A Thousand Small Fires

Every time you use a free app, search for something, or let a website remember who you are, you generate more information than the service actually needs to function. That extra information used to be treated as waste. It became, instead, the entire business model.The internet, and now the systems we call artificial intelligence, are not neutral tools that happened to get built — they're a second enclosure of the commons, continuing in a different material. From there it moves through Shoshana Zuboff's concept of behavioural surplus, Kate Crawford's account of the lithium, water, and labour hidden behind "the cloud," and a TIME investigation that found OpenAI's content-moderation pipeline ran partly through Kenyan workers paid as little as $1.32 an hour, into Joy Buolamwini's research on racial bias in facial recognition and a wrongful arrest in Detroit, and Meredith Whittaker's argument that AI isn't separate from the surveillance business model — it's an expansion of it.Where the alternative is already being built gets equal time: the hacker ethic that predates anarchist theory by decades, a rural South African cooperative that beat NYC Mesh to community-owned internet by two years, and a driver-owned rideshare app proving the current arrangement was a choice, not a law of nature.Further reading: Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (PublicAffairs, 2019) Kate Crawford, Atlas of AI (Yale University Press, 2021) Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (Doubleday, 1984) James Boyle, "The Second Enclosure Movement and the Construction of the Public Domain," Law & Contemporary Problems, 2003 — available via Duke Law, law.duke.edu Joy Buolamwini, Unmasking AI: My Mission to Protect What Is Human in a World of Machines (Random House, 2023) Billy Perrigo, "OpenAI Used Kenyan Workers on Less Than $2 Per Hour," TIME, January 18, 2023 The Drivers Cooperative — drivers.coop Zenzeleni Networks — zenzeleni.netTags: surveillance capitalism, AI ethics, algorithmic bias, digital enclosure, facial recognition, data labor, platform cooperativism, mesh networks, Shoshana Zuboff, Kate Crawford, Joy Buolamwini, Meredith Whittaker, GNU, free software, Cambridge Analytica, predictive policing, anarchismShow notes: The Algorithm Is Not Neutral A Thousand Small Fires — Season 2, Episode 1A small number of companies control the infrastructure that decides what billions of people see, buy, and are believed to be — how that happened, what it actually costs the people invisible inside the supply chain, and where people are already building outside its walls.In this episode:James Boyle's "second enclosure" and the enclosure thread this show picked up in season oneShoshana Zuboff, behavioural surplus, and instrumentarian powerKate Crawford's Atlas of AI — the lithium, the water, the labour behind "the cloud"OpenAI, Sama, and Kenyan data labellers paid $1.32 an hourMeredith Whittaker, the AI Now Institute, and AI as surveillance advertising's expansionCambridge Analytica and the infrastructure that made it possibleJoy Buolamwini, Gender Shades, and the wrongful arrest of Robert WilliamsThe hacker ethic, GNU/Linux, and Wikipedia — anarchist practice before anarchist theoryZenzeleni Networks, NYC Mesh, and the Drivers Cooperative

In July 1915, a woman named Luisa Capetillo was arrested in Havana for wearing trousers in public. She didn't apologize. She told the judge she always wore pants, and the charges were dropped. It's the only part of her life most people have heard, if they've heard anything at all.For a decade before that arrest, and years after it, Capetillo worked as a lectora, reading newspapers, novels, and anarchist theory aloud to cigar and tobacco workers who couldn't read for themselves, on factory floors across Puerto Rico, Cuba, Florida, and New York. She wrote one of the most direct early arguments in the Spanish-speaking world for women's liberation as part of the revolution, not an issue to deal with afterward. And she organized: in 1916 she helped lead a sugar strike that pulled out over forty thousand workers across Puerto Rico, still one of the largest labor actions in the island's history.This episode covers her childhood in Arecibo, the practice of the lectora and why factory owners fought to ban it, her writing on marriage and free love, the 1916 strike, a political compromise in 1919 that's worth sitting with rather than smoothing over, and the farm school she built at the end of her life on the theory that reading and organizing were never really separate.There's a harder question underneath it too: why a woman who organized forty thousand workers into her country's largest strike is harder to find in the history of anarchism than men who wrote considerably less and organized considerably fewer people.Further reading: Norma Valle-Ferrer, Luisa Capetillo, Pioneer Puerto Rican Feminist (Peter Lang, 2006; originally published in Spanish as Luisa Capetillo: Historia de una mujer proscrita, 1990) Luisa Capetillo, A Nation of Women: An Early Feminist Speaks Out / Mi opinión sobre las libertades, derechos y deberes de la mujer, ed. Félix V. Matos Rodríguez (Arte Público Press, 2004)Tags: Luisa Capetillo, anarchism, feminism, Puerto Rico history, labor history, women's history, tobacco workers, lectora, general strike, free love, Caribbean historyShow notes:The reader, the trousers, the tobacco floor A Thousand Small FiresLuisa Capetillo read anarchist theory aloud to tobacco workers who couldn't read for themselves, wrote one of the earliest direct arguments for women's liberation in the Spanish-speaking world, and organized forty thousand sugar workers into Puerto Rico's largest strike. This episode is an attempt to give her the ten minutes most anarchist histories didn't.In this episode:The Havana arrest, and the line that got the charges droppedWhat a lectora was, and why factory owners tried to ban themEnsayos Libertarios and her arguments on marriage and free loveOrganizing across Puerto Rico, Cuba, Florida, and New YorkThe 1916 sugar strike, and the arrest that followed it in Ceiba and ViequesThe 1919 Socialist Workers Party campaign, and what it cost her principlesThe farm school, and her death in 1922Why she's missing from most histories of anarchism, and what that absence has in common with Voltairine de Cleyre and Lucy Parsons

On May 5, 1920, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were arrested on a streetcar outside Boston, carrying loaded pistols and lying to police about where they'd been. Three weeks earlier, two men had been shot dead in a payroll robbery in South Braintree, Massachusetts. Sacco and Vanzetti had nothing to do with it. They were anarchists trying to protect their community, two days after a friend held in secret federal custody fell to his death from a fourteenth-floor window.That's not a footnote. It's the reason the case became what it became: a shoemaker and a fish peddler convicted less on evidence than on their politics, their nationality, and their fear, then executed seven years later, after a confession from the actual robber was thrown out and a governor's own advisory panel found the rigged trial fair.This episode is about the two men underneath the trial everyone half-remembers. Where they came from. What they believed. The militant anarchist movement around them, which included real bombings alongside real innocence. And what got said, in the last weeks of their lives, in the letters they wrote to each other and to the people trying to save them.It also sits with the harder question: what do you do with a case where the men on trial were framed, but the movement they belonged to wasn't uniformly peaceful? Honesty doesn't land cleanly on either side of that story.Further reading: Bruce Watson, Sacco and Vanzetti: The Men, the Murders, and the Judgment of Mankind (Pantheon, 2007) Paul Avrich, Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Background (Princeton University Press, 1991) The Letters of Sacco and Vanzetti, ed. Marion Frankfurter and Gardner Jackson (Viking Press, 1928) Massachusetts state archive on the case — mass.gov/info-details/sacco-vanzetti-who-were-sacco-vanzettiTags: Sacco and Vanzetti, anarchism, Red Scare, Palmer Raids, Luigi Galleani, Andrea Salsedo, wrongful conviction, labor history, Italian immigration, 1920s America, Judge Webster Thayer, capital punishment, Haymarket, Governor Michael Dukakis, direct action, state violence, anarchist historyShow notes:The shoemaker, the fish peddler, and the car nobody got to drive A Thousand Small FiresSacco and Vanzetti were arrested for a robbery and murder they didn't commit, on a night they were actually trying to protect their friends from the Palmer Raids. This episode traces the two men's lives before the arrest, the trial that convicted them anyway, and the seven years of appeals that ended in execution.In this episode:The arrest that had nothing to do with the robberyAndrea Salsedo's death and the Palmer RaidsSacco and Vanzetti's lives before 1920 — a shoe factory, a fish cart, and the 1916 Plymouth Cordage strikeThe trial, Judge Webster Thayer, and the confession that was thrown outSeven years of appeals, and the Lowell Committee's verdictThe letters — a furious one to the Defense Committee, a tender one to a fourteen-year-old boyWhat the Galleanisti's real bombings mean for how this story gets toldGovernor Dukakis's 1977 proclamation, fifty years later

I want to start with something I don't know how to resolve.Over the course of this season I have argued that the state is not your friend, that prisons do not produce safety, that settler colonialism is ongoing, that the feminist movement made things worse for the most marginalised women by handing their safety to the same system that endangered them. I believe all of that. And I also live inside all of it. I pay taxes that fund the prison system I said should not exist. I live on land whose original custodians never ceded it. I have called the police, once, in a situation where I did not know what else to do.The contradiction is not something I can argue my way out of. And I don't think the point of this show was ever to pretend I could.This is the season one finale of A Thousand Small Fires. It does not summarise. It reconsiders. It pulls threads from all fourteen episodes, names the three things the season did not resolve, and turns the critical lens on anarchism itself as a tradition that has not always practiced what it preaches.It closes with the questions i´m still carrying, about what it means to practice mutual aid rather than just believe in it, about what we owe people who need something now, about what you would have to give up. And with a glimpse of what season two is going to be about.Further reading:All reading from Episodes 1-13 remains relevant — this episode draws on the whole seasonUrsula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed (1974) — the novel closest in spirit to what this show is trying to doDean Spade, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next) (Verso, 2020)Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin, Anarchism and the Black Revolution — free at theanarchistlibrary.orgTags: season finale, prefigurative politics, mutual aid, anarchism, self-critique, prison abolition, settler colonialism, carceral feminism, Emma Goldman, Lucy Parsons, Zapatistas, Black Panthers, Mondragón, season two, A Thousand Small FiresShow notes:What are we actually building?A Thousand Small Fires — Season One FinaleThe season started with a question: what even is anarchism? This episode comes back to it from the other side, after fourteen episodes of history, theory, and the people who built something different anyway.In this episode:The personal contradictions that don't resolveThreads from all fourteen episodes — what each one opened and what it left unresolvedThe three things the season didn't answer: scale, urgency, and the show's own positionAnarchism as a movement that has not always practiced what it preachesA self-critique of the show itselfThe mutual aid texture — what it actually feels like when it worksA glimpse of season twoIf you want to get in touch with the show, you can reach us on instagram, A thousand small fires or on the mail BarksMx@proton.me

The founding constitution of the Industrial Workers of the World, written in 1905, contains a phrase that has stayed in anarchist and labour movements for over a century: building the new society in the shell of the old.It is not a metaphor for waiting. It is a description of what you do right now, today, inside the world as it exists. You do not wait for the conditions to be right. You build, in the present, the relationships and institutions and ways of being together that you want to characterise the future.This episode is about prefigurative politics — the most practical and the most demanding idea in the entire season. It asks what the twentieth century taught us about what happens when the means don't match the ends. It looks at what the Black Panther Party built with their survival programs, what the Zapatistas have sustained for thirty years in Chiapas, what the workers at Mondragón in the Basque Country built from a failing factory in 1956, and what thirty workers in a factory in Thessaloniki did in 2011 when their bosses walked away: voted 97.5% to keep running it themselves, changed production to ecological soap, and have been making it ever since — while the Greek state has repeatedly tried to evict them.It also asks the question prefigurative politics has never fully answered: how do you scale horizontal structures without reproducing the hierarchy you were trying to escape? And is scaling even the right goal?Further reading: Cindy Milstein, Anarchism and Its Aspirations (AK Press, 2010) Uri Gordon, Anarchy Alive! (Pluto Press, 2008) Adrienne Maree Brown, Emergent Strategy (AK Press, 2017) Schools for Chiapas — schoolsforchiapas.org Vio.Me worker cooperative — viome.orgTags: prefigurative politics, mutual aid, horizontal organisation, IWW, Black Panther Party, survival programs, Zapatistas, Mondragón, cooperatives, Vio.Me, worker self-management, dual power, anarchism, Emma Goldman, Spain 1936, Russian soviets, Sarvodaya, UbuntuShow notes:Building the world inside the shell of the old one A Thousand Small Fires — Episode 13Prefigurative politics means building the world you want to live in now, inside the world that already exists. This episode traces what that looks like in practice — from the Panthers' free breakfast programme to a factory in Greece where workers voted to keep making soap after their bosses left.In this episode:The IWW phrase and what it actually demandsEmma Goldman on means and ends — and what Russia 1917 and Spain 1936 demonstratedThe Black Panther Party's survival programs — more than 35 programmes, twenty thousand children fed dailyThe Zapatista autonomous communities in Chiapas — thirty years of self-governanceMondragón — the world's largest worker cooperative federation, with all its complicationsVio.Me, Thessaloniki — thirty workers, a vote, and ecological soapThe scaling problem: how do you grow horizontal structures without hierarchy reforming inside them?A question to carry: What are you already building — and what would it look like if you named it as prefigurative politics?

You have been hurt by someone close to you. You are standing in front of a choice nobody prepared you for. You can call the police, and maybe they help or maybe they arrest you too, deport your partner, or make things worse in ways you couldn't predict. Or you don't call. And you carry it alone.This is the situation millions of people face inside a system that spent decades calling itself feminist.Carceral feminism is the name for what happened when the mainstream feminist anti-violence movement aligned itself with the criminal justice system, mandatory arrest laws, longer sentences, more policing and called it protection. This episode traces how it happened: from the genuinely radical battered women's movement of the 1970s, through the Violence Against Women Act of 1994, to the documented reality that mandatory arrest policies increased arrests of women and did not reduce domestic violence rates.It asks who the carceral turn protected, and who it abandoned. Drawing on the work of Beth Richie, INCITE!, and the Color of Violence conference that brought two thousand people to UC Santa Cruz in 2000, it names the feminist alternative: community accountability, transformative justice, and the organisations already doing this work without adequate resources or recognition.It also looks beyond the US, at Ni Una Menos in Argentina and the feminist movement in Kenya that took to the streets in 2024 — and at what it means to build feminist politics in a context where the state is not a potential ally but a known source of harm.Further reading: Elizabeth Bernstein, "Militarized Humanitarianism Meets Carceral Feminism," Signs (2010) Beth E. Richie, Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence, and America's Prison Nation (NYU Press, 2012) Angela Y. Davis, Gina Dent, Erica Meiners, Beth Richie, Abolition. Feminism. Now. (Haymarket, 2022) INCITE! Color of Violence anthology (South End Press, 2006) Victoria Law, "Against Carceral Feminism," Jacobin (2014) — free to read online Survived and Punished — survivedandpunished.org Audre Lorde Project — alp.orgTags: carceral feminism, feminist anti-violence movement, VAWA, Violence Against Women Act, mandatory arrest, Beth Richie, INCITE, Elizabeth Bernstein, transformative justice, community accountability, Ni Una Menos, Kenya EndFemicideKE, Black feminism, abolitionist feminism, gender violence, state violence, anarchismShow notes:Feminism that calls the police A Thousand Small Fires — Episode 12The mainstream feminist anti-violence movement spent three decades building a system that protected some survivors by making things worse for others. This episode asks how that happened, who paid the price, and what a feminism that starts from the most marginalised looks like instead.In this episode:Elizabeth Bernstein and the origins of carceral feminismThe battered women's movement of the 1970s and how it lost its radical politicsThe Violence Against Women Act 1994 — what it funded and what it producedMandatory arrest laws and the documented increase in women's arrestsBeth Richie and gender entrapment of Black womenThe Color of Violence conference 2000 and the founding of INCITE!The Audre Lorde Project and Survived and Punished — the alternatives already runningNi Una Menos and Kenya's EndFemicideKE — feminist politics built differentlyA question to carry: What would a feminism that starts from the most marginalised look like — not as a correction to what came before, but as the actual starting point?

There is a map on the wall of a government building somewhere. On that map, land has lines drawn through it. Those lines rest on a legal fiction: that the land was nobody's before the settlers arrived. Terra nullius. It was not true. The settlers knew it was not true. The fiction was not a mistake. It was a method.This episode is about settler colonialism as a structural analysis rather than a historical grievance. Drawing on Patrick Wolfe's foundational distinction between extractive and settler colonialism, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's history of dispossession in the United States, and Glen Coulthard's critique of recognition politics, it traces how the logic of elimination — of land, of language, of governance — operates not as a past event but as an ongoing structure embedded in the legal and political order of settler states.From the Doctrine of Discovery and Johnson v. M'Intosh, still active precedent in US courts, to the Dawes Act's transfer of ninety million acres from Indigenous nations to white settlers, to the boarding school systems on both sides of the Canadian border, to the Land Back movement and the question of what decolonisation actually requires, the episode refuses to treat any of this as settled.It also names what most anglophone discussions of settler colonialism leave out: Palestine, where the same logic is operating right now. New Caledonia, where France continues to manage Kanak sovereignty through referendums designed to fail. The structure is not North American. It is global.The philosophical question the episode holds: can you oppose the state while benefiting from the land it stole? There is no clean answer. That is the point.Further reading: Patrick Wolfe, "Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native," Journal of Genocide Research (2006) — free to access Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States (2014) Glen Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (2014) Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance (2017) Klee Benally, No Spiritual Surrender: Indigenous Anarchy in Defense of the Sacred (2023) Yellowhead Institute Land Back report (2019) — free at yellowheadinstitute.org Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, "Decolonization is Not a Metaphor" (2012) — free to accessTags: settler colonialism, decolonisation, Land Back, Indigenous sovereignty, Patrick Wolfe, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Glen Coulthard, Doctrine of Discovery, terra nullius, Dawes Act, residential schools, boarding schools, Zapatistas, Palestine, New Caledonia, Kanak, anarchism, grounded normativity, Klee Benally, anarcho-indigenismA question to carry: What does it mean to take dispossession seriously — not as a historical fact, but as something still happening, on land you are standing on right now?

Someone you know was hurt. And afterward, the world had one piece of advice: report it. Press charges. Let the system handle it. What almost nobody asked was what that person actually needed. What would help. What would make it feel like it had been taken seriously.That question is at the centre of the case for prison abolition. Not because abolitionists don't take violence seriously, but because the prison was never designed to answer it. It was designed to disappear the problem, to make the person who caused it invisible, while leaving the conditions that produced the violence completely intact.This episode traces the prison from its origins in the 1820s, when Quaker reformers built the first penitentiary in Philadelphia and inadvertently drove prisoners insane, through the convict leasing system that replaced slavery in all but name, to the mass incarceration system that currently holds more people than any other country on earth. It asks what Angela Davis means when she says the prison performs an ideological function. What Mariame Kaba means when she describes abolition as a dual project. And what transformative justice actually looks like in practice, for survivors who need something now, before the world is different.The hardest question the episode holds: what do we owe the person who was hurt and wants a response today? There is no clean answer. That is the point.Further reading:Angela Y. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003)Mariame Kaba, We Do This 'Til We Free Us (2021)Angela Y. Davis, Gina Dent, Beth Richie, Erica Meiners, Abolition. Feminism. Now. (2022)Creative Interventions Toolkit — free at creative-interventions.orgRuth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag (2007)Tags: prison abolition, abolition, carceral system, Angela Davis, Mariame Kaba, transformative justice, community accountability, convict leasing, 13th Amendment, INCITE, mass incarceration, penitentiary, prison industrial complex, Critical Resistance, anarchism, survivor centred justiceShow notes:Prison abolition and the question nobody wants to answerA Thousand Small Fires — Episode 10The prison was not designed to answer what we do about violence. It was designed to disappear the person who caused it. This episode traces the history of incarceration from its Quaker origins through convict leasing to mass incarceration, and asks what abolition actually offers instead.In this episode:The invention of the penitentiary in 1820s Philadelphia, and why it failed immediatelyThe 13th Amendment exception, the Black Codes, and the convict leasing system that followed slaveryAngela Davis on the ideological function of the prisonMariame Kaba on abolition as a dual project: dismantling and buildingTransformative justice and community accountability in practiceWhat we owe survivors who need something nowThinkers and sources mentioned:Angela Y. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003)Mariame Kaba, We Do This 'Til We Free Us (2021)INCITE! Women, Gender Non-Conforming, and Trans People of Color Against ViolenceCreative Interventions, OaklandA question to carry:What does accountability actually require — and does the system we have come anywhere close to it?

The state isn't failing us. For many people, it's working exactly as intended.Anarchism has one of the clearest and most historically grounded critiques of state power — one that long predates the modern left's debates about reform vs. revolution. In this episode of A Thousand Small Fires, we sit with that critique seriously: What is the state, structurally? What does it exist to protect? And what does it mean to build political life outside of — or against — it?We look at the anarchist argument that the state is not a neutral container for democratic will, but a machine for enforcing hierarchy — of class, race, gender, and empire. We look at how state violence isn't a bug or an abuse of power, but its foundation. And we ask what it means to want something different, without falling back on a simpler state or a better government.This isn't an episode about chaos. It's about clarity.A Thousand Small Fires is an anarchist podcast exploring political ideas with rigour, care, and a refusal to simplify. New episodes drop every Monday.Further ReadingPyotr Kropotkin — The State: Its Historic Role (1896) — one of the foundational anarchist texts on how the modern state emerged through the destruction of mutual aid and self-governanceEmma Goldman — Anarchism and Other Essays (1910) — especially "The Individual, Society and the State"Murray Bookchin — The Ecology of Freedom (1982) — on hierarchy, domination, and the state as a social relationJames C. Scott — Seeing Like a State (1998) — how states make populations legible and controllable, often at enormous human costFrantz Fanon — The Wretched of the Earth (1961) — on colonial state violence and the limits of national liberationAngela Davis — Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003) — the carceral state as a racialised institutionDavid Graeber — Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (2004) — short, accessible, and sharp on stateless societies and political imaginationPeter Gelderloos — Anarchy Works (2010) — practical examples of stateless organisation across historyEpisode Tagsanarchism, the state, state power, political theory, state violence, police, prison abolition, Emma Goldman, Kropotkin, James C. Scott, Frantz Fanon, hierarchy, mutual aid, abolition, political philosophy, feminist theory, decolonisation, radical politics, anti-capitalism, anarchist podcast