So like many people I've been thinking a lot about the information battleground we all seem to find ourselves living in in 2026. Algorithms, fake news (or even real news shaped to serve an agenda, even multiple conflicting agendas), the slow stripping away of the public's ability to easily find first order information in favour of pre-packaged or ultra-processed summaries, LLMs, and even just the relentless march of the never-sated behemoth that is advertising and data-driven marketing as a whole.
What's specifically caught my thinking is the following question: how does a theoretical Anarchist society function in a world where the above is, or at the very least previously has been, a reality? You could say that accurate information is one of the foundational cornerstones of any true direct democracy. Any democratic collective, either on its own or forming part of a wider co-operative society needs access to good, solid, trustworthy information about reality as input in order to have any truly meaningful internal discussion and decision making, let alone co-ordinating with other collectives and wider society.
Events in our current world seem to show how easy it can be for collective thinking and action to be guided down particular paths, often without any overt action being seen to be taken, and without those effected even having any sense that it's happening.
Now obviously in some very important ways this isn't new. All forms of media from the invention of the printing press onwards have been used to sway minds. Radio, television, even the early internet itself were all used in this way and all would have had bearing on any anarchist society that came about. It strikes me that, if anything is different now, it is simply the level of refinement present in such systems, rather than being something new per se, but I think it's clear that first algorithms, and now machine learning and early 'AI' are certainly increasing the reach and precision of these kind of activities and certainly their results.
So how do people here see the above in terms of a theoretical anarchist society? Can we take the positives of the modern digital age and somehow avoid or lessen the social negatives? How does a society based on the co-operation of collective, voluntary associations operate in a world where mass opinion can be so easily led by so few and to such a targeted degree? I'd be keen to hear what people think on the subject.
It's probably worth…
It's probably worth considering how the current society incentivises the production and consumption of misinformation.
It appears to me that very little of it is purely driven by ideolology and that it is mainly down to direct or indirect enrichment.
So manosphere grifters sell young men lies about women and their own paths to success and get rich off that.
Twitter/X pays people who achieve high levels of engagement and the best way to do this is through controversy / rage bait etc.
There is an eager audience for this stuff because people are alienated and this has driven a desire for particular types of entertainment or content. And vast resources have been ploughed into research about what will ensure that human beings get addicted to these platforms.
We want a world without money and with different incentives in place.
That's not to say that there won't be misinformation in the post-revolutionary society. But it will probably be a different kind, produced by different incentives.
Abolishing tech-billionaires would be a good start.