[eli_awry]

My perspective is this: I want to make really awesome intelligent tutoring systems. I'm inspired by Enders Game, Diamond Age, and the Aristotle essay by Hillis. I want to do this because I think that the current model for distributing education privileges people who are already very advantaged, but an intelligent tutoring system could be reproduced over and over and over for free. I obviously love Khan Academy, which is being made static and delivered to places with limited/no internet connection. I think that this is radical because the vision is to use technology and the fact that things are so replicable to essentially destroy educational inequality. If you could make an educational system good enough, and distribute it widely enough, then I think that would really change the world. I want to be part of making that happen, and I'm an AI and cognitive science person, so I'm working on the tutor part.

But even this vision has so many things that other hackers are working on. Just making the net more efficient, or creating better wireless systems, or cheaper technology (or even better, technology that people can make themselves). Or empowering people to use Arduinos and to hack their own open source stuff. Or producing pedagogical content and translating it into other languages. I feel like a world in which everyone has total access to an amazing education is a world-changing proposition, and lots of hackers are working on things that really bring us closer to that.

Also I personally think that the thing that is wrong with the government is unequal application of laws and illegal hiding of government activity. I'm not convinced that there's not a place for laws, police, and taxes in a totally just society. I think that anyone who is working to destroy the (really widespread) lies and spying and unequal treatment and unjust policies and sociopathic violence of the government is doing something that, if it succeeds, will result in a truly different world. One where the laws aren't different for people depending on their class, and violence by the state is not tolerated.

I'm not claiming that working for education, diy technology, government accountability or a total overhaul of the legal system is more revolutionary than being an insurrectionist or running a totally awesome Food Not Bombs. I'm just saying that there's this idea of a better world, a fundamentally different world where things make sense and capricious cruelty is gone and everyone is essentially free to pursue the future they want and self-actualize instead of worrying about where the day's calories will come from or if it's safe to go outside. If we can have that world, I don't care if it's in an anarcho-syndicalist form, a set of independent microcountries, or just a very very reformed version of the constitutional democracies we have now. I see cheap, open source 3D printers and Food Not Bombs as having a similar mission.

I'll sum this up with a quote from an Evan Greer song "I want something that's better than this, and I'm not sure exactly what it is, but I think that we could build it if we try together."

[moxie]

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.