The trouble with uniforms.

I'm not talking clothing here. Well I wasn't going to talk about clothing, but you never know. UNI - FORM see what I mean? Where do you see it? A landscape of wheat, or pine trees, A line of houses, a battalion of people, a national religion or politic, the face of a clock 9-5: the constant drive for conformity, regularity, the push to define what it is to be human into an ever decreasing number of models. The same government that wants you to wrap your water with a fence and wear a helmet while riding your bicycle and concerns itself with what herbs you smoke, all in the name of making you safe, will send you to war with other nations because they do things differently there.

It's driving us mad.

Someone bangs in their garden shed, a neighbour complains, before to long nobody anywhere in the western world has the right to bang in their shed. All suburbs are quiet and LIA's are special suburbs for banging and no signs are allowed on a residential street. No backyard business is allowed - banging or not.

It stifles entrepenurial energy, it makes neighbourhoods bland, there's an invisible blanket of red tape smothering our lives. You know, a lot of people don't want to live like that. Why can't some suburbs be free? Why can't we have the 'street of carpenters' back? We can if we organise.
If we organise we can undo every scrap of protectionist conformity that has ever been erected. We can have suburbs that are communities with corner delhis, just like we used to have, and neighbourhood coffee shops where we can natter in the garden, 'eating houses' too. We can have the Freedom to demand, rather than the freedom to obey directives... just by deciding to.

We can demand that visible pollution, like power lines, go underground instead of festooning the landscape like the dirty remains of a giant spiders drunken night out. We see so much of it so often we aren't conscious of it. It's like a bad habit we learn't from our parents, we aren't conscious of it but its screwing our lives up. Imagine, get up, go out into your street and imagine no power poles and lines. Feel the relief.

Why am I told that a notice advising that the occupant of a house gives music lessons, or sells paintings, or fish even, is visual pollution that doesn't follow council guidelines; while I'm expected to put up with 19th century power technology?

Organise - block by block, know your neighbours, this is HuArchy - the resistance of tyranny.

What’s wrong with Capitalism?

If you grow a tree for timber there’s a point at which you harvest it; that’s when it’s at its optimum. If you don’t it will start to deteriorate, grow hollow in its center, borer holes will pepper the outside, unworkable knots will form. Also, it is going to stop growing and so it’s just occupying valuable space and providing no return. That’s what is wrong with Capitalism, it has past its use by date.

The board game MONOPOLYtm is a fine game and illustrates my point. It’s FUN to play, it works, money is concentrated, houses and hotels are built. And then the money becomes TOO concentrated and only two or three players are having fun, And then only one, BUT THEY are having enormous fun of course. They will often try to extend the game beyond its normal course by ‘letting people off-a bit’ by lending money, anything to keep the game going. But nobody else is having fun anymore. Maybe somebody gets mad with frustration and throws the board in the air, it happens. But the point is that MONOPOLYtm does have an end game.

Capitalism has had a good run, the achievements are many, most players have had fun, it’s worked better than any other system. Primarily because it’s worked hand in hand with ‘Democracy’ . It worked great in America, almost everybody started with nothing and through the various means of hard work, cunning, theft, villainy, talent, co-operation earned their piece of the pie. But now Democracy has become Dee- mock-race-see, the people are no longer equal, a few from the bottom make it to the top (well almost) mainly artists of some sort or sportspeople. There are enough celebrity successes to keep the magazines full of pictures and the hopes of millions full of aspiration. Life as Lotto.

And every hour the pile of super rich dollars outgrows the pile of poor dollars. And every day the jobs that people are doing have less meaning than the day before. How so, do you ask? Lets take the case of taxonomy, the scientific labeling of plants. Back in the 18thC Carl Von Linne*, (being fond of latin and a show off he wrote it Linnaeus*) the Swedish naturalist worked out an efficient method of classifying plants. He used the classical languages to distinguish his names from common names, that was the problem you see, plants had so many names it was difficult to know what people were talking about. An industrious lad Carl did practically the whole damn job himself.

But he had students and taught them and they had students and they had students and… Two and a half centuries later the world probably has as many taxonomists as plants and they’re all busy. Busy nit picking over all the work that’s been done. Most plants have more Latin names than common names; some have had three and four different names a year. An isolated case?

Take civil engineers, great people at building roads and through the same process that produced such an abundance of taxonomists we have an abundance of civil engineers sitting around offices trying to think of something to do. We really have enough roads, some need widening, but really the jobs done. So one guy gets an idea, ‘If I put some nibs out into the road that will slow the traffic down and there wont be as many accidents in that 'black spot’. Across the planet in another office another guy with the same problem thinks ‘If I put in a mini roundabout ……’ Within months nibs and mini-roundabouts sprout across the planet, usually in conjunction, often on roads that had been built a hundred years before on an expectation that never happened and have never had a traffic accident .

Course you could be lucky and get a job transporting toilet rolls from continent to continent… and back. Or glueing and stapleing together furniture. Or you could be a GP. Does anybody know why we can’t just go to the lab and get a blood test and take the result to the pharmacist? Hell, they have exhaust diagnostic machines for cars, that’s what we need in pharmacies.

Speaking of cars, we produce more than can be sold and people are driving around in dangerous old bangers, see the sense in that? And all the waste is wasted Carbon emission and on the other side of the world a kid is crawling in the dust and a very real vulture is waiting and somewhere else a young man is in training to blow himself up and just prays that he can take you with him. He doesn’t know you, but knows you are rich and don’t care and our children take drugs to ‘get out of it’.

The game is OVER. We must find some other way .

What's new about it?

Anarchism suffers from being born into the negative mode. NO LEADERS, that's fine, there's never been a good leader in all human history as far as I'm concerned. And you can be sure I include Prouhdon, (the first person to call himself an Anarchist) in that summation. Though his letter to Marx sums up entirely what I know to be political a truth, Prouhdon himself was a misogynist and an anti-semite, and was probably a racist t' boot. Not stuff I'd sign on for.

But Anarchism is a path forwards. It might have roots buried deep in the past, but it's time to spread out over the canopy now. The Neo Anarchist is a positive Anarchist. Destroying government is unnecessary, this is a time to build, a time to join. The old structures are so worn, so pathetic, that they can be ignored, left to wither.

Power is discourse, power comes from below, power is egalitarian - we are all equals and we can all be heard. And, let me tell you, we the people who do not want to dominate, do not want to coerce OR be coerced. We, who want to live in peace and security, without threat or fear; we who wish to agree and be reasonable and be creative, without being greedy. We are the majority .

That is the meaning of Information Technology. We have the means to inform - each other. It's beautiful!!