Back in the old days, around 2010, anarchists in North America began taking up the argument of how to engage with social media and smartphones. Some argued it would be like refusing to use the printing press in the 1500s if anarchists didn’t engage with the new social platforms and smartphones. Others argued this comparison was absurd. If a printing press had transcribed every word uttered by the rebel printers, filmed their interactions, tracked their movements, and instantly delivered that information to the ruling power’s archive, then perhaps that comparison might make sense. As history decided for us, most anarchists involved in that debate began to engage with social media and smartphones. That was nine years ago.

It was the so-called “Arab Spring” of 2010 and 2011 that mass-popularized the idea of using social media platforms and smartphones for revolutionary ends, a narrative that was embraced deeply within the Occupy Movement. This new movement, appearing during the “Arab Spring,” was the first in the US to fully utilize social-media platforms and smartphones, laying the basis for our current digital reality. Occupy fit so perfectly between the Twitter-fueled Iranian Insurrection of 2009 and the Ukrainian Insurrection of 2013-2014, appearing as just another blip in some wave of global revolt fueled by social media. When the Ferguson Uprising broke out in 2014, it was perfectly normal for radical organizers in the US to use social media. Despite the epic Snowden leaks of 2013, most people weren’t careful as the US was rocked between 2014 and 2016, with those historic events transmitted through Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

Between 2016 and 2019, the entire digital landscape changed, especially for social movements. Where a Twitter posts could once trigger an uprising in Baltimore, there’s now just heavily-policed social networks watched over by NATO’s very own Atlantic Council . In their effort to combat the ‘fake news’ from Russia after Donald Trump’s election in 2016, any social media post remotely threatening to the ruling order is suppressed and rendered irrelevant, mostly by algorithm. Since the hey-day of 2011, the radical utility of social-media has rapidly declined to its current level, where only Donald Trump and AOC are allowed to use Twitter to organize massive demonstrations. Everyone else is relegated to bumbling around in their tiny social networks, cut off from the larger flows of power that now dominate social media platforms.

As the Invisible Committee told the Chaos Computer Club in 2014, it’s becoming clear that Facebook is not so much the model of a new form of government as its reality already in operation. The fact that revolutionaries employed it and still employ it to link up in the street en masse only proves that it’s possible, in some places, to use Facebook against itself, against its essential function, which is policing. In the four years since these words were written, the entire situation has changed, with the loop-holes of social media now forbidden to the public. When they delivered this ‘Fuck Off Google’ address, the Invisible Committee were also trying to rekindle an interest in cybernetics, the 20th century science that still dominates our world, an art of governing whose formative moments are almost forgotten but whose concepts branched their way underground, feeding into information technology as much as biology, artificial intelligence, management, or the cognitive sciences, at the same time as the cables were strung one after the other over the whole surface of the globe.

The creator of cybernetics, Norbert Weiner, once wrote that communication is the cement of society and those whose work consists in keeping the channels of communication open are the ones on whom the continuance or downfall of our civilization largely depends. According to the Invisible Committee, cybernetics is now producing its own humanity. A transparent humanity, emptied out by the very flows that traverse it, electrified by information, attached to the world by an ever-growing quantity of apparatuses. A humanity that’s inseparable from its technological environment because it is constituted, and thus driven, by that…Political economy reigned over beings by leaving them free to pursue their interest; cybernetics controls them by leaving them free to communicate.

While there’s much more to the story, the main point is this: cybernetic capitalism is actually the ruling ideology of our time, and it rules us through our devices. Even the most secure internet user is still being pulled into the cybernetic project simply by using the endless succession of new devices and components. A few recent North American anarchist critiques have questioned our movement’s reliance on digital technology and we hope to encourage this line of thought. It’s been twelve years since the iPhone was first released and almost a decade since North American anarchists began using social media platforms, a convenient moment to pause and reflect on where to go next.

The recent uprisings in Sudan and Haiti, heavily repressed by the ruling powers, has not triggered the same kind of social-media response as did the Tunisian, Egyptian, Lybian, Syrian, Turkish, and Ukrainian uprisings of 2010 to 2014. The rulers of Sudan are allies with Saudi Arabia, hence allies with the US and the EU, and thus their revolt is forbidden from becoming viral on social media platforms. It’s the same story with Haiti, whose ruling powers are allies of the US. All of this illustrates exactly what the NATO/Atlantic Council censorship of Facebook and Twitter look like in practice. Popular support for a coup d’etat in Venezuela is allowed to circulate, as are the words of Trump and AOC, but an anarchist uprising will never find its genesis on social media platforms. If that was ever possible, those days are long past.

It’s important to not get too bleak about this entire situation. Just because it’s normal for everyone to be linked to this cybernetic network, doesn’t mean its a good idea. Starting from cybernetics being a bad idea, move on from despair and resignation into actively forming a strategy to escape the control of power and order. As a reminder of how this is done, we’ve composed a short documentary about the history of cybernetics and one of the early revolts against its reign, a revolt that leads us back to San Francisco, California.

Fulvia Ferrari, the daughter of local SF anarchists, went looking for her mother Isabelle in the 1930s. Her mother had disappeared in the Russian Civil War and was rumored to be fighting the Red Army from within Stalin’s dictatorship. Fulvia eventually tracked her to Poland but was eventually captured after the Nazis invaded the country. She never found her mother and spent four years in a German concentration camp, surviving until her liberation by US soldiers. After returning to San Francisco, Fulvia learned the extent to which WWII was a global counter-revolution against the rebel movement built by her mother, and in the act of rekindling her family’s revolt, she’d soon come up against the technologies birthed by this same war: the atom bomb, the rocket, the jet, and the digital computer.

While the governments of the US and the USSR built large computers to control their populations, the banks and corporations built huge mainframes, and the military used vast computers to select its next bombing targets, a movement of computer hackers began to build an alternate computer vision so that normal people could access the new power of digital technology for rebellious purposes. As the Invisible Committee would later write, the virtue of the hackers has been to base themselves on the materiality of the supposedly virtual world. Much of this computer hacker movement was birthed in the San Francisco region during the 1950s and 1960s when Fulvia Ferrari was living there with her lover, a moment of extreme political discord across the US.

Fulvia took this moment to encourage various rebels of San Francisco to steal this new technology from the government and capitalists by any means necessary and to release that information to the public. As the Invisible Committee wrote, the hacker pulls techniques out of the technological system in order to free them. If we are slaves of technology, this is precisely because there is a whole ensemble of artifacts of our everyday existence that we take to be specifically “technical” and that we will always regard simply as black boxes of which we are the innocent users. While Fulvia also encouraged young hippie radicals to destroy the large government and corporate computer mainframes, most people only remembered the easier suggestion of stealing the technology, copying it, and releasing it. If she knew where these suggestions would lead, she might have only recommended destroying this new technology, not extending its reach. As history is so fond of reminding us, all of our words have consequences.

Fulvia never revealed her name or who she was and moved through these various outlaw scenes with an aura of mystery. Dozens of young hippie anarchists, tripping on hallucinogens, would remember a woman with either a French or Italian accent telling them to pillage and destroy the new digital temples of state and capital. She was always pushing for the maximum, everywhere. As the Invisible Committee would write, understanding how the devices around us work brings an immediate increase in power, giving us a purchase on what will then no longer appear as an environment, but as a world arranged in a certain way and one that we can shape. This is the hacker’s perspective on the world.

During the revolts of the 1970s that followed, these rebel hackers popularized the notion of personal computers and one of them eventually created a business called Apple to sell them across the world. Where this hacker had once enabled the public to enjoy free long-distance telephone calls through the blue box (a useful tool in those violent times), he was now a capitalist selling small computers to the public. After large government computers had been used to fight the war against the North Vietnamese Army and crush the guerrilla movement in West Germany, the global revolts of the 1950-1980s were coming to a close and the alleged triumph of capitalism set to begin.

For a brief moment in the 1990s, many people convinced themselves this triumph was real, especially some of the former hippie hackers, and they resigned themselves to selling their personal computers and software to a growing consumer base. While some of these hackers might have been anarchists, the majority held dubious beliefs about the indigenous and US capitalism, among other things. In the 1980s and 1990s, the first children were provided with these computers at public schools, just as the former hippie radicals threw themselves into designing more software for them to use. While these hippie era hackers might have encoded some rebellious content into their digital constructions, they also created the conditions for today’s children who are now partly raised by hand-held computers.

Many who grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area during the 1980s and 1990s were repeatedly told by the Baby Boomer generation that the hippies didn’t really sell out by becoming bankers or corporate officials, they’d simply infiltrated the enemy camp and were preparing the big take down of the man. One of the ways they were going to do this was through computers. Over the years, it became clear this wasn’t close to being true, especially after the attack on the NYC World Trade Center in 2001 and the global police state that followed, a moment when the internet became a militarized chess-board. Six years into that destructive era, the first smartphone was released by Apple, fulfilling the conditions for putting a computer into the hands of the people, albeit under totalitarian internet conditions. As the first people started using Facebook from their smartphones, the powers of the NSA, the CIA, and the FBI were rapidly expanding.

For better or worse, the hippie era hackers gave the people a chance to use digital technology for revolutionary ends, and the 2007 to 2016 period was partially a result of suggestions made by a mysterious woman from San Francisco to rooms full of long-haired radicals high on amphetamine, THC, or LSD. Either French or Italian, no one could remember which, Fulvia floated through the counter-culture of the 1950s and 1960s, priming the youth for the impending confrontation with capital. It was no easy task to rebuild the Black International after WWII, but thanks to the efforts of Fulvia Ferrari and hundreds of other anarchists, our International still exists today. Now that our movement has been sucked into the digital realm, we offer these words and images as fuel for critical thought. There are no straight lines, no black and white, and this is the history we’re stuck in.

During the first hey-day of our movement, in the period between 1871 and 1939, there was a moment of extreme psychic exhaustion permeating modern societies. At the end of the Industrial Revolution, when the modern world had become littered with steam engines, factories, pipelines, and massive iron constructions, millions of people were growing depressed from the broken promises of industrial technology. Rather than making life easier or more utopian, industrial technology was in fact making life worse with its poisoned earth and blackened skies. Part of this cultural depression fed into the Spiritualist movement of psychics, mediums, and reincarnations, while another part fueled the anarchist revolts of coal miners, foundry workers, textile workers, and every other wage-slave of the new technological order. By the 1880s, this cultural depression was transmuting itself into conscious rebellions against the iron laws of industrial capitalism, and the anarchist movement rapidly grew up to the 1910s, a moment when the impending confrontation was fast approaching.

Just before WWI triggered a global counter-revolution, the Czar of Russia was being counseled by a Spiritualist mystic named Rasputin, indigenous anarchists were fighting a revolution in Mexico, and the commune of Home in Washington State was being populated by a unique mixture of insurrectionist anarchists and Spiritualist mystics. At that moment, just before the war, faith in industrial technology was shaken to its core, both politically and spiritually. Not only did technological industry grind up human labor to satisfy its insatiable appetite, it impoverished the minds and bodies of those it claimed as subjects. We are all living in a similar moment, where the tech overlords are now forbidding their children from using smartphones, sending them to nature-immersion schools, and finding Rasputin life-coach gurus to guide their souls through this technological nightmare.

The anarchists of Home, Washington State

As the Invisible Committee correctly observed, the majority of Marxists and post-Marxists supplement their atavistic inclination to hegemony with a definite attachment to technology-that- emancipates-man, whereas a large percentage of anarchists and post-anarchists are down with being a minority, even an oppressed minority, and adopt positions generally hostile to “technology.” While this strange situation is occurring in radical circles, the public is growing suspicious of the smartphones, homeless camps, ‘fake news,’ social-media, cultural brutality, environmental collapse, and mass-shootings of the current era. It remains unclear what will happen to the digitally-nurtured iGen (or Generation Z) when they begin their inevitable wave of mass-revolt, but it’s possible these young rebels might have a critique of technology. By all accounts, their parents are still unable to account for the current digital landscape, a world their children are now completely intimate with. In some cases, parents ration their children’s screen time or access to the internet. In other cases, parents give their children a smartphone as soon as they can touch the screen. History will determine what these children end up creating.

While this new spiritual crisis is occurring within modern digital culture, the modern anarchist movement now stretches from Japan to Indonesia, from Australia to Afghanistan, from Iran to Greece, and from Moscow to Seattle. True to ourselves, for better and worse, the anarchist movement has never been very powerful, but it’s survived against impossible odds and never took state power like the communists. We’re still not very powerful, but we’re everywhere, just like a hundred years ago, and if we have any luck, we won’t make the same mistakes as before. The alleged triumph of capitalism was never total, not in the 1910s, not in the 2010s, and not in the 2020s. Its reign was never secure and the coming years will see it crumble even further towards dissolution, a moment we should prepare for. As many have noted before, if an uprising ever generalizes into a full-scale revolt, the ruling powers will censor the internet. If that doesn’t work, they’ll simply turn it off. It would be wise to plan for this eventuality, not ignore it.