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Anarchism and Social Ecology

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Hoping to check a concept for use in fiction (slrpnk.net)
submitted 6 days ago by JacobCoffinWrites@slrpnk.net to c/anarchism@slrpnk.net
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Hi, I'm not sure if any of you have read Murder in the Tool Library (a quite good solarpunk murder mystery, I think) but I'm working on a story with an investigation and I'm wondering how close AE Marling's answers are to being a drop-in solution for that particular concept, and sort of whether it passes basic scrutiny by anarchists.

If you haven't read it, the basic idea is that the setting's eutopian city doesn't have a police force but it does have a large and active civilian investigative society which normally investigates more mundane situations but can be temporarily empowered with access to additional information by the community on a case-by-case basis, such as when someone is murdered for seemingly no reason. They lacked any sort of qualified immunity and the community seemed to have an existing system based around rehabilitation and restitution that they answered to. It seemed to be very croudsourcing-oriented but members had to pass a fairly-strict qualification process to screen out those who would misuse their access.

They also seemed to have a much broader scope of what they normally investigated than the modern day police do (finding lost pets and such), as crimes seemed to be much more rare in the setting, given the other safety nets available to catch things earlier.

So I suppose most of my questions are around does this seem viable to you? When I asked some of these questions on the xmpp channel it was pointed out that an organization charged with investigating crimes outside its own members but at least nominally accountable to the community is police under another name, which is probably fair. So I guess my question boils down to: are there anarchist answers to how to do policing?

The anarchist manifestos I've tried seemed to be listing all the problems with modern police, which I agree with, and saying that if you solve all of society's other problems you won't need police, prisons etc. which, I don't really doubt that but it also doesn't feel attainable to me. Especially when one of my most frequently-reused comments over on the subreddit is explaining that yes you can still have conflicts (and thus story plots) in a better, more eutopian society. All kinds of crimes, shortcuts and disagreements can arise without desperate necessity and even between people who 95% agree with each other.

So is there a halfway-to-utopia answer?

Part of the trouble is that though my story centers around an investigation (a treasure hunt for thousands of tons of industrial waste illegally dumped decades earlier, and a modern day conspiracy to cover it up and block the investigation), I have a lot less room for deep dives into the organization itself. Marling was able to devote much of his story to exploring a lot of concepts and nuances around the abolishment of police and prisons, how they try to screen for people with sociopathic or abusive tendencies and how the investigative society still has some hierarchy which puts it at risk to people who prioritize ladder climbing and power, (long with the nuts and bolts of how things might be done when the worst case scenario happens and someone commits murder despite all the other social safety nets).

So thanks for reading my question, and for any thoughts you might have. I guess I'm wondering if this existing idea seems basically viable, and what specifics you'd want called out where I can fit them. If you think it doesn't work, I'd be very interested in any alternatives (and I'm happy to read relevant articles, screeds, manifestos etc!). Thanks

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[–] vegafjord@slrpnk.net 1 points 20 hours ago

I like to think that indigenous communities is to a larger or lesser extent anarchist. Perhaps by looking into everyday stories of these communities, you can get some inspiration as to what kinds of journeys are appealing to them. I haven't done this myself, but at least that's what I would do if I were you.

[–] bluespruce@slrpnk.net 5 points 5 days ago (2 children)

Hey, very interesting question. Carrie Vaughn’s Bannerless saga actually has a similar concept to Murder in the Tool Library. Also an anarchist community, a string of small towns made up of multi-family households that opt in to following certain rules in order to benefit from collective resource sharing. A key stipulation is that they respect the authority of an independent body of professional investigators, who can be called in to investigate a crime. The investigators arrive in pairs, they decide fault and consequences, and their judgement has to be followed, or face banishment.

I like both authors’ works a lot, but I struggle with this level of punitive authority placed in only certain individuals within a society. I think AE Marling tries to decentralize that power more by having a whole network of investigators chiming in on a live-streamed case, the crowdsourcing aspect you mentioned. Still, I think both rely too much on another point you mentioned, the strict qualification process, and that’s a kind of “merit”-based power system that can be easily coopted and controlled by whoever is able to manipulate the selection process.

Thinking about these models, two thoughts come to mind. First, I don’t think investigative (and judgement) authority needs to be (or should be) coupled with the authority to use force. Both sets of books do so, and it does seem convenient, if the people going out to investigate a potentially dangerous situation are allowed to be armed and are authorized to enforce the resulting punishments. But I think these things can be decoupled, and to some extent are in our society already. (Detectives are often cops, but prosecutors, judges, and juries are not.)

Second, for roles that involve the authority to coercively affect others’ lives (through physical force or legally binding judgements), I’d really like to see those be temporary rotational assignments, not career professions. The city I grew up in is far from ideal, but its police force operates differently from most in the U.S. It has a consolidated Public Safety Department, combining police, fire, and emergency medical services. Officers are required to rotate every few years between those three services. So the cops were all recently fire fighters and/or EMTs, and that produces a relationship with and approach toward the local population. I think it also changes recruitment motivations too.

I think it would be preferable for the people who can use force against others (e.g. restrain a person when necessary, take them into custody, escort them to some required treatment or community service, etc) only get to do that for a short term, say a year or two. Then they have to go back to being regular members of the community who don’t have the authority to exert force over others. Ideally they’re randomly selected from a pool of qualified volunteers (or from all community members who haven’t been exempt for various medical/physical reasons), like jury duty.

Also, ideally those individuals also aren’t the ones who play a decisive role in investigating crimes or wrong-doing, determining fault or punishments. They’re the enforcers who accompany the detective, who are sent to collect and escort the individual after the multi-stakeholder mediation or consensus board determines the appropriate restorative justice measures, etc. And if some individuals need to play key roles in negotiating the decisions about fault and restitution, those could be rotational positions too.

The enforcers would still have to exercise some discretion in when to restrain a person, how much force to use, so they’d still need to be well trained and held accountable for their actions. But I think avoiding combining too much authority over others’ lives, and making any such authority very temporary, could go a long way to reducing entrenched hierarchical power and abuses of it. Sorry for the long response, been puzzling over this. I'd be interested in how this relates to your thinking too!

[–] JacobCoffinWrites@slrpnk.net 4 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

Thanks! I really appreciate the thought so please don't worry about text length!

I agree strongly on the level of separation - I think ideally the investigators should be there to do the research and build the case, but should be relying on a separate group for physical enforcement, and the community should have a separate system of restorative/rehabilitative justice which the investigative society reports to. On top of that, I think I want to convey that the investigative societies aren't a monopoly or can't monopolize an area/territory - ideally a given community has several (perhaps overlapping) options actively investigating crimes and other mysteries (not unlike having multiple newspapers all with their own investigative reporters), so they're not locked in with a particular group. (Possibly same for enforcement, I'll say more on that in a minute). I think that plus the lack of qualified immunity and other protections from consequences should help (I know licensed private detectives in some jurisdictions get some additional permissions, I might look into what that entails to see if its a better fit).

I really appreciate you pointing out the qualification process because you're right that can be a lever for preventing scrutiny or limiting membership or otherwise used unfairly and I'm not sure how best to address it. I was actually planning to pin some of the protagonist's motivations on wanting to 'move up' from the more general crowdsourced investigations (find this lost dog, help track the course of this buried river) to the level that requires more community trust (crimes where access to private information might be accessed or where there is a victim to protect). I think qualifications or demonstrations of capability are important but also very much agree that they can be implemented maliciously and unfairly, and I'm not sure how to square that yet, aside from a separate process of audits or perhaps cross-investigations.

As for the violence-doing side of things, thank you so much for introducing me to the concept of a consolidated Public Safety Department. I'd never heard of that before and I'm delighted to hear that it's been implemented in the real world, because I would have thought it'd be a hard sell! I think that stands an excellent chance of changing the motivations around joining up, though I'll admit I'd worry that it'd keep good candidates for fire and EMS out if they don't want to have to be cops. It'd likely be a great fit for a solarpunk society where that stigma and isolation from the community has had some time to wear away due to programs like this though.

Over on the FA discord, there was a great conversation around the enforcer side of this triad(? of investigators, enforcers, and justice system) and some interesting points were brought up which I'll try to convey. One of the devs listed four keys of locking away the modern power of the police:

  • Civilian Panopticon - I think this is a bit of an answer to PunkIsUndead's question about what information is stored and revealed to the investigators on a case by case basis - the idea that public areas are surveilled more or less constantly at a low level (I suppose not unlike now), and most moderately dense areas have more surveillance which might be building-specific and not shared normally, or secretly. So when the investigators are looking for evidence they might ask a neighborhood for the security footage from the park or street, and then have to work with certain households or condo associations or what have you to glean more than that. I was leery about this one but I also considered that most of the scant accountability we see these days comes from regular people's cell phones, so it could very well work both ways if the community are the ones who control this information, rather than corporations hoarding and selling it. Presumably that'd extend to communications records, GPS and other similar information which is currently available if you spend a few bucks or wave a badge around.
  • Overlapping Authorities - I think this covers situations where one organization or sheriff etc is effectively answerable to no one.
  • Multiple Independent Militias - I think this applies just as well to the investigators but we were thinking kinda small with having multiple overlapping groups, I really like the idea of rotating the members of those groups (especially the designated violence-doers) through other professions. I think that is a great addition.
  • Societal Intolerance for Professional Murder

Interestingly, there's a couple of these (overlapping authorities and Multiple Independent Militias) that kind of match the how-to-survive-as-a-dictator playbook: never let any of your armed forces get individually powerful enough to oppose you.

As a last note, I'm quite content to write the investigators as being unarmed in this story, two of my favorites (Lt. Colombo and Hercule Poirot) both declined to carry firearms, content to let the uniforms do that work.

[–] bluespruce@slrpnk.net 1 points 4 days ago

All really great points. They sparked one more thought. I really like overlapping authorities, so people have options. I think that’s important in a non-hierarchical/non-coercive society. At first, it seems easier to imagine overlapping investigative organizations, since different interested parties could request their own investigations and reports/evidence from each could be presented to a consensus-based decision-making body.

So then I wondered, how would overlapping use-of-force groups work? Groups could have different methods, maybe some but not all rotate their force-using agents, have different rules of engagement, etc. But I’m also wary of the idea of multiple independent militias, since if groups can decide for themselves to use violence, that could descend into problematic vigilantism. I think there are ways to make it work more accountably, though. I remember that FA has multiple overlapping civil defense groups, but I forget the details of how they’re called to action, so the thoughts below might be exactly what’s already envisioned in the FA world (apologies if so!)

I think the key issue is, if we want people to have different options, who has the choice? It can’t just be whoever has a complaint against someone else, of course. That part is important in determining whether some response is necessary, in a specific incident. But in general when we think about multiple options for authority in an anarchist society, I think what’s really important is that people agree to be subject to them. And with violence, I think that means that the potential target of the violence needs to be able to choose who can use force against them.

Now, that wouldn’t work if a person can say in the moment, for any given act of violence, no I don’t agree to this person restraining me right now. But I wonder if we could have a system in which all community members are able to register their preferences ahead of time, pre-specify which civil defense group(s) or enforcement agency(ies) they consent to be handled by if needed.

They can’t say no to all available groups (that’s the same as not registering any preference), and their wishes are most likely to be followed if they specify one or more large-enough, respected and responsive groups in their local area who can be called in when needed. If a person hasn’t specified any groups, then by default any group can be called in. Also groups might be called in to respond to an incident when at first the parties involved aren’t identified.

If a person is then identified, and they have registered opposition to being policed/enforced by the group on scene (and their preferred group is also available), then (to maintain the group’s reputation) the on-scene responders would have an obligation to make every effort to remain physically disengaged from the non-consenting person as they can, perhaps just maintaining a perimeter and clearly warning the persons that they may have to engage if the person does not remain within the perimeter, until the person’s preferred response agents arrive on scene.

The on-scene responders could still talk to the present parties, seek to de-escalate the situation without physical force, and might be able to gain a target’s consent to bring them in, if their preferred response group is delayed. Groups that don’t maintain enough registered community members voluntarily submitting to their enforcement practices could have their license to use force revoked (so they couldn’t respond even to the open calls for civil defense).

Anyway, as I write this, I am thinking this might already be how the system works in FA. If so, I’m glad! Helps to think it through, to get on board with it :).

[–] perestroika@slrpnk.net 2 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

I was going to write down some similar points, so I thank you for writing instead of me and upvote.

Some additional notes:

  • I like the concept that stopping violence and investigating crimes are separate jobs, with separate qualifications. Stopping violence is a time-critical job (one must prevent injury or loss of life, restore everyone's freedom of choice and if possible, normal life) and may require both skills of negotiation and using non-lethal violence (it is highly important not to escalate or do irreversible harm). Investigating is a whole different business.

  • Stopping violence in a future society likely has both a local component (the first to arrive upon an emergency broadcast are those who live nearby).

  • Stopping some forms of violence in a future society is very likely highly technical (an person reasonably trained in martial arts is expected to be capable of doing air surveillance, identifying a drone or determining and logging that it refuses to identify, subsequently producing an EMP or using a microwave / laser / kinetic air defense effector). The same would apply for ground rovers or surface / subsurface drones which behave agressively. Assaulting a person with hands, a sharp object or slug thrower would be considered a very antiquated flavour of violent crime.

  • A key question in the development of "law enforcement" (or whatever comes after it) will probably be: how to prevent loss of life. In case a person is out of control, I would expect to see unmanned systems helping with negotiation (because they have no lives to endanger) and wielding pepper spray.

  • I would expect unmanned systems delivering medical supplies and medical assistance literally at the pace of a missile, so I think a well equipped hospital will have few launch tubes ready with medical supplies and rescue / resuscitation robots. I think a high subsonic speed would be appropriate for arrival in most neigbourhoods, while delivery to remote locations might require supersonic speed and leaving the dense layer of the atmosphere. After a medical drone lands, I think most of them would be capable of walking, swimming or diving, and a select few might also cut or pry apart wreckage.

  • In case a crime has happened and violence is no longer ongoing, I like the concept that an investigative team is assembled by randomly selecting people with certain qualifications, who can call up experts if they run out of understanding. Because having the same person investigate twice or more in a row would invite foul play.

So, tehcnically my predictions veer towards something you'd get from the Culture stories by Iain M. Banks. Just without the hyperintelligent AI, because I'm not sure people would want to create that, or whether it's possible.

As for laws... that's a good one. In an anarchist society, laws are not hard-coded. Whatever social bodies deal with conflict resolution would likely not focus on the letter of any text, even if they would have a text they can refer to.

Jurisdiction is an interesting concept. In a stated society, the local state claims jurisdiction through controlling territory. Jurisdiction in anarchy would be far more messy.

[–] punkisundead@slrpnk.net 4 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

I think even in an anarchist utopia, people might accidentally create a hierarchical / police like institution to deal with particular issues. But your example sounds more like current day private investigators / investigative journalists, who occasionally get tasked by their community to do police investigator things. I wouldnt really call that a police force.

I think the more relevant thing to me would be, what additional information are they able to access, why are those actually stored in the first place, who can normally access those etc. Because that might actually be the thing that would be the actual target of bad actors and those that want to have power over others.

Edit: Ah yeah for me it passes the vibe check for something that anti authoritarians might implement to deal with a serial killer or something, especially after they abolished the police.

[–] JacobCoffinWrites@slrpnk.net 4 points 6 days ago

Thanks!

your example sounds more like current day private investigators / investigative journalists, who occasionally get tasked by their community to do police investigator things

I actually think of them that way too.

As for information, in Marling's stories the settings are still quite high tech so more information is retained than might be ideal. I think it was stuff like GPS and similar movement records. The improvement over our present is that they don't just ask a corporation for the info because there are some apparently functional protections in place, and I think at one point they're temporary stymied when a community tells them to pound sand because the local council is concerned the investigative society has been overreaching lately. I don't have specifics in mind for the temporary powers/accesses as they won't really come up in this story but it might be equivalent to the stuff police forces just request/buy from companies today. The protagonist could just as easily be a private detective or reporter but I'll admit I do like the concept of these investigative societies and the changes they demonstrate in the setting.