Thanks for your post, really good thought-food!

In fact, the two happen to be perfectly compatible.

If you reduce “anarchism” to “ultimate individual freedom”, I would say your analysis is correct because capitalism shares this tenet, and one could say that what differentiates anarchism from capitalism is just the rejection of any emergence of centralisation whereas capitalist put no predicates on that.

Another way to say that is:

• Capitalism encourages the system to adopt positive feedback loop (increasing efficiency).
• Anarchism wants (but don’t know how to do it) the system to adopt negative feedback loop (regulate, but then, isn’t that a form of power?).

And what authoritarism has to do with that? I would say it comes to the fact that directive leadership is more efficient than participative leadership when I say “efficient” I mean, it is “fast” to go through problem -> solution -> execution.

On the other hand, participative leadership have overhead, but their outcomes tend to be more sustainable because they are capable of working on complex problems, but even there there is still a notion of control / authority because you must ensure a collective converges to a solution, and then you must have enough authority to enforce its execution.

This is something really easy to understand for me, working on distributed systems: when you pool huge amount of resources over the network, those can work on really large problem space (e.g. genetics, climate, …), but they have a significant overhead:

• In consensus algorithm, each participating member must allocate a part of their resources to the said consensus algorithm.
• In other systems, you have an elected member that is the “leader” or the “coordinator” checking everyone is healthy.
• And then sometimes you even have hybrid, where you have a group of members being “coordinators” and themselves using a consensus algorithm to decide who leads at any given time.

Capitalism is naturally biased towards directive leadership because of economism short-termism and its sacrosanct performance (i.e. GDP, growth, KPIs, …). Today, it is evident their system is not sustainable, it was already evident socially, but planetary limits are making that even more obvious in the short-term.

So it is evident the world will change (or a massive part of humanity will perish).

Where I am, personally, heading to is the idea that society is a Complex Adaptive System where authority will always emerge in a shape or another (centralised vs. polycentric), hence the idea of removing authority makes no sense, instead, we should acknowledge authority is part of society and it is up to us to shape it in a way that serves us.

An authoritative state with a planned economy would almost always fail at large scale on the long run, even with enough computing power to allocate resources, because the essential problem is that society is a CAS: how to model society and the economy in a correct way that accounts for unknown unknowns?

On the other end, the culture of the free market and idea that, because this is a Complex Adaptive System, we should not try to control it because a sustainable system will emerge is also pure BS; we see today the result of that socially and environmentally: we have put humanity into an existential polycrisis.

So if both “control” and “freedom” are a failure, it leaves us with a single option: “steering”. That is, the authority must not take a single permanent shape, instead it must use resilience thinking to evolve through time to be sustainable.

In my view, centralised authority only makes sense when we are in the top-right region of the quadrant where dimensions are (emergency; simple problem).

Revolution is an example of that, the problem is simple: we need to seize power because reform don’t work; and we likely want to do it as soon as possible. Existential crisis are another example, let’s take war, the threat may be imminent and the problem is simple (economy of war, mass mobilisation, …); but you take climate change, the problem is imminent at the scale of humanity but the problem is complex so do we really want a centralised authority? How to make sure it takes decisions that are actually effective?

Where things get really interesting is how to structure authority in the other regions of the quadrant. And that’s where I am really excited because if you are young as me, you will probably face and live the collapse of neoliberalism, which means, you will also likely be able to contribute to a new model that may span some generations (hopefully it can be sustainable for humanity on the long run).

My stance on that is to accept humanity as a CAS, and realise that the more you scale the “scope” (regions, nations, continent, humanity as a whole, …) the more unpredictable and uncontrollable it is. Like, ask any politician aware of the neoliberalism madness, and he will just be genuinely clueless on how to stop the world wide machine.

Hence, I personally see the goal of any centralised power in place (whether revolutionary or not) to shift towards a polycentric authority during stable / peaceful times.

Of course that implies a first important step that is the establishment of a strong shared ethos that will draw the “boundaries” by which all power centres abide by and take a truly holistic approach (social-ecological system thinking, not just economic). The other key is the empowerment of individuals, once you created those “boundaries” (which one may call the “social contract”), if individuals are given clear boundaries, they can engage in positive deviance where they know the limits but also understand why those limits exist to protect the collective.

Another important part of resilience thinking when it comes to distributed systems, is the ability for members to “monitor” their neighbours and ensure they are well-behaving. This implies “transparency” and I think digital is key there, if information flows freely amongst power centers, it becomes easy for power centers to monitor each other and quickly terminate any misbehaving members.

At the end of the day, I don’t know if my vision can be “classified” into any given ideology, but I personally don’t see authority as something in a finite state. Just like water ends up boiling and turns into vapour when it gets heated but condense back to liquid otherwise, authority will adapt to its environment. When this environment is still (peaceful and stable), I personally argue polycentric governance is the ideal equilibrium for humanity.

I don’t deny it at all!

you have by nature often one that is leading and others that prefer (or not) to follow

I actually try to take that into account when I am speaking about sociological profile and say:

So what does it tell us? It tells us we need to stop our autonomy and individualism nonsense. Because there are different sociological profiles, some people, like my father, have no interest in essayism, in critical thinking, in innovating or exploring new ideas. They want to sign a simple social contract that makes their life easier in exchange for their physical labour. End of the line.

But I respect your choice of not going deeper into critical thinking, thanks for you time!

No need to be sorry, you are welcome!

Isn’t the link (click on the title of the post) working?

Oh no it’s in the paper it’s two section:

1. A Citizen’s Perspective: An Anthropological Essay
2. Concrete Proposition For The Digital Industry: EuroStack Consortium