Cypherpunks write code

BUT DARLING your violence! There is always a shadow side to idealism. The notion of ripping up and starting again terrifies me.

It’s not about wilful destruction, nor even starting from scratch. It’s about noticing how institutional power constrains the human spirit and our collective capacity to live well, and finding countervailing forms of power through solidarity. The Czech dissident Vaclav Havel was not an anarchist, but his famous samizdat essay - The Power of the Powerlesss - is anarchism-adjacent, and there he writes:

A better system will not automatically ensure a better life. In fact, the opposite is true: only by creating a better life can a better system be developed.

This is a variant on Buckminster Fuller’s widely quoted injunction to build a new model that makes the old one obsolete, and informs the political injunction to “invite people to a better party”. In practice that kind of purposive experimentalism can mean, for instance, withdrawing consent from unjust laws, replacing dependency on authority with mutual aid, taking decisions as far as possible outside of established structures, providing services through gift exchange, and creating new forms of cultural legitimacy through socialising good collective habits. Understood in this way, anarchism is fundamentally a praxis and a political artform, and it’s experimental in nature. It can and should be fundamentally about persuasion through a critical mass of people demonstrating another way to live.