Ted K

Teds scattershot targeting and failure to define what " Left " meant to him ( or anyone ) made him an abysmal failure as an activist. Most of the anarchist interest in him appears to trace back to Frankfurt-School, Marxist misanthrope, John Zerzan.

Blunderbuss Zerzan's been an ugly parasite on anarchism since the battle of Seattle.  Too stupid to be an activist let alone anarchist. Beware the walking dead. 

Any kind of meaningful post-left-anarchism will exclude all Marxist morons like John Zerzan.

As was feared, there have been a handful of one-liners and just terrible comments that are less than a sentence long and take like 30 seconds to submit (not just on this post). One goal of this forum is to have genuine meaningful conversations about texts on the library projects. My recommendation is that if you don't care about having thoughtful conversations that you find another website to share your commentary with.

Perhaps it is what the Internet has become, but we are anarchists here trying to experiment with registered users and anonymous comments to discuss, critique, and learn from each other - not spend time calling each other names and just leaving troll comments for your own personal lulz. I imagine this comment might just disappear into the void to those who it is actually addressed to, but for other participants I wanted to share that the idea is light moderation, but I do hope commentators put a little more thought into their words instead of just saying something terrible.

Between the dangerous high-peaks of spectacular terror and the teeming flood-plains of pacifism lies the variegated terrain of the threat.

Propaganda of the deed  breakthrough eluded us then but that's no matter - tomorrow we'll run faster - stretch out our arms further.

Armed with the net we can target more precisely than ever - force the corpse-media to carry their own obituaries.

Sure the net represents technological-society - so?

At this stage of the game retreating forward is the easiest path. Even Biggus Dickus uses radio.

Get off the internet

the only time i read ted k was when i was transcribing some letters for publication, and i promptly told people i wouldn't be finishing them, or ever transcribe him again.

that said, i have heard plenty of stories of normies who were compelled by his reasoning that things really were That Bad, decades before (and more widely spread than) desert-the-book.

and yea, blackmailing the nyt to post your writing, which is then convincing to lots of norm-core folks, that's pretty impressive. not that it did us any good. but that's a different conversation.

Steelmanning Ted you could take that ' anarchists ' fragment and the fact he singlehandedly masterminded a successful *enough* propaganda-of-the-deed then run with that. ( as indeed Zerzan did - for years )

Then rust quickly sets in since his screed revealed a profound ignorance of the left in general, and anarchism in particular, while his targeting of a couple of civilians raises unpleasant memories of Nechaev and set the scene for the execrable ITS advocacy of random murder. Meh.

Shame if all this gasbagging and timewasting over an anti-social criminal detracted from enjoyment of an anarchist classic ( like " The Spanish Anarchists Heroic Years " )

And meanwhile the much needed ' Post Left Anarchism " project stagnates for want of a definition of ' Left '. Sad!

This project is well underway online so all those A's accepting online activism ( such as posting here ) might investigate it. Its called ' Cryptoanarchy ".

ONE major drawback though is an acceptance of money and markets is required at this early pre-luxury-communist phase.

So you will be accused of right-opportunism.

Definitely glad to see them on the website as he definitely identified as an anarchist in the 1990s at least. His first letter to the media, in June 1993, began with the words: "We are an anarchist group calling ourselves FC." A later communiqué from April 1995 repeated: "We call ourselves anarchists." The Manifesto discusses "our particular brand of anarchism" in Note 34.

Ideally there'd be more disclaimers & potentially some popular sorting mechanisms directly under the main search box, next to where it says; "You can use the following prefixes to search a word in a specific field". Such as a check box for only anarchist texts that would exclude texts labelled not-anarchist. 

I understand there's no easy answers though. I'm going to be wrestling with similar dilemmas on the website I built specifically to host Ted K documents, suggested reading & broader topics. I'm pro-tech myself, but I just find his life story and impact really interesting. So, I'm hoping the website can work to draw people in with similar politics to him and similar mental health issues frankly, and then for the suggested reading and discussion spaces connected to the website to have a deprogramming effect and be a mental health support. 

Like a popular text on the website is simply 'how to unfuck your friendships' and the discord has already played host to a discussion between people encouraging each other to think rationally about their depression diagnosis.

Other things I've done is have a list of essays critiquing his politics on the front page of the website. And when collecting together research on the misanthropic terror 'group' ITS, I just titled the text 'a text dump on eco-extremism' rather than dignify many of their fictional stories by calling them communiques.