In 2017, I read and reviewed 200 books.

Wow.

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With that many candidates, competition for the best books of the year was bound to be fierce.  Let me see if I can’t pick out some winners.

Best Academic: In Defense of Disciplines by Jerry Jacobs. The idea that we have to break down disciplinary silos and get academic eggheads working together on major issues is no longer radical, it’s the tired conventional wisdom of over a half-century of academic management. Jacob torches this conventional wisdom, using bibliographic methods and employment data to show the disciplines are robust and flexible organizations that connect the work of individual scholars to enduring questions and approaches in human history.  The vaunted “interdisciplinary synthesis” is mostly applied majors like business and communications cannibalizing the traditional liberal arts, with decidedly mixed outcomes for students, and clearly negative outcomes for independent researchers.

Best Vietnam War: War Comes to Long An by Jeffrey Race. You’ve probably heard ad nauseum the phrase “Vietnam was a political war.”  In a close study of a single province outside Saigon over fifteen years, Race explores the implications of that phrase.  The key issue for the average villager was land reform, and the Communist front ably allied the four poorest classes of villagers against the top ranks of absentee landlords.  Communists were giving out plots, while the government was demand nine year of back rents.  Leadership was the second facet of the political war.  The Communists were dedicated to bottom-up leadership. Local cadres could be promoted up to district, province, region, and finally the Central Committee level. Government officials were dispatched from Saigon on the basis of their political connections and formal education, with little advancement for rural figures. Finally, this was a war, and violence was key. The mass destruction of American airpower, and sweep and cordon operations could damage but not destroy the underground VC infrastructure, while 80 assassinations of government officials in 1960 was enough to cripple the official presence in the province. Every insurgency is local, and War Comes to Long An reveals enduring truths about the Vietnam War and basic flaws in the American strategy.

Best Science Fiction: Hardwired by Walter John Williams. A gem of vintage cyberpunk, Hardwired features Cowboy, a cybernetically enhanced pilot who races armored hovercrafts across the ruins of America to smuggle life-saving medicine under the guns of the orbital cartels. This is a perfect wailing power chord of a book, all neon reflections in chrome and black glass. Hardwired gets what it means to be an outlaw, that rebel spirit inherent in the best cyberpunk, which the imitators miss.

Best Fantasy: The Traitor Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson. Baru Cormorant is perhaps the most unlikely fantasy protagonist in history.  An accountant from a recently colonized land, she enters the civil service and winds up in charge of a key province rumbling with rebellion.  She has to chart a course through treachery, maintaining her own counsel in the face of intrigue, assassination, and a full blown war. This is what it looks like to try and change the system from within.

Best RPG: Dog Eat Dog by Liam Lwinge Burke. Exhibit A in the case that RPGs can be art.  Dog Eat Dog is a game about colonialism and power on a fictional South Pacific Island. The wealthiest player IRL is the Occupation, the game master roll. Beginning with a list of stereotypes about the natives and the occupation, the game plays out in scenes, which escalate to chance and then the Occupations fiat. At the end of the scene tokens are exchanged to indicate players who resisted or cooperated with the resistance, and a new rule about the world is added. Dog Eat Dog brilliantly uses the rules to force interesting discussions about power, culture, and benevolence.

Best History: King Leopold’s Ghost by Adam Hothschild. The Belgian Congo was one of the greatest rolling atrocities in human history, a decades long rape of central Africa by King Leopold and the men under his command. European mercenaries used hostage-taking, mutilation, and the lash to extract millions of dollars of ivory and rubber while killing millions of Africans.  The whole colossal enterprise was exposed and destroyed by one of the first international human rights campaigns, which brought together African-American missionaries and English moral reforms to influence the deadly game of 19th century imperialism.

​Best Fiction: The Caine Mutiny by Herman Wouk. A classic of American letters, The Caine Mutiny holds up as a study of courage, cowardice, and the pressures of command in war. Set on an obsolete destroyer-minesweeper wandering around the Pacific Theater, it’s a tense and fascinating study of the psychology of men in combat, and the ordinary heroes of the US Navy.

Best Non-Fiction: Merchants of Doubt by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway. “Post-truth” was the deemed the word of the year in 2016 by the Oxford Dictionary. The conditions of this darkest timeline, vehemently anti-expertise and scornful of the ideas of a fixed reality, are no accident. Rather, they are the deliberate strategic creation of Big Tobacco lawyers, unscrupulous physicists, and hard-line conservatives, to enact a political agenda that is, bluntly, profiting off the deaths of ordinary people. I wish there was a silver bullet to slay this strategy, but for now, know it, recognize it, and give it no quarter. The time for “just asking questions” is long past.

Back in June 2015, I realized that I read about one science fiction novel a week on average, and figured that I might as well do something purposeful with that.  At that moment the Sad Puppies were an ongoing fiasco, and I figured I might as well do something useful with my leisure reading, like read all the Hugo Award Winners for Best Novel, in order starting with 1954’s The Demolished Man and working my way to the present, finishing with The Fifth Season in February 2017.  Now, with the advantage of some time and distance, I’d like to take a retrospective look at the experience.  If you’re curious about a specific book or trend, all my reviews are up on Goodreads.

First, this was in many ways a reread.  Science fiction is an important part of my life, and I’d read 40 of the 65 Hugo Winners (counting ties) already.  However, it was still a pleasure to go back and revisit old friends and personal touchstones like Dune, classic Heinlein, and Neuromancer.  It was also a chance to find some new favorites, like Lord of Light and The Snow Queen. The Hugos are at the end of the day a fan award, a popularity contest among the very unique group of people who go to WorldCons, but they do have good taste. There are a lot of genre classics in there.  I’d rate the Hugos as a better representative of what’s good in the field than say, the Oscars as a representation of cinema.  Of course, as a popularity contest, it’s ultimately a reflection of mindshare.  Some authors win because they have dedicated fan bases, or it’s “their time.”  Only rarely does a new author break out with a Hugo.  And then there are people like Robert Silverberg who were nominated year after year without winning anything.

So let’s take this in order.  Back in 1954, the WorldCon organizers had no idea they were setting up an institution. There was no Hugo for 1955, and the next winner, Mark Clifton’s They Rather Be Right, is a hot mess of ambitious and poorly developed ideas married to terrible characterization. The field as a whole seems to be finding its feet in the transistion from the magazine and short-story dominated Golden Age of Astounding Science Fiction, and the new format of cheap paperbacks (see George RR Martin’s introduction to Rogues to get a sense of the era).

The first period really lands with Heinlein’s Starship Troopers. More than a power-armored adventure, this is also a provocative meditation on the nature of citizenship and society.  The next few years would see a string of great novels tackling increasingly sophisticated topics: A Canticle for Leibowitz, Stranger in a Strange Land, The Man in the High Castle, Dune, and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.  That’s six classics in eight years, a string of success that’s hard to match. These books play with time, power, the cycles of history and how individuals might break them.

1969 seems as good as any point to mark the end of the first era of the Hugos.  The post-modern fragments of Stand on Zanzibar and the gender-bending intrigue of The Left Hand of Darkness take a new approach to the question “what makes a great science fiction story?”  It’s probably no accident that Brunner and Le Guin were the first foreigner and first woman to win the Hugo. There seemed to be a backlash against these unconventional stories, with the revenge of hard scifi based around extrapolating fantastic engineering from unconventional science.  Niven, Clarke, and Asimov all picked up Hugos in this period, with grandmasters Clarke and Asimov getting it for subpar works.
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The 70s were a slog, with a few good works (The Forever War, The Dispossed, Gateway), but I didn’t realize how depressing the decade was until 1984 with Brin’s Startide Rising. Startide is a silly book, featuring talking dolphins, young adult protagonists, and scenery chewing alien villains, but it was the first book in a long time that was actually fun, taking joy in the wonder of the universe, in adventure and defying death.
The mid 80s through the mid 90s saw a creative renaissance, with the debuts of talented and imaginative authors like William Gibson, Orson Scott Card, and Neal Stephenson. It also saw the rise of the mega-series as the new scifi format.  Card was the first author to win twice in a run, and the first to win with a clear sequel with Ender’s Game and Speaker for the Dead. Lois McMaster Bujold won three Hugos for her Vorkosigan series.  Kim Stanley Robinson picked up two for his doorstopper Mars trilogy.  The rise of the extended series as a format is something which the Hugos slowly adapted to. They only added a ‘best series’ category in 2016.  The mid 80s through 90s is another period of great works, matched only by 60s for consistent quality.

2001 is a solid place to mark another turning point, with the Hugo going to the fourth Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.  The boundaries of genre are fuzzy, but Harry Potter makes no bones about being fantasy rather than scifi.  While I do think children’s literature can have literary qualities, this was a rare misstep. Goblet of Fire is simply a mess of an extended fetch quest that loses a lot the charm of the first three books.  The 2000s seemed like they were going through an identity crisis, with classic scifi tropes discarded for the modern myths of Neil Gaiman, fantasy from Bujold, and Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. The straight scifi works, Hominids and Spin, are cold and alienating, a fringe books for fans.  The 2010s could make an argument that the popularity contest aspect of the Hugos have gone too far:  John Scalzi won for Redshirts, a book that he admits is not one of his best, and Jo Walton’s Among Others is gratitutious fanservice for longtime fans.

Reaching the present, the state of the genre is strong. There are talented new authors emerging today, including N.K. Jeminison, Ann Leckie, and Paolo Bacigalupi.  I was not personally a fan of The Three Body Problem, but it’s nice to see non-Anglo cultures represented. Clarkesworld regularly includes Chinese science fiction, which I find to be enthusiastically over-stuffed with technology and themes. They seem to be going through their own Golden Age when every idea is new and exciting, and could bear a little cooling off.

I had some thoughts about generational shifts in science fiction, but the only thing I can say is that the Baby Boomers grabbed the field in the mid 1980s, and haven’t really let go since, although GenX authors are increasingly winning Best Novel. It’s rare for someone under 30 to win a Hugo (Zelazny won his first at 29). Fandom has shifted from 1954, and WorldCon apparently trends a lot greyer than ComicCon.  Millennials prefer their scifi in motion.  That said, I expect my generation to make its mark soon.

Closing thoughts:  The Hugos represent the best of science fiction, a serious attempt to grapple with humanity’s place in the universe, and human qualities that change and stay constant with scientific and technological circumstances.  The stories range from psychological dramas and character-driven comedies to fantastic extrapolations of technology and the workings of natural processes. At their best, they question reality, at their worst they inscribe the prejudices of bygone eras. The prose style ranges from merely workable to truly supreme, but these are all talented wordsmiths.  I’d say that the Hugos trend conservative, with a strong preference for a self-defined “high science fiction”, but there are more than a few exceptions.
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And should you read them? Well, all of the Hugos in order is a commitment, but I think I got something stepping outside of the classics I already knew. And while I’m no fan of nerd elitism, if you haven’t read Dune, or Neuromancer, or The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, you’re missing out.

The first March for Science is in less than a week, April 22, 2017.  While I can’t predict what turnout will be like, or what the effects will be, I’m excited.  There’s a palpable energy among scientists and science advocates.

What I am less enthused about are opinion pieces from scientists and science policy professionals arguing against the march. Dr. Robert S. Young writes in the New York Times that he is worried that “[T]rying to recreate the pointedly political Women’s March will serve only to reinforce the narrative from skeptical conservatives that scientists are an interest group and politicize their data, research and findings for their own ends” or as CSPO program manager Jason Lloyd writes on Slate that it will interfere with the larger project of “[F]iguring out how scientists can build an enduring relationship with all segments of the American public, so that discounting, defunding, or vilifying scientists’ important work is politically intolerable.”
 
The argument of these op-eds is that this march will be counter-productive because it will be seen as partisan, directed solely against the current president, and that therefore scientists will lose their objectivity. That precious quality allows scientists to act as a neutral mediator to between competing factions, and will be abandoned if scientists come out with slogans and posters. I think this is wrong, based on a misunderstanding of the relationship between science and society, and that marching is a general duty for scientists and those who regard themselves as science advocates.
 
Objectivity is a key scientific norm, but objectivity doesn’t come from holding oneself aloof from politics.  As Robert Merton described it, science is objective because it is universal. A scientific truth owes its truthfulness to referencing as external quality of reality that does not depend on the particularity of the observer. Objectivity comes from the process, not the person. And following Karl Popper, scientific statements are scientific because in a logical sense, they are falsifiable. They say “This is how the world, and if I’m wrong, the world is some other way.” A lot of scholarship since then has shown how science often does not achieve these very high ideals, I am particularly fond of the complications of experimenter’s regress as discussed in Collins and Pinch’s The Golem, but even if science as-it-is-done is the work of privileged insiders, bounded by a theoretical paradigm, inextricable from “post-normal” considerations of value, and so on.  Still, these ideals of science give us something to aim towards

But the reason why I don’t much like the op-eds against is the unspoken reasoning behind their arguments: If scientists hide behind objectivity and don’t criticize Republicans, they’ll listen to us in the future, and maybe they won’t cut our funding. This is abuse victim thinking (with deepest apologies to real victims of domestic violence). Objectivity comes from speaking and thinking carefully, not from stripping yourself of any prior values. Indeed, if scientists don’t talk more about their values, demonstrate those values in public, then I don’t see how non-scientists can take them seriously as “honest brokers” of complicated knowledge.

Professor Megan Halpern put it more eloquently than I ever could:
 
“We have an obligation to march precisely because we are in a position of power. For the past few centuries, science has occupied an incredibly powerful position in the world. Marching from a position of power may seem contradictory, but it isn’t. I think by marching, we can show our strength. We have this opportunity to stand up for children and families without safe water, such as those in Flint, Michigan, or to speak up about the causes of disintegrating ocean ecosystems and rising sea levels. We don’t march because people at the EPA are being oppressed; we march so that the EPA can effectively protect us all. We are not disenfranchised underdogs, but it is up to us to stand up for those who are disenfranchised when our work is ignored or abused. And if we fail to show up? We tell a different story. We reveal ourselves as weak, not strong. This is why it is important that AAAS, Sigma Xi, and 25 partner organizations have joined the march. They are our megaphones. In short, with great power comes great responsibility.”
 
Rallies are about demonstrating power. The March for Science is a moment to affirm that science has value to society, that scientists are not unemotional robots but people who care about the same problems that everyone else does, that we are part of a vibrant political coalition.  When utter nonsense rules the day, and I direct anyone who is skeptical on this to @realDonaldTrump, scientists have a duty to stand up and say that hard work matters and external reality exists. Truth is determined by experiment and discarding all other alternatives, not what is most politically expedient. Words have meaning and power must be precise in thought and action because mistakes get people killed.
 
I’d like to close by quoting from one of my favorite philosophers of science, Ludwik Fleck. Fleck was a Polish Jew, a doctor who hung around philosophical circles in the 1930s and wrote an early book on the sociology of science, which Thomas Kuhn repackaged as ‘paradigm shifts’ in The Structure of Scientific Revolution. He developed a typhus vaccine in the L’viv ghetto and survived the horrors of Auschwitz and Buchenwald to have a distinguished postwar scientific career.
 
Fleck wrote “A fact is that which opposes arbitrary thinking.”
 
On Saturday, I’ll be at the March for Science. 

This future world is based on a worldbuilding exercise at Hollywood Invades Tempe 2016 by Trisha Williams and Joe Unger of Pigeonhole Productions.  Given a “what-if” prompt, and a set of hexagon tiles covering five entities (Object, Event, System, Person, Wildcard) in three domains (Personal, Social, and Environmental), groups of about four people built out a world, focusing on a succession of elements responding to three disruptions.  I’d like to describe the world my group came up with, with the world in italics, and our process in plaintext. This account is of course, partial and my own perspective.

We began with the prompt: The year is 2066, and what if there’s no school, no teachers, and all learning is tribal.

One of the group played a Social Event card, declaring that biohacking had become common as a technology. Another person added climate change caused ecological disruption.  I thought about tribes, and how they differ from current societies. The key differences are that tribes are about strong inclusion and exclusion rather than universality, and charismatic and traditional leadership rather than legalistic procedural leadership. What we needed to seed this world was a leader and a boundary.

Biohacking, the modification of human beings by diverse groups for diverse ends, without central oversight or purpose, has become the major driver of change in society. In the Valley of the Sun, the elder of the biohacking community is Azaria. Witchy, queer, and brown, Azaria is leading a movement of desert adapted humans, Homo sapiens sonorans, as part of a broader movement of ecologically defined new human sub-species. Her aesthetics are half Navajo and half narcocorrido; her ideology radical; her commitment to the cause absolute.

This matters, because the United States is falling apart. In the Southwest, it’s all about water, and a literal shooting war between California, Nevada, Arizona, and Colorado over the drought-stricken remnants of the Colorado River and the major aquifers.  President Ironwood, a staunch patriot and Christian, sends in the Army to restore order and to crush Azaria’s biohacked tribe in defense of human nature.

The first two disruptions were political unrest and climate disruption, which we invoked on our own as a group. All of this is based on the near present. Water conflicts are barely being held in check, and a 2010 Arizona law bans the creation of human-animal hybrids. Azaria’s radical transboarder biohacking movement is a natural target for a government seeking to exert control.

At first, Azaria’s tribe had grown slowly, a few initiates at a time, but now she needed a way to fill the ranks of her army fast to beat the Federals. Azaria pioneered her greatest biohacking creation, The Snake, a custom creature that which each bite injected a cocktail of synthetic neurotransmitters and retroviruses, reprogramming ordinary humans into H. sonorans and sharing the knowledge of the tribe in a new kind of collective mind, carried by the biological transmission of small molecules.

These initiations became massive rituals, raves and ecstatic dances where the knowledge of the tribe expanded exponentially in psychedelic communion. Somehow, and no one yet knows because scientific investigation is no longer a thing in this world, Azaria’s people achieved what the Ghost Dance attempted. Her warriors, immune to bullets and conventional weapons, triumphed over the American Army and achieved political independence.
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Someone else suggested “dance” as important, and I proposed that it was the Ghost Dance and it really worked using my Wild Card.  At this point, there was a rather sharp divide about biohacking and the aesthetics of this world. Some people pushed for a more conventional look, the shiny steel of a surgical clinical and the anonymous beige machines and pipette tubes of the biotech lab. I wanted Azaria’s technology to work on an entirely novel basis, biohacking accomplished within the body and in plants and animals through meditation and ritual, rather than the manipulation of genetic base-pairs in a lab.  Because I’m writing this history, I’m taking my approach to the aesthetics as true. The third disruption was Technological Revolution, and biotech without the tech counts there. Also, I know I’m conflating Navajo and Paiute religious practices. In this case, I plead Rule of Cool.  Azaria is a syncretistic fictional character.

Azaria’s invention was also her downfall. Before the war, ecological tribes expanded slowly, living in the interstices of conventional society. Now they were everywhere, and a group of Channel Hoppers switched from tribe to tribe as they wished, taking knowledge with them, and trading new adaptations. Azaria did her best to protect the integrity of the Sonorans, inventing new organisms and a new group of exorcists to seek out foreign molecules and clear them from the tribe.  But her ideology was too rigid for the rapidly changing climate, and the desire of humans for change.

A new leader emerged, Coyote. He preached ecological adaptation to the entire world, chasing the pleasure of joining a new tribe, and the need for humans to be free, rather than following the ecological strictures of any one niche. His followers freely traded identities with sloppy kisses and unprotected sex. With every trade, the collective intelligence of humanity and their mastery over the Ghost Dance grew, and eventually even Azaria was forced to give in to the new human nature. Now united, the ecological tribes used their powers to reverse the damage of climate change.

Pretty cool, if I do say so myself. I put a lot of my own ideas in this world, and they were definitely stronger for bouncing them off the group, and for the surprise inclusion of biohacking and dance as major themes.  I’d even say that we managed to stay more grounded than most groups, with a basic three act structure around Azaria’s rise, defeating President Ironwood, and finding an accord with Coyote.

I did wind up inventing magic, which is bad practice as a futurist, and apparently a mistake in reading the rules. “Wild Card” was supposed to mean pick one of the other options (Object, Event, System, Person) rather than introduce an Outside-Context Problem. My more substantive critiques are that resolution of negotiations in game, and the inclusion of quieter participants and more grounded ideas, need to more robustly represented, but these are durable and tricky problems for any foresight game. I haven’t had much luck solving them in Eventuality either. One thing which I did, which was not in the rules, was good names. Azaria came out of a handy RPG name-generator app. Coyote was a natural fit for trickster and someone broadly involved in North America. Ironwood was added after the fact. Names have power, and a way to name things quickly could be an interesting methodological advance.

Futurist Peter Schwartz was on hand to sum up the event, and he noted that in all of the ten or so futures presented, the common solution was universal empathy, a new way to connect human minds. This is because we’re all geeks, and we know where we’re weak. Is empathy really the issue at hand? And if not, what real ‘critical uncertainties’ is a quest for universal empathy hiding?

Thanks to Trisha and Joe, and to Adam Collis and the Hollywood Invades Tempe team, for giving me the opportunity to participate in this workshop.

This is not the America I expected to wake up in. I'm heartbroken. But grief can't last forever. We're going to fight. The will be time to organize and activate and reach out, but right now, this is the time to strategize and center. Not to plan, because no plan survives contact with reality, but to figure out what kind of world you want to live in, and what means and resources exist to get you there.

If you know me at all, you know I read a lot.  These are the books that'll be thinking about, as I make my own strategy for whatever comes next.

A Vietcong Memoir-Truong Nhu Tang: We're going to have to go underground. These days, the victory of communism in Vietnam looks pretty inevitable, but for a handful of intellectuals and peasants in 1960, opposing their own enthusiastically oppressive government and the full weight of the American war machine, it seemed anything but so. The strategy of the revolution was political, based around building alliances rather than winning victories. Every tactical success through force left the South Vietnamese government and its American allies more isolated, more extreme, more vulnerable in the end. Amplify the corruption and brutality of the regime, separate them from their allies until only a handful of craven opportunists are left.  Expect to suffer, terribly, in the moment. And please, learn from Truong and do not become what you despise.

Distraction-Bruce Sterling: "The year is 2044, and the State of the Union is a farce." After a bitterly contested election, political operative Oscar Valparasio is enjoying one last junket on the campaign's dime when he stumbles into an insane scientific-political conspiracy.  Look for optimism at the worst of times, for some serious Alternatives to the Status Quo, and for a book that still smells like the future fifteen years after publican.  There's a political realignment in the wind, and I'll catch you on the Upwing.

Certain to Win-Chet Richards: Smaller and weaker entities can triumph over bigger and stronger adversaries through speed, morale, and clarity of focus in an environment of fear and uncertainty. In the long run, the side that is most adaptable will win. This is the best non-military introduction to Col. Boyd's OODA loop, and I believe the framework in which we'll succeed. Get weird. Get seriously, dedicatedly, weird. Come at them from a million angles and never give up. Don't trust leaders (not President Obama, not Michael Moore or Jon Stewart), don't trust your communication networks and social media (and yes, I recognize the irony). Find your tribe and trust them. Adapt, evolve, survive, win.

Every Man Dies Alone-Hans Fallada: A stunning and heartbreaking novel of life under Nazi Germany. Do I think it's going to get that bad? Well, expect the worst and you'll always be pleasantly surprised. The thing is that even if we avoid the most obvious excesses and crimes, great evil at the highest echelons of power will be echoed by increased crudity and petty brutality on the street. We see this already, in a rash of Nazi vandalism less than 24 hours after the election. Decency and decent people are in for some hard times. Figure out what you have that they can never take away, because you'll need it.

The Left Hand of Darkness-Ursula K Le Guin. Le Guin's most recent book is blurbed "Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now... We’ll need writers who can remember freedom — poets, visionaries — realists of a larger reality." This is true, and we're going to need to remember freedom, remember reality, hold on to something that won't sink or crush or break. Le Guin is the last of the greats. This story of human connection across an unimaginable cultural and biological gulf is a work of true genius. 

I’d like to write up some points form my recent Association of Internet Researchers talk, “Napalm on Trolls: Counter-Insurgency Theories for Reducing Online Harassment,” and stake a small space for a forthcoming article.  This post follows directly on my Memetic Disarmament post from about a year ago, which many of you read and shared. My theory is that harassment is an enduring feature of online discussion because many major platforms make it very easy to attack people, and conversely difficult to defend against attacks. These platforms offer what I calling guerilla affordances, which in concert with weakly governed online spaces, makes platforms like Twitter havens for abuse rather than discussion.

Affordances are a slippery term in the literature on technology (see Nagy & Neff, 2015, Imagined Affordances: Reconstructing a Keyword for Communication Theory for a solid review of the origins of the term, and further theorizing of how to use it in the future), but I would describe them simply, as the kinds of action that a technology or technological system makes easy rather than hard, and the kinds of purposes that users see as potentially active in those technologies. Affordances bridge the concrete space of the physical world, and the mathematic cognates to materiality in the digital, the psychological and perceptual capabilities of individual intelligences, and the social and culture possibilities of large numbers of people.

Guerrilla affordances are therefore those which invite users to make attacks, which shield them from the consequences of being an aggressor, and which amplify the scope of attacks.  The tricky part is that many guerrilla affordances are a slight modification of the default affordances of a social communication platform, some generic statement like “We want our users to express themselves, communicate with each other, and discover what’s popular, without jumping through a bunch of hoops.”  That said, let’s talk about some guerilla affordances.
 
Emotional Asymmetry
“Select the tactic of seeming to come from the East and attacking from the West; avoid the solid, attack the hollow; attack; withdraw; deliver a lightning blow, seek a lightning decision. When guerrillas engage a stronger enemy, they withdraw when he advances; harass him when he stops; strike him when he is weary; pursue him when he withdraws.”
--Mao

One thing that is key to note is that this not about speech as expression or communication. This is about speech as a weapon. Harassers are very clear that their objective is to silence their opponents through psychological harm, threats of violence, and ultimately physical harm.  Why would you tell someone to kill themselves if you didn’t actually want them to commit suicide? The emotional asymmetry comes in because it is easy and fun to flame, insult, and otherwise self-stimulate aggression, and much less pleasant to be on the receiving end. This affordance is psychological, rather than technological, but grounds everything that follows.

Easy Pseudonymity
“The guerrilla must move amongst the people as a fish swims in the sea.”
--Mao

You can ban somebody, but they’ll be back.  It is trivially easy make a new account on many services specifically for the purposes of harassment and these newbies have the exact same technological status as someone who’s been around for years, who has invested time and energy into building up an online rep.   The ability to strike, fade, and avoid attacks is key to all guerrilla strategies. Most counters to online attacks, such as bans and blocks, are ineffective because they target accounts, and accounts are almost always a disposal mask for the attacker behind them.
 
Brigading
“Guerrilla war is a kind of war waged by the few but dependent on the support of many.”
--B.H Liddell Hart

Distance is a funny thing online. I like to measure it in clicks, how many distinct actions it takes to go somewhere. The hyperlink, a basic building block of the web, means that nothing is more than one click away (In theory. For some reason getting pdfs of journal articles always takes me like five clicks).  Hyperlinking makes it easy amplify an attack, as people pass on “Look at this fucking shit links”.  It’s a conscious tactic, as Eron Gjoni, shopped his gamergate starting zeopost to SomethingAwful.com and Reddit before getting traction on 4chan to generate an army to hit his ex with, or reminding people to retweet a hashtag in the hopes of breaking into Twitter’s trending. Existing wells of guerrillas means that there’s a ready supply of angry jerks ready to supply a brigade.  These affordances give greater weight to a small, highly motivated minority than a more or less quiescent majority.
 
​Weakly Governed
“Nothing turns out to be so oppressive and unjust as a feeble government.”
--Edmund Burke

Law and order takes effort to maintain.  There are 2.5 police officers for 1000 people in the US.  The counter-insurgency rule of thumb is 20 counter-insurgents for 1000 civilians.  To take Twitter as an example again, it has about 3700 employees and 307 million monthly active users. Even if all those employees were on moderation, or community management, or whatever you want to call it, that’d be a ratio of 0.012 employees per 1000 users, several orders of magnitude lower than physical world comparisons.  Facebook is notorious for Mechanical Turking its content moderators, paying foreign contractors a few dollars an hour to check content (and occasionally come face-to-face with child porn or an ISIS execution). Unsurprisingly, content checking is based on simple mechanical rules like “are there nipples?” rather than political judgments like “is this group inciting race war?” 
 
Going Forward: Towards a Counter-Insurgency Theory of Platforms
“I think a failed state is the responsibility of the people who have made that state fail, and those are generally the people of that country.”
--Lakhdar Brahimi
 
The single largest point is that the creation of an online platform is a political act, and that politics requires awareness of choices and values.  It’s entirely insufficient to say that “both sides are wrong”, as SXSW did recently on this very topic of online harassment. I’m not advocating for any sort of government intervention or elaborate set of rules on thought crime: merely that terms of use need to be backed up with actual action, that the right to swing your fist ends at someone else’s nose, and that people who sign onto a platform purely to attack other users are low value, and ultimately toxic.  It’s been nearly 20 years since Barlow’s Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace, and if there are any anarchist-libertarian cyber autonomous zones governed according to the Golden Rule, I have yet to see them.

Affordances are both real and imaginary. What we need are real changes to make it a little easier to imagine that we’re citizens in a shared community, and a little harder that we’re fighters striking out against the evil around us.