|
You don't have to defend yourself to me. I'm not saying you (or "hackers") are wrong or something, just that these are not necessarily shared beliefs among anarchists. What you're describing is more akin to (classical) liberalism. For instance, here you draw on a couple of the core tenants of liberalism: 1) Equality. In the Jeffersonian sense (ie, under the law). This is really the cornerstone of liberalism. The classic structuralist response would be something like "Yes, yes... all men will be tried equally for the crime of stealing bread crumbs to feed their starving children." 2) Freedom of information. Also at the heart of liberalism is the idea that in a world where anyone can participate, speak, and think freely, we'll be able to select from a marketplace of ideas for how the world should look. The classic anarchist response is that we live in a specific political and economic reality that wasn't of our choosing, but which influences our desires, the way we think, how we think, and what we conceptualize as possible. Simply talking about other social or economic possibilities does not have the same effect, so just being able to speak freely is not necessarily meaningful in that context. 3) Transparency and accountability. A typical anarchist response to projects like wikileaks is something like "What is the value of truth in a world where we have no agency?" The insurrectionist, for example, doesn't attempt to shame, expose, or reform institutions of power, but rather expects their injustices as their fundamental nature. You can't blame a tiger for being a tiger. It's true that it is possible to draw similarities in the sense that hackers and anarchists on the whole probably want "good things and not bad things." But to the extent that we're never fully going to get there, it's the tension that really matters, and that's where I believe the differences are currently quite deep between these two groups. |