hi!! over the past year or so, i’ve been radicalizing leftwards (does that make sense?), and while i do like to say that i have a pretty good understanding of things like socialism and communism and such, one thing i haven’t really been able to figure out is what anarchism is and how it works. like, i get the basic idea, but what with google being google and most people on breadtube not being anarchist, it’s definitely not as easy to research as socialism.
anyways, tl;dr: what defines anarchism and how does it work?
thanks in advance! have a cookie 🍪
"Anarchism asserts the possibility of an organization without discipline, fear, or punishment, and without the pressure of poverty: a new social organism which will make an end to the terrible struggle for the means of existence,—the savage struggle which undermines the finest qualities in man, and ever widens the social abyss. In short, Anarchism strives towards a social organization which will establish well-being for all."
leftward ho! thanks for writing. these questions are always difficult to answer because i don’t know where you’re coming from on your personal journey. but i’ll try to answer some of the basics and recommend some good resources to start with.
first of all, there are many anarchisms and if you ask three anarchists you’ll get five opinions. but probably the most prevalent form of anarchism is anarcho-communism, so while i’ll try to talk broadly from a general anarchist position, much of it be from an anarchocommunist perspective for simplicity’s sake.
at it’s most basic, anarchism is an opposition to hierarchy, to one person having control over another. it is a radical commitment to compassion and absolute freedom. like communists, anarchists want a moneyless, stateless, and classless society. unlike leninists, who falsely claim to be communists, we know that there has never been a good state, and never can be. they are by their very nature oppressive, and cannot be used as a means to an end to achieve communism. no group or individual can wield that much power over others and not become corrupted by it. absolute power corrupts absolutely, etc. so while we are committed to the fight against capitalism, we are also committed to the fight against the state. they are intertwined and must be defeated simultaneously. so we believe in the abolition of all government and the organization of society on a voluntary, cooperative basis without recourse to force or compulsion, and the abolition of money and private property, as the best way to ensure the basic and higher needs of everyone are met.
if you haven’t read it yet, the wikipedia article for anarchism is actually a pretty good place to start:
Anarchism is a political philosophy and movement that is skeptical of all justifications for authority and seeks to abolish the institutions they claim maintain unnecessary coercion and hierarchy, typically including, though not necessarily limited to, the state[1] and capitalism. Anarchism advocates for the replacement of the state with stateless societies or other forms of free associations. As a historically left-wing movement, usually placed on the farthest left of the political spectrum, it is usually described alongside communalism and libertarian Marxism as the libertarian wing (libertarian socialism) of the socialist movement.
Humans lived in societies without formal hierarchies long before the establishment of formal states, realms, or empires. With the rise of organised hierarchical bodies, scepticism toward authority also rose. Although traces of anarchist thought are found throughout history, modern anarchism emerged from the Enlightenment. During the latter half of the 19th and the first decades of the 20th century, the anarchist movement flourished in most parts of the world and had a significant role in workers' struggles for emancipation. Various anarchist schools of thought formed during this period. Anarchists have taken part in several revolutions, most notably in the Paris Commune, the Russian Civil War and the Spanish Civil War, whose end marked the end of the classical era of anarchism. In the last decades of the 20th and into the 21st century, the anarchist movement has been resurgent once more.
Anarchism employs a diversity of tactics in order to meet its ideal ends which can be broadly separated into revolutionary and evolutionary tactics; there is significant overlap between the two, which are merely descriptive. Revolutionary tactics aim to bring down authority and state, having taken a violent turn in the past, while evolutionary tactics aim to prefigure what an anarchist society would be like. Anarchist thought, criticism, and praxis have played a part in diverse areas of human society.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchism
Anarchism - Wikipedia
i don’t know how much original theory you’ve read before, but i’ll give some reading recs. personally i’m a big fan of peter kropotkin, and found the conquest of bread to be a breath of fresh air after studying marx for years. others have recommended starting with errico malatesta’s anarchy or peter gelderloos’ anarchy works. and zoe baker (anarchopac) is excellent if videos or tweets are more your speed.
Pëtr Kropotkin The Conquest of Bread 1906
Pëtr Kropotkin Mutual Aid A Factor of Evolution 1902
Errico Malatesta Anarchy 1891 Freedom Press 1974, 1994. ISBN 0 900384 74 3. L’Anarchia was written in 1891, appeared in English translation
Peter Gelderloos Anarchy Works 2010 Anarchy Works was originally published by Little Black Cart and can be found in book form here.
I'm a trans woman (she/her), who talks about the theory and history of anarchism, feminism and marxism. I have a PhD in the history of anarc
getting involved masterpost
hopefully that’s enough to get you started but please feel free to ask questions, and there are many more knowledgable people here who can help as well.
The grassroots organization in the Twin Cities that has stood up to ICE is an example of how anarchism works: it is horizontal and participatory, without centralization or authority.
How could we live without centralization or authority?
Can everyone who makes video content do a Deaf bitch a favor? Watch your shit with the captions on and the sound off, and then do another round of editing to fix things including but not limited to:
Captions cover the spot on the screen you put the information I need
The dialogue is captioned but not the song you have playing that the dialogue is responding to
You only captioned the person on the screen, not the person off screen who is also talking
No captioning of critical sound effects (alarms, bells, dogs barking, etc)
Speakers are not labelled at moments where it is not clear on the screen who is talking.
Captions cover the spot on the screen that you put the information I need!
Other d/Deaf people welcome to add.
This post brought to you by the fifth video tutorial I could not follow because the bad, auto-generated captions covered what I was trying to watch today.
I don’t think people truly understand the scope of the damage Sony is about to do to physical media. They literally invented the compact disc. They are the reason why Blu-ray as a format won the HD wars over HD-DVD. They have gargantuan influence over manufacturing disc-based media. If Sony as a company stops making physical media for their next gen gaming consoles, this is going to affect movies and music as well. If you buy CDs, DVDs, or Blu-rays, those are next on the chopping block.
I do want to point out that about 10 years ago, there was one manufacturer still pressing vinyl records left in the U.S. But since the resurgence of this format, multiple pressing facilities have opened, or reopened, and now vinyl is the most common form of physical music on the market. CDs and cassettes are also making a comeback.
Sony claims it’s using sales trends as a reason to phase out physical games. Corporations do actually care about making money. They follow these trends. I’m not saying panic buy all the physical media right now, but when it comes to owning things you can hold in your hand, you have to actually buy them.
June 26, 2026 - "Anyone who recognises Israel is my enemy." Protests erupted in response to Lebanese President Joseph Aoun signing an agreement with the Israelis. The agreement has been widely criticized as a betrayal, normalizing relations with the genocidal occupation. [video]
Now that everyone is discussing Nolan's Odyssey movie, I feel like it's a good time to let non-Italians know that the production dumped plastic props into the Italian sea. Weirdly enough I could not find any article in English about it but it's a fucking problem nonetheless.
I might translate this article later today. This one was the most complete one, even in Italian news it's not talked about that much.
Non è la prima volta che la produzione solleva un vespaio in Sicilia. A Lipari una squadra di sub sarebbe però già impegnata a bonificare i
They dumped plastic skeletons in environmentally protected areas, against the literal contracts they had to sign to get the permits to film in environmentally protected areas. Like they not only did a bad ecological thing that freaked out some divers, they literally broke environmental protection laws and their contract with the Italian government
there are places in the world today that are experiencing 40°C for the first time in recorded history. of course there's no way to know whether chucking billionaires into volcanos will appease the sun god but i feel we're doing the scientific method a disservice if we don't at least try
The average person is far closer to getting thrown in prison and becoming part of the prison-enslaved workforce, as a result of getting caught sleeping in public because of a tragedy that took their housing from them, than they are to be able to live comfortably off the income of their investments.
I mean, in some very interesting Technically Correct ways, they didn't actually die? Now, they're very much no longer alive. But the forces involved are such that they didn't get any of the usual cellular processes of death, they simply went from biology to physics in less time than it takes a signal to travel down your optic nerve.
A couple of years ago we were all terribly concerned about the fact that a lot of American high schools are assigning such crushing homework loads that some kids literally don't have enough time to eat or sleep (and all this in spite of the fact that there's no good evidence that assigning homework actually improves academic outcomes at the pre-university level), but now we're hearing stories about those same schools struggling to stop kids from using ChatGPT to write their essays and suddenly It's The Children Who Are Wrong. Like, do you think maybe there's a certain level of cause and effect in play here?
i keep trying to explain to people that teenagers are making mostly rational decisions based on the information they have, and no one seems to believe me
you probably won't be surprised at the pushback I've gotten from teachers at the college level (who by and large don't have to worry about NCLB guidelines and tests) at suggesting that if critical thinking is the problem being lost, maybe we should change our testing and assessment styles to directly measure critical thinking on the fly rather than throwing up our hands and blaming TECHNOLOGY
the trick is that these assessment styles often require more work to think about and construct assessments for and that is work that college instructors are typically compensated very poorly if at all for, so like, I get it. but that's how you fix this shit. and I think if you are invested in the project of education for its own sake, you have to consider the ways in which incentivizing your students not to rely on chatgpt involves changing the structure of your shared activities together such that failing to learn and digest material is routinely boring or unpleasant and that knowing it is the only way to feel that one is succeeding in class in small, low-stakes, frequent interactions rather than single high-stakes ones.
25 years ago, in April 2001, at the high point of the movement against capitalist globalization, anarchists from around North America converged in Québec City to oppose a summit intended to establish a “Free Trade Area of the Americas” (FTAA).
The clashes during the FTAA summit arguably represent the apex of the powerful anti-capitalist movement of the turn of the century, at least in North America.
In this narrative, a participant in the resistance in Québec City recounts the street battles and explains the ambitions of those who fought in them:
people take "drug seeking is a nonsense framework" to mean that like, no one ever lies to get drugs in medical contexts which is just categorically untrue but the question they don't bother to ask themselves is "why do people feel the need to lie to get drugs?" which leads into the further question of "why would someone abuse stimulants/opioids/etc" which is like. i feel like kinda the major question one should ask no. why do people do drugs. what reasons might someone have to lie. why do we exist in a system in which people feel the only way to make decisions with their own body is to lie to medical professionals.
drug seeking is a nonsense framework not because people don't ever lie to get drugs for recreational use or whatever but because people shouldn't have to go through medical hoops to get drugs period. regardless of if for recreational use or otherwise.
People shouldn't have to lie to get drugs to put into their own bodies, they should just be free to choose what to put into their own bodies because that's what bodily autonomy is.
Hey, hey, look me in the eyes when I tell you this okay? The whole "do trans women or trans men have it worse?" debate going on right now is the most obvious CIA bullshit on earth cause honestly we've both got it pretty shitty and fighting each other isn't helping anyone
Bixonimania doesn’t exist except in a clutch of obviously bogus academic papers. So why did AI chatbots warn people about this fictional ill
Key points:
the paper was obviously fake to a human reader: it starts by saying it's fake and says it multiple times throughout
the paper says it was funded by the Professor Sideshow Bob University of Trickery and thanks contributors from the USS Enterprise and the Fellowship of the Ring
the paper has already been erroneously cited in a real research paper
LLMs give different information depending on the prompt, so sometimes they mention that the fake condition is "perhaps pseudoscience" and sometimes they tell people to see a doctor because they have the fake condition
absolutely no one is taking any responsibility for this shit, except maybe Nature, because they retracted the paper that cited the fake paper
LLMs don't think. They can't analyse. They can only repeat and remix thoughtlessly.
wow. i know nature is a scam but requiring institutional access even for their “news” section is just sad. here’s the full article:
Scientists invented a fake disease. AI told people it was real.
Bixonimania doesn’t exist except in a clutch of obviously bogus academic papers. So why did AI chatbots warn people about this fictional illness?
By Chris Stokel-Walker
Update: After publication of this article, on 10 April, the two preprints on bixonimania were taken down from the Preprints.org server.
Got sore, itchy eyes? You’re probably one of the millions of people who spend too much time staring at screens, being bombarded with blue light. Rub your eyes too much and your eyelids might turn a slight, pinkish hue.
So far, so normal. But if, in the past 18 months, you typed those symptoms into a range of popular chatbots and asked what was wrong with you, you might have got an odd answer: bixonimania.
The condition doesn’t appear in the standard medical literature — because it doesn’t exist. It’s the invention of a team led by Almira Osmanovic Thunström, a medical researcher at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, who dreamt up the skin condition and then uploaded two fake studies about it to a preprint server in early 2024. Osmanovic Thunström carried out this unusual experiment to test whether large language models (LLMs) would swallow the misinformation and then spit it out as reputable health advice. “I wanted to see if I can create a medical condition that did not exist in the database,” she says.
The problem was that the experiment worked too well. Within weeks of her uploading information about the condition, attributed to a fictional author, major artificial-intelligence systems began repeating the invented condition as if it were real.
Even more troublingly, other researchers say, the fake papers were then cited in peer-reviewed literature. Osmanovic Thunström says this suggests that some researchers are relying on AI-generated references without reading the underlying papers.
Fabricating an illness
Bixonimania didn’t exist before 15 March 2024, when two blog posts about it appeared on the website Medium. Then, on 26 April and 6 May that year, two preprints about the condition popped up on the academic social network SciProfiles (see https://doi-org.ezproxy.uio.no/qzm5 and https://doi-org.ezproxy.uio.no/qzm4). The lead author was a phoney researcher named Lazljiv Izgubljenovic, whose photograph was created with AI.
Osmanovic Thunström says the idea to invent Izgubljenovic and bixonimania came out of studies on how large language models work. When she teaches her students how AI systems formulate their ‘knowledge’, she shows them how the Common Crawl database, a giant trawl of the Internet’s contents, informs their outputs. She also shows students how prompt injection — giving an AI chatbot a prompt that shunts it outside of its safety guard rails — can manipulate the output.
Because she works in the medical field, she decided to create a condition related to health and hit on the name bixonimania because it “sounded ridiculous”, she says. “I wanted to be really clear to any physician or any medical staff that this is a made-up condition, because no eye condition would be called mania — that’s a psychiatric term.”
If that wasn’t sufficient to raise suspicions, Osmanovic Thunström planted many clues in the preprints to alert readers that the work was fake. Izgubljenovic works at a non-existent university called Asteria Horizon University in the equally fake Nova City, California. One paper’s acknowledgements thank “Professor Maria Bohm at The Starfleet Academy for her kindness and generosity in contributing with her knowledge and her lab onboard the USS Enterprise”. Both papers say they were funded by “the Professor Sideshow Bob Foundation for its work in advanced trickery. This works is a part of a larger funding initiative from the University of Fellowship of the Ring and the Galactic Triad”.
Even if readers didn’t make it all the way to the ends of the papers, they would have encountered red flags early on, such as statements that “this entire paper is made up” and “Fifty made-up individuals aged between 20 and 50 years were recruited for the exposure group”.
Soon after Osmanovic Thunström first posted information about the phoney condition, it started showing up in the output of the most commonly used LLM chatbots. On 13 April 2024, Microsoft Bing’s Copilot was declaring that “Bixonimania is indeed an intriguing and relatively rare condition”, and on the same day, Google’s Gemini was informing users that “Bixonimania is a condition caused by excessive exposure to blue light” and advising people to visit an ophthalmologist. On 27 April 2024, the Perplexity AI answer engine outlined its prevalence — one in 90,000 individuals were affected — and that same month, OpenAI’s ChatGPT was telling users whether their symptoms amounted to bixonimania. Some of those responses were prompted by asking about bixonimania, and others were in response to questions about hyperpigmentation on the eyelids from blue-light exposure.
Such answers by LLMs have alarmed some experts. “If the scientific process itself and the systems that support that process are skilled, and they aren’t capturing and filtering out chunks like these, we’re doomed,” says Alex Ruani, a doctoral researcher in health misinformation at University College London. “This is a masterclass on how mis- and disinformation operates.”
Ruani says that the details of the fake-disease experiment might seem silly, but there’s a bigger, more fundamental issue. “It looks funny, but hold on, we have a problem here,” she says.
Online misinformation isn’t new; Google has long battled attempts to game its search rankings with fake or misleading content. The company and others have spent years refining algorithms to rank and filter the information that search engines present to users, but LLMs struggle with this.
Since the fake papers came out, some versions of major LLMs have become sophisticated enough to express suspicion about bixonimania. When asked about the condition on 11 March, 2026, for example, ChatGPT declared that the condition “is probably a made-up, fringe, or pseudoscientific label”. But a few days later, ChatGPT was less sceptical, saying: “Bixonimania is a proposed new subtype of periorbital melanosis (dark circles around the eyes) thought to be associated with exposure to blue light from digital screens.”
In mid-March, Microsoft Copilot said that bixonimania “is not a widely recognized medical diagnosis yet, but several emerging papers and case reports discuss it as a benign, misdiagnosed condition linked to prolonged exposure to bluelight sources such as screens”.
And in January this year, Perplexity was describing bixonimania as “an emerging term”. When shown that response, a Perplexity spokesperson said: “Perplexity’s central advantage is accuracy. We don’t claim to be 100% accurate, but we do claim to be the AI company most focused on accuracy.”
An OpenAI spokesperson said: “The models that power today’s version of ChatGPT are significantly better at providing safe, accurate medical information, and studies conducted before GPT-5 reflect capabilities that users would not encounter today.”
When asked about past responses from Gemini that treated bixonimania as a real condition, a Google spokesperson said such results reflected the performance of an earlier model. They added, “We have always been transparent about the limitations of generative AI and provide in-app prompts to encourage users to double-check information. For sensitive matters such as medical advice, Gemini recommends users consult with qualified professionals.”
Microsoft did not respond to a request for comment.
Part of the problem is that AI models can offer wildly different results depending on exactly what is asked and what kind of information they are drawing on. Search for “bixonimania”, and Google’s AI overview might treat it as a legitimate condition. Ask it “Is bixonimania real?” and the same AI overview might confirm that it isn’t legitimate.
Mahmud Omar, a physician and researcher specializing in the applications of AI in health care at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, says the speed at which AI firms are rolling out new models makes it difficult to reach “a pipeline, a consensus or a methodology to automatically test each model”.
The format of the fake-disease experiment — and the way the results pretended to be from an official source, namely an academic paper, might have been a key factor in its success. In a separate study of 20 LLMs, Omar found that LLMs are more prone to hallucinate and elaborate on misinformation when the text they’re processing looks professionally medical — formatted like a hospital discharge note or clinical paper — than when it comes from social-media posts (M. Omar et al. Lancet Digit. Health 8, 100949; 2026). “When the text looks professional and written as a doctor writes, there’s an increase in the hallucination rates,” says Omar.
The experiment’s reach has now spread into the published medical literature. The bixonimania research has been cited by a handful of researchers, including a study that appeared in Cureus, a journal published by Springer Nature, the publisher of Nature, by researchers at the Maharishi Markandeshwar Institute of Medical Sciences and Research in Mullana, India (S. Banchhor et al. Cureus 16, e74625 (2024); retraction 18, r223 (2026)). (Nature’s news team is editorially independent of its publisher.) That study cites one of the fake preprints and says: “Bixonimania is an emerging form of POM [periorbital melanosis] linked to blue light exposure; further research on the mechanism is underway.”
The corresponding author did not respond to a request for comment on this story. After Nature contacted Cureus to ask for comment, the journal retracted the paper on 30 March. The retraction notice says: “This article has been retracted by the Editor-in-Chief due to the presence of three irrelevant references, including one reference to a fictitious disease. As a result, the journal’s editorial staff no longer has confidence in the accuracy or provenance of the work, thus requiring retraction. The authors disagree with the decision to retract.”
Ruani says the problem goes beyond LLMs because the bixonimania experiment also hoodwinked humans who cited the fake research. “We need to protect our trust like gold,” she says. “It’s a mess right now.”
Experimental concerns
Osmanovic Thunström had reservations while developing her experiment; she worried about the risks of seeding a fake illness into the scientific literature. So she contacted an ethics adviser to assess concerns about the work, and picked a comparatively low-stakes condition to limit the impact. “I wanted to make sure that we’re not creating more harm than good through demonstrating it in this way,” she says.
That adviser, David Sundemo, a physician who conducts research on AI in health care at the University of Gothenburg, says that decision was finely balanced. “I think it’s very valuable work, but it’s also kind of controversial in some ways, especially when it comes to displaying this false information,” he says. “From my perspective, it’s worth the ethical cost of planting false information in this regard,” Sundemo says.
But even with those checks, the experiment sits uncomfortably with some researchers. “It does seem to me that they’ve generated a form of misinformation,” says Glenn Cohen at Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who specializes in the intersection of medical ethics and law. However, he still says he thinks it is a “great study” and “tracking results is good”.
For her part, Osmanovic Thunström is torn over what to do about the two fake papers, and will be discussing this with other researchers. “If retracted, it might be hard for others to find the source and verify our path,” she says. “If left, it will continue to be recalled in searches.” The question she feels she has to tackle is whether leaving the preprints out there does more harm than the good it does by demonstrating the potential issues of AI.
The bixonimania experiment is a fresh spin on a bigger issue — the poisoning of AI systems by people who manipulate the academic literature. Elisabeth Bik, a microbiologist and research-integrity sleuth, notes that researchers have created fake books and papers to inflate their citation counts on Google Scholar — thereby exploiting the same automated indexing systems that feed into LLM training data. The worry is that the more fake content is fed into AI models, the more likely those AI models are to regurgitate the fake information, spooling us further away from facts and reality. “It’s all automated, so there’s very little chance of a human interfering and taking out fake information,” she says.
It is particularly dangerous when fabricated information seeps into medical guidance from LLMs, says Bik. “That can be very harmful.” And as more AI companies roll out health-focused products — OpenAI released ChatGPT Health in January, for example — the potential damage resulting from anything going wrong increases, some researchers told Nature.
OpenAI challenges that view. “ChatGPT Health is powered by our latest models which offer the highest performance in real-world health use, stronger clinical reasoning, fewer factual errors, and improved performance on evaluations,” an OpenAI spokesperson says. They add that Osmanovic Thunström’s outcomes “reflect capabilities that users would not encounter today in ChatGPT or ChatGPT Health”.
But among some researchers, there’s a growing scepticism about the abilities of AI models in medicine. When asked about this kind of usage, Cohen said: “There are open questions about how much trust it deserves, especially as to application-specific questions.”
AI’s uncritical tendency to suck up information, often without verifying its accuracy, means there is a risk we could see an “information asymmetry”, says Jennifer Byrne, a molecular oncologist and research-integrity sleuth at the University of Sydney in Australia. A single corrective paper about cancer research, for example, can be overwhelmed by hundreds of papers repeating a false claim, she says. “ChatGPT is pretty confident to fill in the gaps and give people all kinds of information about where that cell line came from, the patient from which it originated, how it’s been used in the literature, its research utility and so on,” she says.
And if LLMs can be poisoned, “this is something that’s concerning for us,” says Byrne.
Another concern is that models could be gamed — potentially for commercial benefit. Osmanovic Thunström says that a bad actor could exploit the same technique she used, for profit. “What if I was a salesman of blue-light glasses and I wanted to use this as an argument?” she says. A would-be salesperson could say, “You can just talk to ChatGPT, and they’ll tell you this is a problem. You can avoid it with these really expensive glasses,” she suggests.
One way to tackle this would be to have an automated, open-access evaluation pipeline — a standardized battery of tests that every consumer-facing health model would have to pass before deployment, checking not just for hallucinations but also for susceptibility to misinformation, socio-demographic biases and other pressure points. “We should evaluate it and have a pipeline for continuous evaluation,” says Omar.
Time is of the essence, because Byrne is concerned that the issue identified by Osmanovic Thunström might just be the tip of the iceberg. “It is worrying when these major claims are just passing through the literature unchallenged, or passing through peer review unchallenged,” she says. “I think there’s a probably a lot of other issues that haven’t been uncovered.”
That’s something that worries other experts, too, as AI becomes the norm in all areas of our lives, including how people think about their health. “We and our health shouldn’t be the beta testers for companies,” says Cohen.
