The Artisan as Anarch

Whose permission do we need?

These are strange times.

In the same week that I have watched recruiters and technology businesses treating people as disposable, behaving like sociopaths and destroying any credibility they have as leaders, I have talked with venture capitalists who have rounded on craft and value as a true source of differentiation. Thinkers who have moved beyond the numbers to the substance.

It feels like a bit of an inversion. It reminded me of Jünger’s Anarch, and the fact that Ed Brenegar once used the term to describe me, so I had to go and find out what it meant.

In Eumeswil, the narrator Manuel Venator is a night-steward to the Condor, the tyrant of a small post-historical city-state (or today, maybe a tech company). Venator serves competently, even loyally in outward conduct, while remaining inwardly sovereign and entirely uncommitted. Jünger draws the distinction with great care: the anarchist wishes to overthrow the ruler; the Anarch is indifferent to him. The anarchist is a positive opposite of the monarch (defined by the throne); the Anarch is the monarch's true counterpart: sovereign in himself, owing nothing to the order, but also seeking to overthrow nothing. He is what the monk is to the believer: the same impulse turned inward and made self-sufficient.

As I was reflecting on this, two emails landed next to each other in my inbox. The first from Gaping Void, whose work I have always liked, reflecting on the Starbucks rediscovery of what had made them popular in the first place, which they had then optimised just about out of existence. The second was a stunning piece by Abi Awomosu brought to my attention by Paul Crick on the relationship between art and necessity. It’s a long piece, but very well worth reading, to the extent I’ve printed it off, because I need to read it several times. At its core, the idea is that when it comes to art and necessity, the necessity is not for the art itself. It is the artist’s need to produce it. It is part of who they are, something that only they can bring forth, regardless of how it is received. It has absolutely nothing to do with value, other than in retrospect. It is what sits underneath: ideas of craft and mētis. It is emotere, energy in motion. A soul in search of expression.

It is the force that is constrained in all of us from the time we go to school, and what isn’t finished there is finished in the workplace. It is the energy that is the antithesis of productivity and efficiency. It is the thing that wants us to allow it to emerge into the world, not as something complete and wonderful, but as something with potential and possibility.

The opening of the piece by Abi Awomosu centred on the nature of the Ten Commandments, and in particular, that the forbidding of graven images is the second one, coming before all the other sins of murder, adultery and all the coveting. It’s about the importance of making sure that the one who gives permission doesn’t have any competition.

As I say, it’s a long and complicated piece, but the idea is sitting with me.

Part of her long argument is that now, through AI, competence is free. Necessity is not. Letting our necessity loose on the world needs us to be granted permission in many areas. From our friends and family, from our culture, from our business, and of course, ourselves.

Whoever it was said “Speak the truth and the truth shall set you free” knew what they were talking about. Just the merest whisper of an unacceptable truth in many businesses is enough for you to be granted that freedom.

I’ve now been working long enough with AI to understand that there’s a danger we have things the wrong way around. The danger is not what AI might do to our skills; it’s what our skills might do with AI. It’s less us who are in danger, and more the graven images that are major corporations.

Each of us, if we just pause for a moment and look at where we work and the environment we work in, we can see a multitude of gaps. The gaps left by obsession with the rush to scale and of productivity and efficiency. In the culture of the business or the organisation, pointing them out is the stuff of heresy. And yet they’re real.

In my Outside the Walls blog on Sunday, I quoted Leonard Cohen saying that “There’s a crack in everything. It’s where the light gets in.” And the light shows us the opportunities. It’s all those things that are too small, too insignificant, and too inconvenient for a business obsessed with scale and efficiency to deal with. Add them together, however, and rearrange them, and they can make that big, scaled business irrelevant.

And that is what artisans can do with AI.

Because artisans are natural anarchs; sovereign in themselves, owing nothing to the order, but also seeking to overthrow nothing.

Because there’s going to be enough opportunity illuminated by the cracks.