The Problem of Scale in Anarchism and the Case for Cybernetic Communism
TL;DR — An essay that takes seriously the strongest objection to anarchism, that it works only at small scale, and asks whether decentralised computation could solve it.
Begins from the point that anarchism plainly works locally (food co-ops, infoshops, mutual aid), and that the old objection, voiced by Trotsky among others, is that there is no theory of how non-hierarchical organisation scales. The essay looks to cybernetics and distributed computation for an answer. Twenty pages, hosted on a Caltech mathematician’s page under a pseudonym.
What it is: a political-theory essay, not peer-reviewed. It is relevant to the long-running economic-calculation debate.
Where this came from
- r/obscurePDFs post, October 2022 — “The Problem of Scale in Anarchism And the Case for Cybernetic Communism”. Routing record: The obscurePDFs Subreddit
20 pages. A copy is archived locally against link rot; the header links the original source.