What If We Ran Homogeneous Empty-Time?: How the Library Economy reinvents Capitalism

“The effect of the grid was always to be able to say of anything that it was this, not that; it belonged here, not there. It was bounded, determinate, and therefore — in principle — countable.” - Benedict Anderson (Imagined Communities)

People can seek refuge from the skies of oblivion for a territorial shelter to defend them from the homelessness of the cosmic sublime, but so too can the imagined community of boundary and limits seek shelter and come to sneak into the backdoor of the mind and reinvent itself as a new freedom unlike the old bondages but just like the same securities. The nation is a material and conscious condition in reflection of the scarce condition of planetary limitations. To seek the nation is to degrow the human condition against the “growthism” of human-nonhuman-posthuman unity that would blast off all chains of earth-historical limits of terra, corpus, and sol. It is no surprise that those seeking local limits and economic degrowth would find themselves searching the catacombs of rootedness for a new corpse to resurrect and haunt us all with.

You see, anarchism has the unique ability, above all others, to have its initial premise be antagonistic to the logic of territory —those fixed constants of boundaries that make the nation and the capital interstate conceivable. It’s also an (always) alien intelligence, an otherness that kills all nativities. Anarchy stands outside the gates of all nations, companies, and castles like a liquid battering ram, coming to surround the entrances and walls, breaking them all down, and then quickly, swiftly, running and swirling in differing directions, like rivers without a fixed current, leaving to find new walls to demolish. However, some seem desperate to reject the old ways of anarcho-syndicalism, communist free production, and not only a post-scarce world but also a post-territorial world, and try instead to attempt to recreate free association with Rousseauan general wills and Lockean property norms.

The striking thing about the library economy is its reinvention of homogeneous empty-time and capital through the creation of collecting a series of rental tickets corresponding to time-sensitive intervals where in, you go to this library, ask the librarian ledger keepers for an item and they provide in kind a ticket, putting everyone single person into a slot a long a linearized numbering system, where each person can only consume within the allotted time given, which this would have to be maintained by debt keepers and collectors to maintain the serialized list of who gets what and when and to make sure no one breaks from the calendricalized sequence by either stealing or keeping the item in question past-due. This is the source of a new class system of renters, bookkeepers, and enforcers of late fees and sanctions; we will call them bookenforcers. Granted, the possibility of abolishing the late fee system is posited at least, but people are still punished for other things in this system, such as damage to the items in the library. The bookkeepers and bookenforcers would have to work shifts to make sure day-to-day economic activities are followed. They aren’t given the usual wage one would presume; instead, they possibly have their own pool of resources to rent from themselves as a form of compensation? They, too, have to eat and use the same tools from the library, after all. This all serves to recreate a continuous stream of linearized, moment-to-moment, uniform progression of time, but orchestrated by list makers, users, and reinforcers, all marching along to the ticking of the clock.

Thankfully, certain things are lifetime uses, such as houses, although, hopefully, the guy who really likes your house and happens to be next on the list who gets it doesn’t try and murder you for it. If that does happen, perhaps the library detectives will respond and figure out what happened. It would be really awkward if they had to wait for days or weeks to rent the tools necessary to make a proper investigation.

The history of money tells us it starts with debt collection and its enforcement, which the latter creates state institutions of authority and sovereignty, so that the ownership of goods within a state, or here, the library, is maintained as they leave the library to renters. Conveniently for us, these libraries have fixed boundaries, and so the creation and maintenance of borders is already here. Those “clear boundaries for both system and users” are the recreation of government and citizenship. And since the earth is sprawling with these library-states, naturally, an interstate forms to maintain clear boundaries between them, as each library-state recognizes the other’s sovereign territory, in turn creating a set of standards and laws for sovereign equality so one library-state couldn’t simply invade another.

Now, would this recreate a core of hegemonic or near-hegemonic library-states taking advantage of smaller and weaker peripheral ones? Supposedly not, as all library-states are roughly of equally small size, and in a committed network based on competition to maintain residents, Yarvin’s vision, or based on cooperation to maintain residents, Andrewism’s vision, where a collection of citizens could, in theory, leave to form another library-state or perhaps break up an existing one into smaller patches of territory. However, once the earth is filled with this odd, mass-patchwork of library-states, there isn't much room to simply start up a new one without threatening the sovereignty of another pre-existing library-state. Being says mass-patchwork, because many aspects of this system are similar but also different in important ways from the patchwork system envisioned by Curtis “Mencius Moldbug” Yarvin; his is premised on individual sovereignty, as each of his neo-states is run by an autocrat or “CEO-monarch,” private-state ownership, and a rejection of the mass subject, hence an absolute-patchwork with an exclusive form of capital. Both Andrewism's mass-patchwork and Yarvin’s absolute-patchwork do, in theory, have the freedom to exit, but the mass-patchwork is premised on inclusive capital and, as argued here, collectively owned statehood.

There's a sense here where Andrewism seems to be conjuring a thousand mini-systems, self-contained, isolated, and sufficient areas of economic activities with a centripetal concentration towards the library as it houses the majority of the territory’s resources with the periphery of gardens, houses, and people all submitting themselves to the librarian sovereign-center, however, at the same time, theirs also this world-wide commitment of interconnected travel between, where an interlibrary class of cross-library data keepers and collectors maintain the sovereignty of each library by making sure they all know which citizen is a criminal with a pile of past due books and which is has the ok to pass into another library-state, and so we get a mix of premodern centripetal and modern centrifugal power dynamics. But in this mix-and-match, we can guess that the source of authority in a given library-state would naturally fall to the bookkeepers, given they know who owes what and in what order; whoever has these ledgers has the power to reorder time at their fingertips if they wanted to.

The inter-library class (“consultative associations“) is also used to make sure each library-state is not violating ecological limits. How exactly will they enforce this if one library-state violates these limits? Do they form an army or mass organization from neighboring library-states to invade and/or pressure the offending library-state? Well, sanctions, yes, for real, are used against those citizens who have late fees or other offenses; these sanctions are “proportional punishments,” from exile to reeducation, and so one might assume this is done on a larger scale to the offending library-state. Who even gives this inter-library class the authority to give the final say on who is and isn’t a malefactor? Hopefully, factions within this inter-library class don’t form over personal disputes regarding whether X or Y citizens should or shouldn’t leave and go to the other library-states. You wouldn’t want things to collapse as the inter-librarians start accusing each other of malfeasance, trying to sanction one another.

In terms of broader issues such as production, the people within the library-state are supposed to somehow produce, but not too much, enough for everyone and the maintenance of buildings and so on, while also, presumably, giving whatever tools or food collected and made to the library to then be redistributed via those series of lists. Whether money is directly on the table here is left ambiguous, but one could easily see currency forming as a means to make the ticket and debt systems more streamlined. In fact, the podcast Srsly Wrong suggests that if the people demand and vote democratically, there will be money, as the library will have a cooperative economy. This is also coupled with epic, customer-consumer reports on whether you liked or didn’t like the cooperatively made products. The more logistics are mulled over in regard to this library economy, the more it sounds like a parody of state socialism and the endless layers of bureaucracy made to fulfill and collect data on each person, and if John Citizen enjoyed the pizza-flavored Pop-Tart over the popcorn-flavored soda or vice versa.

The library is a territorial data center that has become the last refuge for an odd egalitarian patchwork of inclusive capital here. One of the oldest state priorities was data collection and archiving, so making the library the center of the state itself is the natural evolution of an omni-competent data-collecting and rigidly surveilling force. As the gardens are used as a territorial resource periphery and refuge for greater extraction and consumption of naturally grown resources. Of course, the librarians need to make sure they have a line of properly timed cabbage eaters. We wouldn’t want some fool skipping the line and taking the cabbage out of his place in the time slots. 

This cabbage-stealing fool will be Being as he gives the cabbage to Steve to eat while looking you in the face and saying, “Steve eats your cabbage.” (Pictured Below)

This library economy also seems to forget, or at least greatly neglect, that humanity lives in the 21st century and could take great advantage of seeking out liberatory spaces from virtual places. Harkening back to the public library is as silly as if Being decided we should have a blockbuster economy because physically renting DVDs is somehow the path towards anarchy when the digitization of entertainment has made it possible to watch and read films and books without territorial attachments. Of course, copyright law keeps trying to prevent this by re-attaching territory to the virtual world, but thankfully, anarchism is opposed to such property norms. The excuse for throwing away the virtual world is that the internet has been co-opted by capital and hierarchies, but surely public libraries are no strangers to sources of domination? Physical attachments to localized centers of limited resource management are not the path to a horizontally decentralized universe of free peoples unattached to terrestrial bonds.

It’s clear that the universe is not the focus here, let alone a truly free global world, but rather an obsession with the communal, direct, and local so much that it quickly begins to look like an odd form of micro-nativism, as the rejection of the virtual world can quickly conjure the nation. It wouldn’t take long for one library-state to argue on xenophobic lines for stricter border security and the reduction in interlibrary immigration on the premise that its native library-state and its people are inherently more “ecologically friendly” and have “better values” than the “degenerating library-states” that neighbor them. Being can see it now: one library-state questioning the inter-librarian class and creating a conspiracy theory, where the inter-librarians are seen as part of a foreign interest group bent on reducing and crushing their library-state’s autonomy for a “globalist takeover.” When supposed “socialists” trade internationalism for territorial localism, the result isn’t pretty. Given the imposed limitations on where each community begins and ends territorially, and the center of knowledge and resources is also wrapped up in day-to-day social connections and developments within these borders, it makes it easy for the nation to emerge. Benedict Anderson, in his book Imagined Communities, famously showed how the widespread use of the printing press to establish centers of communities and resources coupled with the imposed territorial limits of colonial jurisdictions, group pilgrimages, and capital, helped to facilitate people imagining themselves as part of a limited and sovereign community continuously linearized along time.

A far easier and better ideology for the library economy would be liberalism, not socialism or anarchism. The homogeneous uniformity of law and rights through citizenship, paired with contractual upkeep, is a more natural home for these library republics. Early liberals such as Locke were even supportive of free movement between states and made use of usufruct property norms to justify certain relations between people and the physical lands beneath their feet, and even a demand for everyone to have equal availability of rights. Rousseau's demand for the people to submit to the general will through sovereign assemblies would fit into the management of the library and its day-to-day operations. Rousseau even thought these republics should be as small and localized as possible to maximize conformity of virtue. Where each republic is filled with constant, year-round festivities to reinforce the norms of the society. Funnily enough, the podcast Srsly Wrong suggests the use of extensive festivities in these libraries with a “library socialist calendar,” directly referencing the French Revolution’s use of it too. Truly, the calendrical monster is kept alive, well, and celebrated.

All in all, Being would say that the library economy of “library socialism” is a confused form of radical republicanism (a species of liberalism on the radical side of its morphology) that tries to bake an anarchist cake with, ultimately, liberal batter. The library economy is another one of these, recreating the socialist wheel from scratch but not understanding certain basic premises, such as the requirement of free production that integrates the home and factory into one where each person’s recreational play is also their production of new life unbound by all forms of government and sovereignty, including popular sovereignty and democracy. A form of this separation is presented by the library economy, where the home and factory are kept from the free individual by placing the collectives of the library between them and the direct integration of their person and labor. Instead of the integrated modernism of socialism, we get a new form of an old alienation, that of the social contract’s subtraction of the person’s freedom for supposed guarantees by a dominator’s protection, be it the state or some “freely, directly, democratically elected rotational collective.” These systems instead reject older socialist organizations and international subjects like the proletariat or free individual, such as Bookchin’s libertarian municipalism and Ocalan’s democratic confederalism, and so in the end, instead of rolling down the street smoothly, it ends up a bumpy ride that crashes and burns hard.

“The politics of the patch emerged from the depths of the catacombs and spun a new silky-shiny web. The nation-state was no longer sticking, as the network-state had everyone in its grip. From the far left to the far right, politics was no longer about global dreams of domination or liberation but localist dreams of micro-belongings, filled with micro-stock trading and micro-gardening. Yarvin’s patchwork was premised on all exit, no voice, while Andrewism reversed this with all voice, no exit. The earth came to a stop, bound in thick layers of webbing, and the cosmic spider began to feast on the innards of all its inhabitants. They all screamed two cries: ‘But we could leave so we had freedom,' and the other, ‘But we could participate so we had freedom.’ Neither made the jaws of the beast flinch”. - The Odd Being (Review of Ice Spiders 2: Cosmic Webbing)

Sources and further reading:

• David Graeber - Debt: The First 5,000 Years
• Immanuel Wallerstein - World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction
• Benedict Anderson - Imagined Communities
• Bruno Leipold, Karma Nabulsi, and Stuart White - Radical Republicanism: Recovering the Tradition’s Popular Heritage
• Mencius Moldbug - Patchwork: A Positive Vision
• Post-Comprehension - An Unearthly Politics A (https://medium.com/@postcomprehension/an-unearthly-politics-a-history-as-an-unconscious-object-b7c6643c5b31)
• Post-Comprehension - Democratic confederalism is NOT libertarian socialism (https://medium.com/@postcomprehension/democratic-confederalism-is-not-libertarian-socialism-de2b3d602b39)
• Andrewism - What If We Ran The Economy? (text: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/andrewism-what-if-we-ran-the-economy, video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vW5EVNT--DA&t)
• Srsly Wrong - Library Socialism Q&A - Heirlooms and Motivation – SRSLY WRONG PODCAST 267 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjEjHBsKcLw)