Anarchist Automation: A Sociotechnical Framework for Decentralization and Universal Care

TL;DR

This paper proposes a sociotechnical framework called anarchist automation to decentralize full automation and promote universal care, addressing risks of techno-feudalism and economic concentration.

Contribution

It introduces the Liberation Stack architecture, formal hypotheses, and design principles for decentralized, commons-based automation aligned with anarchist tradition.

Findings

Commons-based systems operate at scale, as shown by Linux and Mondragon.

AI distributed optimization can substitute market signals in abundance.

Framework for progressive state dissolution through commons-building.

Abstract

Foundational results in machine learning establish that all human labor may in principle be automatable. Without deliberate intervention, this trajectory risks concentrating productive capacity in a handful of corporations, resulting in techno-feudalism: mass economic redundancy, surveillance-based control and dependence on corporate benevolence for survival. To avert this outcome, this paper introduces anarchist automation, a rigorously defined sociotechnical framework grounded in the 200-year anarchist tradition from Godwin through Kropotkin to Bookchin for ensuring that full automation is decentralized and oriented toward universal care. Specifically, I state five formal hypotheses and six research objectives, present a formal definition through analytical categories of interdependent spheres, and propose the Liberation Stack as a layered technical architecture with explicit preconditions and gate conditions for each layer, incorporating crypto-economic coordination tools appropriated from the crypto-anarchist tradition for commons financing and governance. Furthermore, I introduce Universal Desired Resources as a post-monetary design principle that eliminates the material basis of intersectional oppression, and address the Mises-Hayek economic calculation problem by arguing that AI-based distributed optimization and federated preference elicitation can substitute for market price signals under conditions of material abundance. I develop a framework for progressive state dissolution through incremental, reversible commons-building compatible with existing democratic institutions. Empirical evidence from Linux, Mondragon and contemporary commons initiatives confirms that commons-based systems already operate at scale. Finally, I conclude with a phased roadmap specifying explicit assumptions, hard constraints, gate conditions between phases, and detailed limitations.