I’ve been pontificating all morning on Twitter and I don’t see why I should spare Tumblr from my pomposity so, a couple of realizations I had today:

When did mass media collectively decide to start using “left wing libertarian” in lieu of “anarchist”? Did the word “anarchist” carry so many negative connotations that people wanted no association with it? Outside of academia, there isn’t enough intersectional anarchist theory (one that takes into account racial disparities in anarchist frameworks, just to give one example) and now there might never be, because people no longer consider it a label worth exploring. There is work done on the subject from a US perspective, but now that media has somewhat decreed that anarchist = urban terrorist, I doubt the subject will ever have much traction, at least in the near future. Also, the fact that anarchist ideas, in mainstream media, were almost always portrayed as the pursuit of middle class White youth. When no, that wasn’t the case in many places in the Global South, at all. In fact, many actions of the so called Operation Condor, that installed CIA sponsored brutal dictatorships in Latin America, were triggered by a mandate to crush any kind of anarchist/ libertarian movements and forms of organization, at the time, popping up across the region.

Another thing, totally unrelated to the above (who said I was going to have coherent thoughts): even illegally downloaded media is bound to fall prey to consumer needs. What I mean is, a person downloads media for which they hold no copyright and due to the massive amount of available “stuff”, there’s this cycle wherein the person needs more data storage devices to be able to keep up (at least if they want to keep the media they downloaded, like music, to listen to more than once). So, people get the media free of charge but they have to spend money on the hardware. Which means someone other than the consumer and/ or the artist does profit from this whole “illegal download” business.

For the past decade and a half I have been making all my content available for free (and never behind a paywall) as an ongoing practice of ephemeral publishing. This site is no exception. If you wish to help offset my labor costs, you can donate on Paypal or you can subscribe to Patreon where I will not be putting my posts behind a lock but you'd be helping me continue making this work available for everyone. Thank you.  Follow me on Twitter for new post updates.