Welcome to the fifth anniversary edition of the Anarchist Review of Books, produced by a collective based in Atlanta, Baltimore, Brussels, Chicago, Detroit, Exarchia, New York, Oakland, and Richmond.
ARB’s contributors and editorial collective are international, intergenerational, and unlike most media in the U.S., interclass and offline. ARB published its first issue with help from Fifth Estate magazine, the longest-running anarchist publication in North America. A Detroit teenager with a portable typewriter started FE in his parents’ basement in 1965, after returning from a summer job at the Los Angeles Free Press, one of the country’s first underground newspapers. Fifth Estate’s coverage of drug culture, protests against the war in Vietnam, labor, feminism, gay rights, and all things anti-authoritarian was something not found in other newspapers at the time. By 1969, FE had an office, a bookstore, a staff of writers, and a circulation of 20,000. The magazine would come to be influenced by the Situationists, supported by octogenarian internationalists, and be heralded by anti-civ and green anarchists. For 60 years FE has been at the forefront of anarchist thought and practice, and ARB was born from this legacy.
Over the past five years ARB has published widely on literature, art, history, science, and philosophy, including work by Guggenheim fellows, middle schoolers, PhDs, day laborers, best-selling authors, underground experimentalists, neuroscientists, incarcerated comrades, utopian squatters, conflict journalists, blue chip artists, and revolutionaries. Our youngest contributor is fourteen years old and our oldest is ninety.
Our varied backgrounds, cultures, ages, theories of mind, and approaches to radical action provide a small portrait of the international anarchist community, which does not reduce people to type, brand, or national identity. Our shared beliefs in autonomy and solidarity stand in stark contrast to the media that brands and polarizes, which serves only the market and shatters human bonds.
One of the first pieces ARB published back in winter of 2020 was an interview with James Yu, a founder of Sudowrite. Marketed as an “AI partner to creative writers,” the business uses Chat GPT to generate fiction and non-fiction. Yu was performatively naïve about AI. Many of the things he said would likely not happen in the world of artificial intelligence have come to pass, including products his business was instrumental in creating, like AI novels and AI journalism (both of which eliminate the need for content produced by humans.) When pressed about the possibility that these products would be created and used, and that they may not be an economic or cultural good, he compared AI to the businesses that produce books. “A whole organization is creating these narratives,” he said. “Is it a human actually at that point? I think that AIs are already here; they’re called corporations.”
At the heart of this sophistry is a truth: marketing departments, editors, booksellers, shareholders of multinational media corporations, and even military consultants shape literary works to suit profit, and in turn shape the culture in which we live.
The marriage of technology, business, and the state is not new, and neither is the totalizing force this form of capitalism holds over everyday life, keeping the majority of the population in a state of debt, and overwork—so focused on surviving, the idea of anything more seems absurd. At the time of this writing, the U.S. government has stepped up its attacks on the country’s population, passing a bill that robs tens of millions of money, health care, dignity, and time, while giving 175 billion dollars to immigration enforcement and 45 billion dollars to construction of new detention camps.
Governments and corporations rely on human suffering to maintaining power and profit, and they are using AI to accelerate this system. Guerrilla fighters in Kurdistan must stand still for days because armed, motion-detecting AI drones are hovering above them; tens of thousands of people are starving in Gaza as AI quad-copters equipped with thermal image sensors and guided missiles patrol their neighborhoods, recording every movement, determining who lives and dies. Hundreds of workers at U.S. government seed bunkers were fired by DOGE using AI, putting 600,000 genetic lines of crop species in jeopardy, because words like diversity, as in ‘biodiversity,’ defined their work.
The scale of AI surveillance is profound. Palantir Technologies, run by Alex Karp, a lawyer whose parents were civil rights activists, collects and analyzes multi-source datasets involving billions of data points from social media and other digital sources. Its main products, Gotham and Foundry, aggregate public and private data like posts, connections, locations, and online behavior. Corporations use Palantir for marketing surveillance and tracking. It is also used to create profiles and activity patterns for government, CIA, FBI, and ICE, to monitor social movements, and to track anyone in the world in real time. This is done by accessing GPS, dashboard cameras, timestamps, networks, phone and email metadata, geolocation records, financial transactions, immigration, travel, criminal and military records, surveillance footage, sensor data from drones and satellites, and medical records. Palantir’s scale is not measured in single terabytes or databases—but in entire systems of population-level information. As we go to press, the Pentagon has announced a 10-billion-dollar contract with Palantir, in part to “improve human machine interfaces for soldiers in the field.”
AI’s devastation of the environment is also vast. Amazon’s new 1,200-acre data center outside New Carlisle, Indiana—larger than seven football stadiums—uses enough electricity to power one million homes. The business, whose annual revenue was 637.96 billion dollars in July, and who received a fifty percent tax abatement for the project, is planning to build thirty more centers of that size. Training for a single large language model that, like ChatGPT, consumes thousands of megawatt hours of electricity and emits hundreds of tons of carbon. A mid-sized data center uses 300,000 gallons of water a day. Cloud services now produce more CO2 than the airline industry. AI has become the foundation of all industrial operations—Shell, Chevron, and Kobold use it to expand speculation and extraction of oil and rare earth minerals. Autonomous farm machinery has drastically increased pesticide application and sped up clearcutting of protected forests to make farmlands, where farmers are no longer needed.
AI is programmed to execute the market driven, technocratic directives of its billionaire creators, whether it is drafting a novel, making a grocery list, or running a cobalt mine.
Every technology contains within it the possibilities of both subjection and freedom. The question is who holds the tools. In a recent talk at Property is Theft in Brooklyn, artist Ben Morea, who worked as a bodyguard for the Black Panther Party, urged young radicals to think more expansively about all the purposes to which tools, including technological tools, can be put.
Around the world, the risks of radical action are heightened and rapidly changing. Networks of people are sharing both traditional and high-tech skills to stay safe, protect each other, and build strength. They are sick of struggling to survive, sick of polarizing arguments, isolationist tactics, and economics as slavery. In June, protests erupted in every state when the U.S. government deployed Marines to Los Angeles to assist four thousand National Guard troops, ICE, and the LAPD, who used rubber bullets and CS gas, to control a civilian population that was trying to protect neighbors and family members from deportation. Kurdish rebels have risked death to construct a vast roof of metal sheeting over city streets in order to hide the population from killer drones. Black radicals are leading a revolution in thought, rejecting the model of elevating charismatic leaders to focus on strategies that collectivize risk and sustain power from the ground up.
And people everywhere are turning away from the endlessly reproduced, dehumanizing digital and social media, which maintain states of fear, sorrow, distraction, and greed. They are tired of the glowing screen, bored by the lack of variation and imagination in mediated experience. Five years ago, we were told no one would read a print-only magazine. Today the Anarchist Review of Books has subscribers on six continents.
Print media is not, as it turns out, obsolete. It’s crucial. It cannot track your engagement, it does not gather your data, there are no searches, key strokes, and location tracking that can be used to algorithmically target you. The paper in your hand can’t be erased, shut down, or remotely revoked. It provides the gift of quiet, the pleasure of you alone with the page, your mind engaged with the minds of authors and artists, the time for your own thoughts. No clickbait, no peanut gallery of comments, no directives to share or post or research or shop.
You can use it to start a fire.
This kind of reading is one way of breaking the faulty conceptual link between the human mind and technology: the mind has always been compared to whatever technology is current (clockwork! computers! the things that we invent and that in turn shape and change us). But in fact, the mind is not analogous to any technology—it is beyond all technology and apart from it, something stranger and more expansive, and that, according to current research, almost certainly does not end at the brain.
Understanding this is important, because we are being sold a world where AI “becomes” us / “is” us, and vice versa. We risk becoming locked in battle with a machine that threatens to consume us from the inside out, when really, we have the option, at every moment, of reclaiming both the vastness and the personal, tactile immediacy of the imagination.
This tenth issue marks five years of putting all our power to the imagination, of reading and writing outside and alongside the machine, of quiet, uninterrupted contemplation, of building community across nations and borders; of wildness, art-making, arguing, parties, actions, and protests.
Inside you’ll find dispatches from Berlin, Newcastle, South of France, and the Edge of Sleep. William C. Anderson talks with JoNina Ervin about the BPP and Black Anarchism; Julie Hair muses on art and more art; documentary filmmakers Payton McDonald and Leah Ayer talk mutual aid; Jack Bratich researches misinformation and moral panics; Douglas Martin translates Elfride Jelineck; Ben Morea remembers breaking into the Pentagon; and Carrie Laben remembers the common murres. All this and brilliant fiction by Nick Mamatas and Angela Woodward, poetry by C. Russell Price, art by Carrie Moyer, Joyce Kozloff, Shellyne Rodriguez, Dianna Settles, and N. Masani Landfair.
In this year of war, fear, and rage, we have found ourselves returning again and again to W.S. Merwin’s poem The River of Bees. “We are the echo of the future,” Merwin writes,
“On the door it says what to do to survive
But we were not born to survive
Only to live”
ALL POWER TO THE IMAGINATION
ALL POWER TO LIFE
The Editorial Collective
August 15, 2025