents
young scientists (especially at the crucial postdoc and tenure-track stages) from seriously
questioning or opposing the power structure and current paradigms in their field. The necessity
to produce readily marketable results, that will ensure survival on the cutthroat academic job
market, effectively prevents young scientists from tackling more risky but potentially highly
transformative lines of investigation, and to go against the established power structures, from
which they depend for recommendation letters and networking, both currently essential for
securing a job in science. Even tenured scientists, who have until recent times enjoyed a
relative freedom in pursuing more risky and unconventional lines of research, are currently
threatened, by the constant erosion of tenure and academic freedom, perpetrated by myopic
assault-capitalist university administrators, bound on transforming universities from safe havens
of culture and free inquiry into businesses aimed at generating profit by marketing a caricature
of education. Another main threat to science is coming from the current capitalist approach to
the distribution of research funds. The main public funding agencies (like NSF, NIH, NASA, and
their counterparts in other nations) are under constant political assault from anti-science
conservative constituencies that would rather divert the crucial support for basic science into
further military squandering. The resulting extreme competition for securing the increasingly
scarce funds creates a climate in the community that is not conducive to larger collaborative
efforts and to a serene and unconstrained level of critical thinking.

As anarchists, we embrace science as the best way of understanding the world, and we are in
complete accord with its intrinsic non-hierarchical, free, and egalitarian way of approaching
knowledge. At the same time we are profoundly critical of the current sociology of the scientific
community and we envision several important changes in the organization of the community of
scientists.
(Matilde Marcolli) ​Broader access to scientific education:​ our world is crucially based on
modern science and modern technology, and this will be all the more the case in the future
world we envision. In order to function as a direct democracy with engagement and participation
of all, and respect for everybody's agency, an in depth understanding of modern science is
crucial. Arthur Clarke once famously stated that any sufficiently advanced technology is
indistinguishable from magic, and we already live in a society where too many people treat
current technology as little more than a magical black box. This is a tragic capitulation, an
abandonment of agency. Renouncing our right to understand the world that surrounds us is a
complete surrender, which makes us vulnerable to other powers, from spying government
agencies, to sellers of crappy pseudo-science or religious fundamentalists and the neoliberal
capitalist domination over labour. Serious advanced scientific education, freely available to all, is
crucial to make us free independent thinkers in the modern world. The fact that we advocate
scientific education for all is not meant to exclude or diminish the value of the humanities as an
important part of education: philosophy, literature, and the arts are crucially needed, as much as
the sciences, in creating citizens of a free society. We oppose all attempts by current
market-driven administrative tyrannies to assault, defund, reduce or even eliminate both the
humanities and the sciences from the academic and school curricula. A free society needs
culture, intellectual depth, and analytical capabilities, not “marketable skills" to be sold for profit
in a great capitalist supermarket of existence.

Free access to the scientific literature​: science is a cumulative, collaborative, self-correcting

process. An absolutely crucial ingredient for the scientific process to function properly is access
to scientific results by all researchers. The current capitalist system has created a vicious circle
of exploitation, by which a few profiteers, like Elsevier and other mega-publishers, are able to
harvest the free labor of researchers (whose articles they appropriate without compensation and
without consent), of referees (who typically consent to being exploited out of the perceived need
of having scientific work peer-reviewed by the community), and of editors (who understand the
publish-or-perish pressure researchers are subject to). All these people provide their free work
to keep the scientific community functioning, while their efforts are hijacked by lurid
profit-making companies who sell the same free product of the scientists' labor back to the same
scientific community for exorbitant prices, by hiding scientific results behind paywalls, and
blackmailing the community into paying a hefty ransom to access the work that they have
themselves produced. Scientists have been fighting back against this exploitations for years, by
creating free repositories of preprints, like the eprints arXiv, or by creating their own alternative
low cost journals, and finally by joining the growing anti-copyright movement and sharing
scientific papers on torrents and on the darknet. As anarchists we believe all scientific
information should be freely available to all. All scientific papers, databases, and scientific
results should be posted without paywalls, readily accessible and usable by anyone who is
interested in learning, researching, reproducing results, applying knowledge.

http://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/oldest-university
Rethinking the University:​ universities are neither shopping malls nor grade factories.
Historically, the earliest universities to appear in Europe in the 11th century were designed as
protected environments for free inquiry and free thought, where dangerous philosophical ideas
could be envisioned and debated, shielded from the violent oppression of the christian
orthodoxy. The concept of academic freedom was a crucial part of this process from its
inception. Universities play a crucial role as producers of culture and of scientific research. In
recent years, universities have increasingly come under attack from an authoritarian ruling caste
of administrators, who perpetually increase their ranks and their salaries, driving to skyrocketing
costs a higher education that should be freely accessible to all. Administrators are hired by other
administrators, they have no academic credentials, and are often picked on the basis of a clear
anti-intellectual stance. This oppressive and authoritarian power structure is destroying higher
education, turning it into a marketable product, animated by myopic anti-cultural goals.
Administrators routinely undermine academic freedom, curtail free speech, and curb dissent
with resort to increasingly violent and militarized campus police. It is time for universities to be
reborn as the safe havens of free intellectual inquiry they were always meant to be. The
abolition of non-academic administration is the first necessary step to this goal, and its
replacement by a self-ruling of all scholarly institutions by a direct democracy of scholars and
students. Subjects of study are relevant on the basis on their intellectual depth, not on their sale
value for capitalist markets. Mentoring of students by faculty is not and should never become a
power relation: it must be a collaborative effort towards the expansion, the sharing and
transmission, and the critical assessment of knowledge.

The concept of the university as a cradle for the development of logical reasoning and
independent free thinking has its historical roots in Plato's Academy in Athens, from which the
word academia is indeed derived. The later Neoplatonic stage of the Academy was forcibly shut
down in the year 529 CE by Justinian (a date that is taken by many to mark the end of the
ancient Greek world), while the first university in the modern sense was opened only 5 centuries
later, in Bologna in the year 1088 CE. In the intervening historical period, knowledge of the
ancient Greek language and writings had almost entirely disappeared in the western part of
Europe, while it was retained in the eastern Byzantine side of the former Roman empire, and
transmitted to the Islamic world, where ancient Greek philosophy and science was preserved
and translated, and various attempts were made to organize higher learning around models
similar to the Platonic. These finally in turn influenced the creation of the first European
universities, prior to the European rediscovery of the Greeks that flourished during the period of
Renaissance Humanism. [needs editing]

While the emphasis on the Socratic method of critical inquiry, on open questions and problems
and on dialectics, makes the ancient Platonic Academy seem very progressive in its
pedagogical principles, the enterprise was certainly deeply affected by the prejudices of the
society of the time. This is evident already in Plato's Socratic dialog Meno, where Plato's largely
fictional Socrates character mentors an illiterate slave on how to derive by himself a proof of a
case of the Pythagorean theorem. At first this looks like a very positive example of good
mentoring skills, whereby without assuming previous knowledge, people are instructed not to
passively acquire notions by to reason by themselves. However, Plato immediately jumps to
invoking the intervention of a supernatural world of innate and transcendental ideas, in order to
avoid having to admit that the intellectual capacities of the enslaved man are on an equal
footing with his own. Despite these despicable aspects of the Platonic world view, there are
important ideas that can be retained from the original Greek model of academia: the fostering of
critical thinking, a non-hierarchical relation between teacher and learner, a learning based on
reasoning and questioning rather than on cumulative notion acquisition and memorization, and
also the prominent role given to science (which in Plato's time meant mathematics) as a crucial
tool for critical thinking: the entrance to Plato’s Academy was famously inscribed with the motto
“Μηδείς αγεωμέτρητος εισίτω” (no one may enter without knowledge of geometry).

Autonomous Research Communities:​ hackerspaces, the rising DIY synthetic biology

movement, with its counter-culture labs and biohacking, self-organized tutoring communities like
the Baltimore Algebra Project, and several other ongoing initiatives are helping to create
spontaneously organized communal spaces for the practice and the teaching of science at all
levels, from school level material to the professional. We envision the creation of a broad
network of autonomous research communities, based on the model of anarchist communes,
and functioning like professional scientific research institutes, where the pursuit of scientific
research can be uncoupled from large organized structures like universities, and from financial
interests. Such autonomous structures are not a replacement for the type of revived and
functional university structure described above, but a complementary form of organization, more
flexible and independent. We envision a large hacker science movement involving professional
scientists as well as a larger, scientifically trained and scientifically active, part of the population.
Anarchism is fundamentally an ethical philosophy and part of this philosophy involves a general
widespread education to the ethical use of scientific knowledge and technical expertise, for the
good of society and the preservation of the environment.

The it and the bit:​ we advocate digitalization of information and its complete and free
availability, universal access to digital resources, and the creation of online communities and
new virtual spaces for the practice and the free and unconstrained transmission of scientific and
technical knowledge, and for the engagement of science in society. At the same time, we
believe that the preservation and expansion of physical spaces and resources is equally crucial.
We advocate and promote the creation of new physical spaces and communities, including
hackerspaces, people laboratories as envisioned by the biohacker and DIY synthetic biology
movement, libraries and bookstores with physical books. These physical resources are not in
competition with, nor superseded by the online resources: they complement each other
providing different, but equally crucial, types of services to the communities. We oppose and
denounce the barbaric and indiscriminate destruction of library resources perpetrated by
university administrators in their ongoing savage ``war on books". We advocate the protection
and expansion of all cultural resources: access to libraries and books (both digital and physical)
is a right that we will continue to fight for.
Discussion not bullying:​ free in depth discussion of ideas is crucial to the advancement of
science. Critical thinking, questioning of established ideas, and a thorough scrutiny of any new
proposed model lie at the heart of the scientific method. Criticism of ideas can be fierce and it
usually starts with the individual researcher themselves, putting their own ideas on a harsh trial,
trying to find where they would fail. The process is multilayered, involving anonymous peer
reviewers in the publication stage, feedback and input from the community in the earlier
circulation of preprints and in conference presentations, and continuous later rechecking of
results and questioning of assumptions and derivations, by other researchers intending to use
the results for their own work. Indeed, the scientific process relies crucially on two very different
modes of thinking, both playing an indispensable role. One is the free, imaginative,
unconstrained flight of the creative imagination, which is very close to artistic creativity. This
phase is where the brilliant new and unexpected insights take place. The other is the painful and
gruesome process of checking those ideas, of putting them on trial, criticizing them as harshly
as possible, and discarding everything that does not survive this tough scrutiny, no matter how
appealing and elegant it might have seemed in the previous phase. For a healthy and
successful functioning of the scientific process it is important to ensure that both of these
phases of thought can take place unobstructed. There is a danger, especially with a scientific
community that is plagued by many maladies of power and aggression, sexism and racism, that
the harshness of the debate on ideas would be transformed into an excuse for ad personam
attacks against other researchers. Such attacks can be motivated by tribal rivalries and attempts
to establish dominance and hierarchical structures, or they can be aimed at excluding and
marginalizing researchers belonging to certain groups, especially women and minorities. These
attacks tend to happen most frequently in the peer reviewing phase, where anonymity allows
the attacker to behave like an internet troll.

Occasionally, they can be overt attacks, heckling of conference presentations, attempts to ruin
reputations and professional careers. A climate of fear induced by such behavior does not help
improving the quality of the screening process and can dramatically curtail the possibility of
having a creative phase involving free exchange of preliminary ideas, not yet completely formed
and checked, which is essential to the advancement of science. We advocate a professional
ethics in science that fosters creative thinking and upholds the harsh debate and criticism of
ideas and results. At the same time we condemn any form of bullying and violence, that uses
the tradition of scrutiny of ideas as a coverup for power games and the establishment of
authoritarian hierarchical structures.

(Matilde Marcolli) ​Stop all collusion of science with the military:​ very few scientists feel any
sympathy for the military. The open, questioning and anti-hierarchical nature of scientific thought
is completely at odds with the very idea of military organization. Most scientists find the use of
science for the purpose of warfare a perversion of knowledge. Yet, the collusion of the scientific
community with the military continues at record levels. Often, scientists grudgingly recognize
that the DOD is sucking away half of the national revenue, while funds for scientific research are
lagging far behind and constantly threatened: the only way to secure the survival of their
research often lies in trying to pretend that it serves the cause of national security and tapping
into the endless DOD resources. Unfortunately, these pretend games often turn real, as after all
the military do expect something in return for the money they have extorted from the American
taxpayer, and scientific and technological innovations are increasingly employed in the
battlefields and in intrusive surveillance and repression, rather than in the service of society.
Defunding the military and funding fundamental scientific research is a top priority for a free
society based on true democratic cooperation.

(Matilde Marcolli) ​Scientific expertise, consensus, and democracy:​ we reject the extreme
relativism inherent in several currents of Postmodernism. The distinction between science and
pseudo-science is real and it profoundly affects the wellbeing of individuals and society. it is not
a matter of arbitrary conventions. The decision to believe in pseudo-science, magical thinking,
and superstition is not empowering: it is a self-defeating abandonment of effective agency and a
surrender of critical thinking. It does not matter whether it is young earth creationism, astrology,
or new age mysticism: pseudo-science strips us of our capacity to understand and to
meaningfully interact with the world. Scientific expertise is real. It takes at least ten years of
intense training to achieve professional level in a particular scientific discipline. Only a handful of
experts are usually qualified to assess a scientific paper by peer reviewing. At first, this may
generate the impression that scientific consensus is achieved by the tacit agreement of a small
elite on the basis of arbitrary choices and the exclusion of others from decision making. Anyone
who has been personally directly involved in this assessment process knows how far the
conspiratorial view is from the reality of harsh criticism and unrelenting scrutiny of ideas.​[needs
editing]

It is certainly true that power groups (often looking like tribes) exist among scientists and tend to
favor their own acolytes when it comes to distribution of scarce resources. This is part of the
criticism that we articulated about the sociology of the scientific community under capitalism.
However, cases of malpractice induced by capitalist attempts to transform research into a
marketable product are not an indication that scientific consensus is an arbitrary social
construct, only that capitalism may not the best environment to foster the development of
science. It is certainly of crucial important to be aware of the influence that the surrounding
culture and social circumstances can have on the course of scientific development, as the
earlier developments in the modern philosophy of science pioneered by Kuhn and Feyerabend
have taught us.​[needs editing]

However, it is also important to recognize that the ultimate acceptance or rejection of scientific
models is largely based on a combination of criteria that include Popper's falsifiability, but that
also involve other aspects, such as Bayesian model selection and mathematical consistency
and elegance. Envisioning a central role for science in a functioning anarchist society also
raises the issue of how to reconcile a general involvement in decision making based on direct
democracy with the specialized expertise that is necessary to science. Needless to say, forms of
direct participation and direct democracy, as are envisioned in the anarchist tradition, do not
conflict with the specializations of different individuals. Indeed, an anarchist society is structured
as the overlap of many smaller communes and communities, at different scales, which
incorporate specific individual expertise and act, within each community, on participatory and
democratic principles. For example, many initiatives within the scientific community are already
largely functioning according to the principles envisioned by anarchism: the ​eprints arXiv​, that
guarantees fast and free access to new scientific results (mostly in areas of physics,
mathematics, and computer science) is run and organized by members of the community in a
broad participatory way, and in the respect of the specific expertise of all contributors.

While there have been occasional disputes around moderation of submissions, altogether the
functioning of the arXiv as an open and participatory initiative has been extremely successful.
Thus, there is room within the scientific community for the type of communal and participatory
organization envisioned by anarchism, and there is also room for specific scientific expertise
within the context of a larger anarchist society based on participatory democracy. The type of
broad and free access to higher scientific education that we advocate, as discussed earlier in
this section, is also crucial in order to combine effectively a truly democratic and direct decision
making process, and the importance of scientific expertise. Only if the general population is
scientifically literate and sufficiently educated in the principles and results of advanced modern
science, it is possible to reach an informed consensus on issues that are of crucial importance
to the environment
and to society.

References:
- Thomas S. Kuhn, "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: 50th Anniversary Edition",
University of Chicago Press, 2012
- Paul Feyerabend, "Science in a Free Society", Verso, 1982
- Massimo Pigliucci, Maarten Boudry, "Philosophy of Pseudoscience: Reconsidering the
Demarcation Problem", University of Chicago Press, 2013
- Alan Sokal, Jean Bricmont, "Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of
Science", Picador, 2014
- Marcus Wohlsen, "Biopunk: Solving Biotech's Biggest Problems in Kitchens and
Garages", Penguin, 2011
- "The Boy Who Could Change the World: The Writings of Aaron Swartz", The New Press,
2015

● Longevity, Bioengineering, Medical Enhancement

[​http://sens.org/research/research-blog​]

18. Summary of Anarchist-Transhumanism:

Anarchist-Transhumanism can be described as;

A radical democratic revolution, centuries old and still growing strong, has at its core the idea
that people are happiest when they have rational control over their lives. Reason, science, and
technology provide one kind of control, slowly freeing us from ignorance, toil, pain, and disease.
Radical democracy provides the other kinds of control, through civil liberties.
Technology and democracy complement one another, ensuring that safe technology is
generally accessible and democratically accountable. The convergence of nanotechnology,
biotechnology, information technology, and cognitive science in the coming decades will give us
unimaginable technological mastery of nature and ourselves. That mastery requires radical
democratization and egalitarianism.

(​The above has been adapted from IEET’s Mission Statement)​

– ​http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/purpose

Anarchist-Transhumanism takes a stance of anti-capitalism, while valuing radical democracy

and consensus decision-making in a unionized environment.

Anarchism itself has many branches ranging from Anarcho-primitivism to Anarchist-communism.

Transhumanism alone assumes the existence of the collective expertise of the scientific
community, advancement of technology to better human-kind, and eventually will lead to a
posthuman future. The cooperation of human societies to reach the above goals maintains that
there must be a kind of cooperative being, therefore a type of worker syndicalism, socialism and
federation. Anarchist-Transhumanists hold the idea that progress should not be held back by
dogmatic and oppressive institutions. Rather, innovation and improvement of the human
condition can be brought about by emphasising survival and cooperation, instead of competition
and conquest.

Anarchist-Transhumanism is thus a combination of syndicalism, socialism, technology, and

radical democracy, maintaining an anarchist stance of the lack of religion, the destruction of the
capitalist and/or socialist State, and the idea that minds (humans, posthumans) DO NOT have
the right to force political, economic and religious ideas on one another especially through future
“gigadeath” wars.

Anarchist-Transhumanism assumes that the future will bring a kind of interconnectedness

through technology that will allow individuals and communities to communicate and vote very
rapidly, abolishing the need for a State. Brain/Mind will be “enhanced” through the use of
technological means, leading to an ever greater, fairer, and peaceful outcome of the voting
process.

However we have a lot of work to do in the here-and-now. We can’t sit back as the DOD,
corporations like Walmart, Foxconn, and countries in the global ‘north’ lead the way towards a
transhumanist future using wage slavery. If we wish for progress, we cannot allow capitalist
institutions to continue to stand in front of innovation. For as industry jobs are taken by
machines, and capitalist empires are collapsing, capitalism and authoritarianism are not
sustainable.The RICH will not win this time, in fact technological progress WILL backfire on
them, just like the internet backfired on the U.S. government who invented it – for you would not
be reading these anti imperialist words if they had control of it – therefore we must act now, we
must take to the streets, share information, and save those lives in which the rich have stolen,
from Palestine, Iraq, to Bangladesh – in war-zones to sweatshops.

And what will happen if there is not an end to the institutions and structures which have created
these war-zones and sweatshops? What happens if we do not put an end to the institutions and
structures which have prevented innovation and liberation from human limitation? A number of
things are possible. Climate change is nearly irreversible - many respected scientific reports
describing apocalyptic environment catastrophes. This is only one of many disastrous
possibilities. We see the continued juggling of power on geopolitical scales, some of which
involve weaponry and tools of manipulation detrimental to human existence and quality of life.
Massive geoengineering projects may have to become reality as capitalism destroys our
symbiotic relationship with the environment.

It seems we need to eliminate these tools of destruction, undo the current power structures, and
liberate ourselves from our mortal limitations. The combination of anarchist egalitarianism and
ambitious transhumanist innovation is an unstoppable and unbelievably liberating force we
cannot ignore.

We want to see a fair authentic transhumanist future, but one with anarchist values and the lack
of massive human rights abuses. Brain/Mind will be liberated and freed from the shackles of the
oppressive State and the tyranny of capitalism, and technological progress will aid our fight for
the future!

Contributors to this document (or previous versions) include: Kris Notaro, Kim A. Violet,,
Summerspeaker, Dominic Donnelly, Matilde Marcolli, (Richard Stallman via free text only
software) [...] Thanks to all the anonymous contributions and suggestions - please keep
them coming!