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Comment by blake1 | Hacker News Reader

I'm always fascinated by the way these techno-anarchists are so drawn to symbols of the State, and State power. Cold War, nuclear artifacts seem a perennial favorite. And it's funny how every little collective seems to end up being a mini-State, with a little dictator on top. I don't have an empirical study to back this up, and am drawing this from this story, the story of Ross Ulbricht, and a little from my own personal experience.

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They're probably drawn to the symbols of a fallen state. What could be more apt?

I think most serious anarchists acknowledge that humans won't exist in a true state of nature for very long. People will always band together for security which with scale requires administration. That becomes a de facto state.

I remember reading this book a long time ago relevant to this idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchy,_State,_and_Utopia

It's also interesting if you look at the history of CHAZ/CHOP.

The first thing they did was enable a security force, and well, I'll leave the rest out but the decisions and fate are interesting and the correlation you make is similar enough.

Seattle resident here, Capitol Hill, heh.

I mean any anarchist that means it in the leftist sense will always fall into the same trap: that they're attempting to describe a system with very specific social and economic outcomes, while either failing to describe the apparatus necessary to achieve those outcomes, or invariably describing an authoritarian state while calling it anything but.

"It's not a state. It's a collectivist system of syndicate guilds that democratically allocate..." let me go ahead and cut you off there. That's a state, and an extremely authoritarian one at that.

Or maybe they're just drawn to the security aspects? Remote, isolated, underground, designed to resist damage from weapons...

As Freud said, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

Money obsessed man-children who want to smoke pot are about as "anarchist" as a standard rap verse.

Combine this with a unhealthy dose of group think and you got the perfect petri dish / bunker for some really radical believe systems.

The only reason it's not called a cult at that point is because there's normally no element of religion involved.

Ulbricht was a self-professed libertarian. He was an anarchist in the same way that libertarians are anarchists, in that they are not anarchists. Libertarians want a state that enforces property restrictions with violence and death, and an economic system that enforces class hierarchy.

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