Stateless Patchwork and Intangible Capital: an Explanation

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It seems that, when I wrote The Anarcho-Accelerationist Primer, many people did not understand my concept of ‘stateless Patchwork’. On one hand, I can see why they misunderstood — it’s a term that I use in about four different interchangeable and secretly-equivalent ways, and that probably relies a bit too much on the anarchist mindset to be understood. On the other hand, the way that it most often gets misunderstood — i.e., “stateless Patchwork is when there’s no unified government and a bunch of physically distinct societies side-by-side” — is inexplicable to me.

As such, this essay is my attempt at explaining stateless Patchwork in a clear and comprehensive way.

Before I can explain stateless Patchwork, I need to explain intangible capital. I need to explain this for two reasons. Firstly, intangible capital is extremely important and yet so rarely talked about in socialist circles. Secondly, stateless Patchwork is — among other things — a way of viewing intangible capital.

Capital is usually separated into intangible assets and physical assets. Physical assets are talked about often enough — they are the physical means of production. Intangible assets, though, are too-often missed in socialist discussions of economics.

Intangible assets are all the forms of capital that one cannot directly pick up and hold. It includes human capital, relational capital, and structural capital.

Human capital is all the attributes inherent to actors. This includes, but is not limited to, the knowledge and skills that actors have. It also includes their inherent mental and physical attributes.

Relational capital is the relationships that an actor has with other actors. The most lucrative form that this takes is in the mind-share that platforms have — the biggest thing standing in the way of making a competitor for Uber or Lyft (for example) is that it would be hard to get others to download your competing app. The most common form that this takes, though, is in one’s personal reputation and personal contacts — “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know”.

Structural capital is all the institutional infrastructure that makes up a firm. It is the org chart, the company culture, the knowledge passed around the office, the methods developed to deal with specific issues within the specific firm, etc, etc..

Now, all three (human, relational, and structural) of these sorts of capital are based in the existence of information — specifically, information that is not known by all actors.

The information that comprises human capital mostly takes the form of skills known by some actors and not others — the more actors have a skill, the higher the supply, the lower the rents. The information that compromises an actor’s relational capital takes the form of information that other actors know about it. The information that compromises an organization’s structural capital takes the form of information that is (in some, perhaps overly poetic, sense) contained within the organization — especially about how to organize the organization and what to do within it. It could, perhaps more literally, be seen as the information that is distributed among a group of actors and tells them how to act within that group.

All of these forms of capital, being based on infinitely copyable information, are in some sense naturally self-destroying. The higher the rents on having information, the more value actors will expend to get it. The more value actors expend to get it, the more actors will get it. The more that actors expend to get it, the lower the rents on having that information go. On a long enough time-scale, the time-discounted rents on these forms of capital tend towards the cost of acquiring them.

It would appear, naively, that intangible and physical capital have a rather different divide than they really do. This is inaccurate. It is not even the case that physical capital is made of objectively existing objects while intangible capital is made up of information. Both are, arguably, made up of information — at least partially. Physical capital is not the objects themselves. It is the claim to those objects — physical capital is a social norm created and maintained through both violence and reputation. The ability to do violence ultimately rests in human, structural, and physical capitals — that is to say, our minds and bodies, our organization, and our weapons. Of course, that definition recurses. Reputation is relational capital, perhaps mixed with structural capital. In this way, we see that intangible capital precedes and creates physical capital. This is where our socialist insights begin to transform our use of this conceptual framework in a major way.

It would seem that the real difference between intangible capital and physical capital is that intangible capital is not transferable, and physical capital is. One can buy a tractor, and once one has done so, the person from whom the tractor was purchased now no longer has that tractor. One cannot directly and easily buy intangible capital — it must be created. One can hire a consultant to help one acquire the intangible capital through an act of self-modification, but the consultant does not lose their own ability to do that labor in the future through this process, and the success of this attempt at self-modification (or, perhaps, self-creation) is not certain.

However, even the ability to transfer physical capital is a manifestation of the social process (norms maintained through reputation and violence) that makes an object into physical capital. It is not at all true that all imaginable systems would allow for all physical capital to be transferable through a market process. In feudalism, land titles were both the main form of capital and were transferable only through inheritance, gift, war, and (arguably) vassalage. Under occupancy-and-use, land titles might not be transferable at all, only abandonable and homesteadable. Under a sort of ultra-strict quasi-geoism, it might be the case that all land is rented through the local community and never leaves it. So on and so on.

We must always keep in mind that physical capital is a significantly more changeable and socially constructed thing than intangible capital is. Further, intangible capital is almost intrinsically less bound to be scarce than physical capital is.

With all this in mind, I can finally and clearly explain what I mean by “stateless Patchwork”.

Here are the four things that I mean by ‘stateless Patchwork’:

1 — the Patch as a social relationship: a Patch is really just a shared social infrastructure, one that is created, maintained, and occupied by its members. So, you could/would have Patches that ‘overlapped’ in ‘their’ territory — the members would be part of different societies within the same geographical territory. Except, of course, “overlapped” and “their territory” are both misnomers — a Patch doesn’t own its territory, it “owns” and is owned by, its members.

2 — a reminder that the Patch might ‘acquire’ some territory, but that it necessarily exists prior to and independent of any territory: since a Patch is a social relationship, any claims that it might make to territorial existence are a sort of lie. This, of course, is true for states in general — anyone who fully understands the anarchist mindset knows that states aren’t real, and never have been. Just because someone colors in a section of a map does not change the properties of the territory. Any claims that anyone makes to ‘ownership’ of a territory (whether this ‘ownership’ is capitalist or statist!) must be enforced by, ultimately, violence aimed at those who would otherwise freely ignore such bombastic claims of exclusive control. Ownership is not a declaration, it is a threat. Even to the extent that members of a community might ‘peacefully’ negotiate out who is allowed to claim what, the continuation of these peaceful-seeming claims relies on someone being able to bring violence to bear against those who would disregard these claims — whether those are internal defectors or external interlopers.

3 — a way of viewing Actually Existing groups: all groups, if they are used enough for their members to readily identify themselves as belonging to them, are Patches. This is the converse of the first definition. In this sense, society is already a stateless Patchwork — gay culture (or a given city’s gay culture) is a Patch, a company is a Patch, a church’s community is a Patch, so on and so forth.

4 — the most natural bundlings of capital: a Patch is a bundling of relational and structural capital, with ownership not completely localized to any one member, though some members may hold more ownership than others — even this inequality is fluid and ill-defined: ability to extract rents is likely to shift, be uncertain, and not be easily intentionally transferable. It is a socially-created and socially-existing commons.

Now, obviously, once you understand all four of these definitions of “stateless Patchwork”, you also understand that each of them implies the other three. But, from a surface-level perspective, the relationship between them might seem tenuous — and, from a statist and territory-obsessed perspective, the concept might seem meaningless.

However, it should be noted that the concept calls out for you to intentionally enter into it — to go from a theory of stateless Patchwork to a praxis of it. You’ve been unintentionally creating, maintaining, and using stateless Patches. I want you to go out and do so intentionally, using a fuller understanding of their potential to work your desire upon the world.

Given that, from a stateless Patchwork viewpoint, mainstream society also looks like a Patch — one that creates private property, the state, and all the other accouterments of the distributed AI that is market-capitalism, I am telling you to do something insurrectionary: I am telling you to hijack the membership and intangible capital of the mainstream, and use that to make your own Patches, aided by an informed intent towards Exit.