Anarchist Automation: A Sociotechnical Framework for Decentralization and Universal Care
It addresses the societal problem of economic inequality and oppression from automation for humanity, proposing a novel framework rather than incremental technical improvements.
This paper tackles the risk that full automation could concentrate power in corporations and lead to techno-feudalism by introducing anarchist automation, a sociotechnical framework for decentralized automation oriented toward universal care, proposing formal definitions, a technical architecture, and a phased roadmap.
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.