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the importance of social technology in social change

TLDR: By retooling, devouring, and innovating our social technologies, we can create participatory organizations that enable egalitarian social change. These organizations should be animated by an understanding of hierarchy, its relation to oppression writ-large, and how to create and employ social technologies that distribute power, rather than concentrating it.

Introduction

We take technology for granted in general (most people I know don’t think much about how water gets to their sink unless it doesn’t work, for example), but this seems especially true for our social technologies. We take things like democracy, laws, and even the nuclear family form at face value and as fundamental parts of reality.

So, what is technology, and how does it relate to our pending conversation? What is the throughline between obvious technologies like a stone axe and my iPhone, and more nebulous ones, like speech and the nuclear family? Any technology you can imagine takes concepts and knowledge and creates a method of applying them to specific goals, objectives, or functions. This doesn’t preclude emergent uses for tools, as you can probably think of using tools in unintended ways. This definition is useful to keep in mind as we realize that the technologies at present, animating the status quo are inadequate. We need something different to make radical, roots-grasping change.

And, for the sake of change, we need a specific way to achieve it. Part of this is technological; we need to figure out models of relating and working with one another that prefigure the changes that we want to see. To create and modify those technologies, we need to figure out which concepts and knowledge we will use.

Prefiguration can be described as “creating the new world in the shell of the old”. It’s doing things in the present that we think will get us to our imagined future. This implies the need to have a coherent conception of what is currently happening, and change will look like.

Currently, we live in a hierarchical, bureaucratic hell. This might best be epitomized by trying to obtain official identification recognized by our respective state. From all of the forms that you fill out, to the additional paperwork needed, to the horrible experience of getting that information approved, there are a lot of issues that this creates, from an experiential standpoint. One of the more under-realized aspects of issues such as this is how these experiences alienate us from the ability to do things for ourselves. Bureaucracy is a way to manage hierarchy’s inherent simplification of reality. A king couldn’t actually run their kingdom themselves, so they create layers of functionaries, under their control, to (try and) manage that complexity.

Along with my opposition, I’d like to propose something. A theory of change, that allows us to do that prefiguration work, leaving behind some of the negative methods of relating as currently mediated and handled. Since we live in a very hierarchical and bureaucratic world-system, constituting a colonial-imperialist, cisheteropatriarchical, ableist hegemony, if we create non-hierarchical/heterarchical organizational forms that allow us to relate in alignment with our values, then we will achieve a more egalitarian world, because of these organizational forms addressing fundamental contradictions in the way that society, from the personal to the global scale, is administered and ordered at present.

Having non-hierarchical organizational forms will allow us to become self-managed and autonomous, gaining collective control over collective issues, and individual control over individual issues. What is hierarchy, though? For our purposes, hierarchy can be seen as the glue that brings oppression together. It binds structures of domination, coercion, and power (specifically power-over) into oppression writ-large. This is what makes the act of arranging organizational forms a pyramid, where value, authority, and decision-making ability are concentrated toward the top. It is not a problem if some friendly games and competitions employ hierarchy in the broadest sense. The issue comes where, in that game, the folks who won got to eat and the folks who lost went hungry. The power imbalance and value judgments are what make hierarchy dangerous.

Alternatively, non-hierarchical structures that prioritize non-coercive, non-domineering principles, that enable positive versions of power-to (the ability to act) and power-with (the ability to act collectively, towards collective interest) have much more liberatory potential at their foundation. That’s what we’re aiming for, social technologies that allow for horizontal relating.

The pieces of horizontal organizations

The foundation of these horizontal, heterarchical forms should be in values and principles that enable relating in that way. Some of these values might be joy, autonomy, radically informed consent, cultivating ownness-uniqueness, and solidarity. These are defined as:

Joy: This should be a group that is constantly looking critically at how we engage with productivity, work, and formality from the perspective of prefiguring spaces of fun, play, and levity -- infusing it into as much of the work as we can. If it feels like a drag, that should at the very least give us pause. While we will not be able to avoid negativity wholesale, we can be intentional about minimizing the moments where it is unnecessary.

Autonomy: Each unit of interest (teammate, team, section/wing, whole) can operate independently from other elements as it desires, without imposition.

Radically Informed Consent: All decisions that include or impact someone should be made with that person (1) in that discussion/process and (2) having as much context and information as they need to be aware of the implications of the decision being made.

Cultivating Ownness-Uniqueness: The group should allow for a cooperative orientation that is based on finding what is best for all involved as individuals, concerning the collective goals. The group should be a tool that cultivates this orientation, rather than existing for its own sake and becoming something that holds power over the people in the space.

Solidarity: People in the group should work together around common interests and affinities, made clear in the joining process, grounded in (1) centering the most marginalized in society and/or our specific context within our spaces, and (2) sharing in the responsibilities of achieving what the group sets out to do.

Having these values as described gives us a shared language from which to judge how we relate to each other using the organizational forms we will set out to describe, to make sure that it gives opportunities to widen the spaces where our organizational aims can be achieved.

The components of these forms, the building blocks that sit atop the foundation, creating the organization when assembled, are the teammate, roles & tasks, aims & domains, the team, assemblies and summits, and the areas, functions, and committees. These are defined as:

Teammate: This is the individual in the structure. A specific person, who interfaces with the other parts of the structure.

Roles and Tasks: This is how the work is distributed within an organization, in line with the foundational principles and the aims of the specific team and organization as a whole.

aims: Objectives of the unit of interest. The thing that the unit of interest is trying to accomplish.

Domains: The range of focus a specific unit of interest has within an organization. What the unit of interest is responsible for doing.

Team: A collective unit within the structure. Multiple teammates coming together.

Assemblies and Summits: Multiple teams (or delegations of teams) coming together to deliberate on mutual aims, across mutual domains.

Areas, Functions, and Committees: Ways to group teams together (or create new teams) to cover specific aims.

These allow for us to have specific modes of relating with each other around specific things that we want to accomplish, from the individual to the organization-wide scale, with the potential to connect with outside organizations.

These values and components are important to create are heterarchical organization, but it doesn’t tell us what the organization will be doing. We know that it’s meant to be aimed towards social change, but what does that actually look like? I think that there are three interrelated things that the organization should achieve for it to be successful at its overall aims. There should be robust analysis, care work, and effective, radical action. These are described as:

Care Work: Embedding the ideas of restoration, rest, healthy engagement, sustainability, and healing into the core of the organizational structure. This can be done through things like healing circles, accountability circles, meeting "non-organizational" needs that deal with the making and remaking of folks (a la childcare, food, emotional care, etc), and other methods.

Robust analysis: Creating mental models that can approach an accurate understanding of the world, along with how to be experimental and learn from those experiments (while not seeing participants as disposable, or coercing folks into things). This horizontal orientation encourages us to be able to catalyze autonomous & self-directed action, rather than make ourselves indispensable to a movement. We should use these forms to organize ourselves out of a role, in a sense, through things such as making sure other people understand how to do what we do, and not hyper-specializing.

Effective, Radical Action: The organization, through the above two functions, should be able to achieve the goals that it sets. It should be successful at the current conjuncture, and these successes should build up to the general goals of the organization. There should be a conception of strategy, campaigns, logistics/operations, and tactics.

For any of these initiatives to be successful, there needs to be a basic security culture. Pretty much any social change org that is directly effective or building towards effectiveness necessitates modes of protection for the people in the organization. We need to protect from state, corporate, and non-state reactionaries. This is worth an in-depth conversation, but basic things like not talking to those forces, being mindful of where and when certain information is shared, if at all, and screening for new members, the intensity of which is proportional to the openness of the organization, and not fedjacketing (claim that someone is the cops) people. This would be paired with collective discussion to establish those agreements, and training/collective study to inoculate folks against bad security practices.

Arranging the pieces

Now that we’ve built up the different parts of our organizations, we can describe some ways to bring them together. I propose three different organizational shapes: phantom cells, networked guerrillas, and fractal teams and working groups. These are differentiated by the ways that the teams within the org are connected and relate to one another.

Phantom cells are the most ephemeral formation that I’ll describe. These are temporary teams created with wide variations towards some goal. They don’t even have any meaningful awareness of the composition of other cells. Actions are motivated by catalyzing forces that follow a general flow of event → action → report-back → action. Something happens that motivates a cell to form and act, that cell publishes information about their action, along with instructions on how to replicate and the ideological motivation behind it, and others follow suit. This repeats and spreads out, through stigmergy. It’s like how social media trends work. All follow a similar format, evolving as they spread until they saturate a space and wane. The goal here is to combine distributed intelligence through information posting, replicability, and inspiration.

A diagram representing phantom cells. Pill shapes with the word team in the middle are spread around on a white canvas.

This form is inspired by Tiktok and the SHAC campaign. If we could have groups of folks who: (1) find concrete goals & replicable methods for finding connected goals in specific contexts, (2) create compelling narratives around acting in line with those goals, and (3) encourage easily replicable actions, consistent pressure, and sharing the results so that it spreads. This allows for action to become highly distributed, where unity isn’t based on allegiance to specific organizations, movements, or formations. This type of operation is most useful for trying to achieve protracted, quick, decisive, small actions against a target.

Networked guerrillas are cells (or teams) of folks that have a well-rounded skill set, and who work consistently together. I imagine it being like a team for an RPG (role-playing game) campaign where each character is in a different class. This group should have a relatively high amount of self-sufficiency, to be able to achieve aims within their domain without much outside assistance. Each cell is animated by a general alignment of principles, vision, and values. Cells are also designed to link up with other cells, of this type, to accomplish bigger goals and complete bigger actions. There might also be a bundle of cells “in the middle” to help coordinate resources between cells and provide additional, more specialized, and contextual resources. Ideally, there is a rotation and continual morphing of the core to not become a failure point. This is why it’s important to have the cells be as self-sufficient as possible. Every connection is an enhancement of capability, rather than a necessity. The relationships between the cells can be organized like a mesh network (many-to-many relationships between the cells), star (one-to-many-to-one relationships), and a chain/ring (one-to-one-to-one relationships), or some combination, based on the needs of the organization.

A diagram representing networked guerrillas. showing a form that combines mesh, start, and chain/ring.

Fractal teams and working groups work through a kind of fractal, heterarchical confederalism. Essentially, it flips the hierarchical nature of authoritarian federalism by having power flow from the lowest level upwards, rather than the other way around. It starts at the lowest level, the team, and we confederate upwards from there to encompass more general aims and domains, using assemblies, assemblies of assemblies, and summits. This structure also operates on the principle of autonomous collaboration, where people who are impacted by and/or are doing a specific set of tasks are the ones to decide how that task is implemented. This is meant to minimize the amount of power-over within the structure, while still fostering modes of engagement between different scales of decision making. At each level, there would be assemblies that provide the space to share information and discuss plans, and for potential working groups to meet and freely associate and dissociate as necessary. Decisions shouldn’t be made here at these higher levels of the hierarchy, as that leads to a form of power that isn’t always deliberative. Folks would execute whatever plans they see fit on the ground, based on self-organization, informed by the information that is shared within these more open, popular gatherings. The trust is put on folks to be self-directed around their needs, getting help and providing assistance in a mutualistic way, rather than a top-down way.

a diagram of the fractal teams & working groups. teams send delegates to assemblies, and assemblies send delegates to assemblies of assemblies or summits. delegates gather information and context at the above levels and come back to their team to provide context and give information to the team. They also will share the decisions made by the teams, to the assemblies and summits.

All of these forms would need some kind of intelligence apparatus. Intelligence for us will be information that allows us to achieve objectives better. We gain this information through research, investigative journalism-style methods, and espionage. It is pertinent, practical, and informative. These apparatuses will gather information (what we might usually think of as intelligence), and prevent/impede opposition from doing the same (counterintelligence). This is not something it seems like social change folks are intentional about very often, but is an important part of building, refining, and achieving the aims laid out at every scale, from strategies for wider social change to specific actions.

The basic structure of this intelligence apparatus is a specific unit of interest would (s)elect/delegate an intelligence handler to work within that unit’s domain. This handler is one part of an intelligence cell. The cell would be a compartmentalized team for the sake of mutual protection, containing a handler, analyst(s), and agent(s). Handlers are the cell coordinators, recruiting the other roles as they see fit. They act as the direct link/contact to the agent on the ground/in the field, supporting them on their missions with whatever they need. Handlers also support analysts with collaborating on research work or anything that they need. Handlers are the glue of a cell, supporting everyone towards their objectives. Analysts are the folks who make the information gathered by the agents usable. They sort and organize the information, making things like reports and presentations so that action can come from or be informed by the information. Handlers may support the analysts with those tasks. Agents are the crux of this cell—they gather the intelligence. They should be a generalizing specialist, where they understand the breadth of the context in which they act, even with a specific specialty in the type of intelligence they gather.

For these purposes, there will probably be a combination of focus on open-source intelligence, signals intelligence, and human intelligence. Finally, we have the auditor. They are also elected by the unit of interest (the one that placed the handler). This is a way to make sure there isn’t any tomfoolery happening within the cell—the auditor can look over any of the information within the cell, and compile an independent report for the sake of the unit of interest.

A diagram of the basic intelligence apparatus.

The basic intelligence process would go as follows: Information would be split or categorized into four main areas: strategic, campaign, logistic/operational, and tactical. For each of these levels, there would be a repeating loop process of setting goals in relation to those areas, gathering the information, analyzing it, figuring out how to use it, and a method to evaluate the process. Information can be gathered by agents or anyone else in the organization, anonymously. This helps bolster the capacity of information gathering.

So, we start by asking, what do we need to know to achieve our aims? Then, we ask about where we can find that information. As we’ll probably receive more information than what is usable, we want to ask about what information found is important, timely, and accurate/verifiable? After that, we want to ask how we can package and disseminate the information, along with an understanding of the audience(s). That leads us to review what we’ve done, integrate any changes, and start the process over. This is not to say that teams can’t do intelligence-gathering work themselves, such as scouting or information synthesis. It is just useful to have capacity specifically built for that work.

How these forms relate

Finally, we want to look at the relationship between the organizational forms, and how these forms change, depending on what the specific organization does. We can do this by understanding how things look through the classifications of overt, covert, and clandestine.

Overt organizations act out in the open. They operate in a mode where what you see is what you get. Phantom cells might operate as front-facing aboveground collectives of folks who have a very specific focus, with the intent to popularize and virally spread action around that focus, through building (para)social relationships. Networked guerrillas might make more intentional, long-term connections between cells, leading to a more tightly bound network. This could look like the mesh model. Fractal teams might have highly accessible and legible teams and assemblies with centralized information pipelines, creating an easy way to get involved with the movement. This point is important when we’re thinking about how to make the movement accessible.

Covert organizations act in secret, operating on the mode of plausible deniability. Phantom cells might use mainstream channels to share their ideas but operate in a way that obscures their identities. Networked guerrillas might have the cells be related using a star model, with many connections compartmentalized by those shared nodes. Fractal teams might hide membership and focus on the intake process because this formation is the most vulnerable to infiltration. Maybe this formation isn’t useful outside of the overt context.

Clandestine organizations are fully underground. Phantom cells might only spread action through hyper-encrypted or low-tech methods. Networked guerrillas might have no awareness of who or what the composition is of other teams in the network, and any connections between cells might be mediated in ways that maintain anonymity and prevent infiltration. Fractal teams likely would be a great weakness in this context.

Looking at all of these forms, across different modes of operating, we should not “pick” one form or the other in a dogmatic way. Each form should see the others as providing something of value towards anti-authoritarian ends. In other words, fractals should not decry networks or phantoms for their seemingly chaotic structures or methods. Phantoms shouldn’t shit on the other two for not being effective enough. Aligning people and actions across these horizontal forms will allow an ecosystem of forms that reinforces the ability of each to succeed. Overt groups can act as an auxiliary force for the covert and clandestine groups, and the covert and clandestine groups can create spaces for the overt groups to construct the world they are all working for.

By having principles and ethics that are sound, exploring what organizations need to do, and creating structures that enable those ethics and principles to be realized, we can have social technologies that allow us to more easily accomplish the social change that we’re seeking.

Everyday Anarchists

When I talk with people about anarchism, they tend to tense up. I can use words like mutual aid or police abolition quite comfortably these days, but I think people have big feelings when I use the word anarchy. It conjures images violence, rioting, revolution. They think of punks and skinheads. But the colloquial use of the word “anarchy” (confusion, disorder, lack of obedience) is far from the political ideology.

Anarchism is a belief system that rejects all involuntary, coercive forms of hierarchy. Anarchism believes in autonomy, the right of the people to self govern without state leadership. Anarchists believe that the state should be abolished as it holds too much power and is harmful towards most people. That’s it. Not nearly as radical as one might think, right? At least not in today’s political climate.

Part of the misconception around anarchism is that many people think of it as an alternative form of government born out of violent revolution. But I’ve come to learn that anarchy isn’t necessarily just an end goal but an ongoing process, like “justice” or “solidarity”. Most anarchists don’t believe that revolution will happen overnight and people will be able to self organize in the ashes of that revolution. While that might happen, it’s not an ideal transition away from state control. Like so many concepts that we deal with these days: collapse, genocide, apocalypse, etc. anarchy is not one single event but a series of events that started in the past and will continue into the future. It’s an ongoing process.

What’s more, anarchism isn’t a single approach! There are dozens of ideologies that branch off from anarchism: green anarchism, anarcho-pacifism, communo-anarchism, anarcho-primitivism, anarcho-capitalism. The list goes on. Each take considered different factors depending on where you live, what your community looks like, what resources you have, how healthy you are.

No matter what ideology you follow, anarchism is built on some basic approaches to a better life: mutual aid, resistance to state control, communalism. And it’s funny because most people would agree with these principles but would not call themselves anarchists.

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