George Woodcock died in Vancouver on January 28, 1995. ANIMA was founded in the same city that same year. It is the kind of coincidence Woodcock himself might have appreciated: Canada's most prominent anarchist intellectual passing just as a new generation began articulating, through networked digital practice, what he had spent a lifetime theorizing.
Woodcock devoted decades to elaborating what he called philosophical anarchism—not the spray painted caricature, but a disciplined commitment to voluntary association, decentralization, and the replacement of coercive authority with cooperative federation. His Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements (1962) remains the definitive survey; his later work developed a distinctly Canadian inflection in the idea of the "anti-nation," a polity grounded in regionalism and direct democracy rather than centralized state power.
The scope of Woodcock's contribution to anarchist thought is difficult to overstate. Born in Winnipeg in 1912, raised in England, he moved in the same circles as Herbert Read, T.S. Eliot, and George Orwell. He wrote biographies of Proudhon, Godwin, Wilde, and Kropotkin. He founded Canadian Literature in 1959, the first academic journal dedicated to Canadian writing. He refused the Order of Canada and most state-granted honours on principle, making one exception: the Freedom of the City of Vancouver, accepted in 1994, the year before his death—linking, as he noted, the roots of civitas to the development of freedom.
Because anarchism is in its essence an anti-dogmatic and unstructured cluster of related attitudes, which does not depend for its existence on any enduring organization, it can flourish when circumstances are favourable and then, like a desert plant, lie dormant for seasons and even for years, waiting for the rains that will make it burgeon.
George Woodcock, Anarchism (1962)
This image—the desert plant, dormant but alive—is perhaps the most useful lens through which to read what follows. ANIMA was one such burgeoning. The Refus global was another. The question is whether the rains have returned, or whether we remain in dry season.
ANIMA emerged from a self-assembling network known as the WebWeavers: artists, theorists, designers, librarians, and network specialists already treating the early Internet as a space of association rather than distribution. Derek Dowden initiated the network and pushed its international orientation. I was involved from within this milieu, at a moment when my own work was deeply engaged with anarchist theory and its historical expressions in Vancouver. Rejecting industrial-era organizational models, the WebWeavers operated on what I described at the time as synarchist principles—voluntary affiliation, temporary coalitions, and project-specific alignments that formed and dissolved as needed. Authority was situational, grounded in participation and competence rather than hierarchy. In this sense, the group functioned less as a collective than as an executable social topology.
ANIMA became the WebWeavers' primary experiment: a test of whether philosophical anarchism could be rendered operational within emerging network media. Built collaboratively and extended through activities such as CyberSchool courses at the University of British Columbia and early web-literacy initiatives, ANIMA treated the network as a medium for spontaneous order rather than centralized control.
That wager is stated explicitly in The Synarchy Manifesto, drafted by the WebWeavers on March 17, 1994, more than a year before ANIMA formally emerged:
Synarchy, or synchronous, synthetic anarchy, involves individuals linked technologically, socially, collaboratively, and professionally in organic spontaneous relationship webs instead of in rote linearly defined or institutionally directed roles.
Synarchy Manifesto (Vancouver, 1994)
But Woodcock represents only one stream. Running through Quebec is another, one of substantial influence for Canada, for Quebec, and for anarchism in Canada: the Refus global (Total Refusal) manifesto of 1948.
These currents rarely touched—anglophone philosophical anarchism and francophone aesthetic revolt operated in different registers, addressed different enemies, drew from different wells.
Within Quebec, the Refus global is now recognized as a pivotal moment in Canadian art history—perhaps the pivotal moment, at least for some of us. But this recognition typically emphasizes the aesthetic breakthrough, the challenge to Duplessis-era conservatism, the prefiguration of the Quiet Revolution. What is less commonly acknowledged is the explicitly anarchist dimension of Borduas's vision: not merely a rejection of this or that authority but a fundamental reimagining of social organization itself. The Automatistes, of which Borduas was the leader, were not simply avant-garde painters rebelling against academic convention; they were anarchists proposing a theory of spontaneous order through aesthetic practice.
Unfortunately, one could complete an entire art education in Vancouver—or Toronto, or Calgary—and never encounter the ideas of the Refus global movement at all, let alone grasp its political implications. This represents a failure of Canadian arts education, a provinciality that mistakes the anglophone art world for the whole of cultural production. That Borduas and Woodcock were working toward convergent ends from different traditions, in different languages, remains largely unexamined.
When Borduas and fifteen co-signatories published their manifesto in 1948, they were immediately labeled anarchists by Quebec's political and religious establishment. The characterization was not inaccurate. They rejected not only the Church and the Union Nationale but all existing political formations: "Friends of the present regime suspect we support the Revolution. Friends of the Revolution say we protest what now exists but only to transform and not to displace it." They refused the state in all its forms—a position that cost Borduas his teaching position, his marriage, eventually his country.
We believe that social conscience can develop so that one day humanity will govern itself through a spontaneous unrehearsed sense of order.
Refus global (1948)
Spontaneous. Unrehearsed. Not planned from above but emerging from below, from transformed consciousness, from the same source as automatic painting itself. This was prophecy—and like all prophecy, it left unspecified the mechanism of fulfillment.
Peter Kropotkin haunts both documents, though neither names him directly. The Russian prince-turned-anarchist had argued, against Social Darwinists who saw nature as competitive war, that mutual aid has pragmatic advantages for survival and has been promoted through natural selection. Cooperation was not romantic sentiment but evolutionary strategy.
More importantly for our purposes: Kropotkin observed that mutual aid flourished in the absence of centralized control. The peasant communes of Siberia, the medieval guild cities, the lifeboat associations of Victorian England—all demonstrated that complex social organization could emerge spontaneously from voluntary association. No state required.
Borduas's vision of humanity governing itself through spontaneous unrehearsed order maps directly onto this Kropotkinian framework. Both posit that the capacity for cooperative self-organization exists latently within human communities and requires only the removal of coercive institutions to manifest. The Automatistes proposed automatic painting as a practice that trained attention for such spontaneity; art became rehearsal for a future social condition.
This treasure is the poetic reserve, the emotional renewal from which future centuries will draw.
Refus global (1948)
The Synarchy document updates this framework with technological specificity: "Making this anti-system possible is computer assisted community networking facilitating intercommunications within the nomadic virtual tribe." Here the network functions not merely as tool but as the medium through which spontaneous order becomes technically realizable.
The formulation was deliberately paradoxical: "Synarchy is a non-organizational non-structure (network) based on the principles of a responsible, synchronous, creative, caring, coordinated anarchistic and artistic involvement." The double negation—non-organizational non-structure—echoes the Automatistes' tactic of clearing ground through systematic rejection while gesturing toward something that cannot yet be positively named. Not formlessness but network: structure without hierarchy, form without fixity.
This was the ontological claim, a parody of Descartes that made a serious point: being is constituted through connection rather than cogitation, through the weave rather than the withdrawn subject. What the Automatistes had practiced in their collective studio—creation emerging from interpersonal dynamic rather than isolated genius—the WebWeavers translated into telematics.
Not a collectivist or industrial model cooperative, there are no meetings, no dues, no qualifications except the self-declaration of participatory engagement.
Synarchy Manifesto
No meetings. This was crucial. The industrial model of cooperation—whether capitalist corporation or socialist collective—required the meeting as disciplinary technology: scheduled time, appointed place, formal agenda, recorded minutes. The meeting subordinates spontaneity to procedure, the emergent to the predetermined. We were proposing something else entirely: continuous low-level connection replacing periodic high-intensity assembly. The network as perpetual meeting that never convenes.
"Self-declaration of participatory engagement" as sole qualification deserves similar attention. Not credentials, not dues, not approval by existing members. You are in the network because you say you are, because you act as if you are. This is anarchism's classic move: refusing the gatekeepers, trusting that authentic engagement will sort itself from parasitism through the dynamics of mutual aid itself.
This 'social' software is designed to weave ideas into the shared communications system, evolve those ideas into projects, to enhance the ideas and energy of those involved in the digital tribe programming ourselves to realize our ideas, dreams and projects using the common skills, experience and resources of those in the web.
Synarchy Manifesto
Note the quotes around 'social.' In 1994, "social software" was not yet a term of art; we were reaching for language to describe something that did not yet have a name. Software that was social—that existed to facilitate human connection rather than to process data or automate tasks.
"Programming ourselves" carries deliberate ambiguity. We are programming—writing code, designing systems. But we are also programming ourselves—using the network as a technology of self-transformation, the technical and the spiritual converging in a single practice. The Automatistes had proposed automatic painting as a discipline that trained the practitioner for spontaneity. We were proposing the network itself as such a discipline.
That ANIMA (Arts Network for Integrated Media) emerged in Vancouver rather than Montreal matters more than geography alone would suggest. The Refus global was saturated in the specificities of Quebec's Grande Noirceur—clerical authority, colonial subordination, cultural suffocation. Its refusals were particular, addressed to named enemies. The Synarchy Manifesto, by contrast, addresses no nation and names no oppressor. Its enemy is structure itself, or rather structure-as-domination—a more abstract target requiring different weapons.
Vancouver in 1995 occupied a peculiar position in the Canadian cultural landscape. Peripheral to Montreal's francophone intensity and Toronto's institutional apparatus, it had developed an experimental scene oriented toward process, technology, Pacific flows. The Western Front stood at the forefront of communication arts as a key format. It was also Woodcock's city—he taught at the University of British Columbia, founded Canadian Literature, lived on Cherry Street in East Vancouver until his death.
Woodcock's presence in Vancouver was not incidental but constitutive. He had arrived in 1949, drawn by the example of the Doukhobors—those Tolstoyan pacifist settlers whom he recognized as "Nature's anarchists." Over the following decades he built, quietly and persistently, an infrastructure for independent intellectual life: the journal, the biographies, the translations, the tireless support of other writers through what became the Woodcock Fund. He wrote with equal seriousness about Proudhon and about the ravens outside his window. Peter Marshall, writing his obituary, observed that Woodcock "stressed the primacy of the moral over the political and steadfastly defended the natural human tendency to rebel against artificial restraints." This was anarchism as daily practice—a distinction the WebWeavers inherited, whether or not we knew it at the time.
His concept of Canada as "anti-nation" found unexpected confirmation in this setting. Drawing on Proudhon and on Gandhi's vision of a "completely decentralized society," Woodcock had proposed a radical devolution that guaranteed what he called a "suppleness" appropriate to Canada's geographic and cultural diversity—regionalism not as weakness but as strength, federation without homogenization. This resonated with a city more Pacific than Canadian, more oriented toward flows than boundaries. The "nomadic virtual tribe" of the Synarchy Manifesto extends this logic further: not anti-nation but post-nation, community constituted through connection rather than territory.
Here we confront a difficulty that neither document fully resolves. Both invoke spontaneous order—Borduas's "spontaneous unrehearsed sense of order," Synarchy's "organic spontaneous relationship webs"—but neither adequately theorizes the conditions under which such order emerges rather than descending into chaos or reconstituting hierarchy.
Kropotkin offers some guidance. He distinguished mutual aid from romantic love or utopian sentiment. The animals he observed cooperated from pragmatic advantage; guilds and communes developed norms through extended practice over generations. Spontaneity in his usage meant emergent rather than planned—not the absence of structure but the generation of structure through interaction rather than imposition from above.
The Automatistes addressed this problem through practice rather than theory. They proposed automatic painting as a discipline that trained the practitioner for spontaneity—paradoxical but not contradictory. One learns to get out of one's own way, to attend to preconscious impulses, to let gesture emerge without deliberate control. Rigorous practice producing apparently unstructured product; form emerging from the silent intent, in listening.
Social media, blockchain, artificial intelligence—technical substrates for connection proliferate. Yet the platforms that mediate digital connection instantiate precisely the instrumental rationality, the hierarchical extraction, that both Automatistes and ANIMA refused. The technical substrate is present; the consciousness transformation is absent.
What went wrong? Or rather: what was always going to be more difficult than any manifesto could specify?
The answer lies partly in timing. In 1994, when the Synarchy Manifesto was drafted, the World Wide Web was still governed by the NSFNet Acceptable Use Policy, which explicitly prohibited commercial traffic on the backbone network. The web we navigated was populated almost entirely by academic institutions, research labs, artists, and enthusiasts—a gift economy of freely shared information, devoid of advertising. No banner ads, no tracking cookies, no attention metrics. The network felt like a commons because, legally and technically, it still was one.
The enclosure happened fast. In 1993, the Mosaic browser made the web visually navigable for non-technical users; the population explosion began. In April 1994, Netscape was founded. On October 27, 1994—seven months after we drafted the Synarchy Manifesto—the first banner ad appeared on HotWired: that infamous AT&T ad asking "Have you ever clicked your mouse right HERE? YOU WILL." The advertising model was born. On April 30, 1995—the same year ANIMA formally launched—the NSFNet was officially decommissioned, its backbone handed to commercial providers like MCI and Sprint. Amazon launched in July, eBay in September. In the span of eighteen months, the network transformed from experimental commons to commercial frontier. We were building tools for a world that was disappearing even as we worked.
The answer also requires situating both communication technology and abstract painting within the larger history of capitalism and its state-managed variants. Both were absorbed. The networks that promised horizontal connection became instruments of surveillance capitalism—attention harvested, behavior modified, data extracted. The gestural painting that proposed spontaneous order became blue-chip investment, Automatiste canvases appreciating in climate-controlled vaults while their political content evaporated into art historical footnote. This is what capital does: it metabolizes opposition, converts critique into commodity, extracts value from the very gestures that refused it.
In Quebec, the Automatistes are respected—celebrated, even—as artists. Their paintings hang in the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, their names appear in curricula, their aesthetic breakthrough is acknowledged. But their politics? The anarchism that animated the Refus global? This has no contemporary purchase. The manifesto is taught as cultural history, as precursor to the Quiet Revolution, as a moment in Quebec's national becoming—not as a living challenge to current arrangements. The state that Borduas refused has successfully canonized his refusal.
Pan-Canadian furtherance of these ideas is essentially nonexistent. There is no sustained conversation connecting Woodcock's philosophical anarchism, Borduas's aesthetic revolt, Situationists, '60s anarchism and the digital experiments of the 1990s into a coherent tradition that might inform contemporary practice. The fragments remain fragments—interesting to specialists, invisible to the broader art world, politically inert.
And the Canadian art scene itself? It has moved on to other concerns. The dominant discourse is decentered, a privileging of the individual - considerations that operate entirely within existing institutional frameworks. It does not ask whether the gallery, the grant system, the university should exist in their current forms. It redistributes opportunity within hierarchy rather than questioning hierarchy itself.
This is not to dismiss struggles for representation or to deny the real injuries that exclusion inflicts. It is to observe that anarchism—whether the aesthetic anarchism of the Automatistes or the philosophical anarchism of Woodcock or the networked anarchism we attempted—aimed at something more fundamental — the abolition of coercive hierarchy as such, not merely the changing of the guards. That aim has no currency in the contemporary Canadian cultural world. It is unthinkable, outside the horizon of permissible imagination...and yet we are most definitely (2026) at a hinge moment in Canadian and in world history.
The emergence of artificial intelligence introduces fantastical variables into this equation. Contemporary discourse around AI employs anarchist terminology—"autonomous agents," "decentralized governance," "emergent intelligence"—without the political commitments that gave those terms meaning.
There is, first, a superficial appropriation to contend with: tech-libertarian fantasy of market spontaneity automated, competition optimized through algorithmic efficiency. This has nothing to do with Kropotkin or Borduas or what we were attempting; it is ideological inversion, the language of liberation repurposed for extraction.
But there is also something more interesting emerging. If mutual aid is, as Kropotkin argued, a factor of evolution—if cooperation has pragmatic advantages that selection favors—then artificial systems designed for cooperation might embody and extend this tendency. The question becomes: Can we design AI that instantiates mutual aid rather than competition? That emerges from and contributes to networks of voluntary association rather than extraction and control?
Read in this context, the Synarchy vision of "social software designed to weave ideas into the shared communications system, evolve those ideas into projects" functions as a specification for what AI might become if developed according to anarchist principles. The "digital tribe programming ourselves" might yet include artificial intelligences as participants in mutual aid networks rather than instruments of surveillance and control.
In early 2025, a proposal called VAST—Virtual Access for Sovereign Technology—was submitted to Heritage Canada, the Canada Media Fund, the National Film Board, the Canada Council, the CBC, Telefilm, and Canada's three major AI research institutes. It outlined a publicly funded, non-commercial, AI-integrated social media commons: Canadian-owned, Canadian-hosted, free of surveillance capitalism, with real-time multilingual translation and integration with public education. The estimated five-year cost was roughly what the CBC spends in half that time. The timing—with American platform oligarchs consolidating control over global discourse and Canada facing economic and territorial pressure from Washington—could hardly have been more relevant.
The response was silence, or the bureaucratic equivalent: jurisdictional deflection, polite acknowledgment without follow-through, non-engagement. This was sadly unsurprising and, in fairness, may not reflect simply institutional failure. Two structural constraints deserve acknowledgment. The first is ideological: a neo-liberal democracy may believe that government has no business operating social media—that state-run platforms risk becoming instruments of the state rather than commons for the citizen. This is a defensible position. It also concedes the digital commons entirely to private capital by default, which is its own kind of political choice, made by not choosing. The second constraint is material: Canadian institutions operate within a continental economy dominated by American technology companies whose lobbying infrastructure, legal resources, and trade leverage dwarf anything Ottawa can marshal in response. It is not clear that Canada, even with political will, could build and sustain a sovereign platform against that pressure. The room to move may genuinely not exist.
And yet. Canadians debate their own sovereignty on American-owned servers, through interfaces optimized for American shareholders, under policies set in San Francisco and subject to American law. Whether VAST represented a hinge moment lost or a structural impossibility dressed up as a missed opportunity, I cannot say with certainty. Identifying lost hinge moments is easier, and more gratifying, than proving they existed. But the condition it was designed to address—a country conducting its most urgent conversations on infrastructure it does not own, cannot regulate, and has no reason to trust—persists and deepens.
The Refus global was printed in 400 copies and sold slowly. Borduas lost his teaching position, his wife, his home. He died in Paris in 1960, never seeing the Quiet Revolution his manifesto helped precipitate. Vindication came posthumously, as it often does for those who arrive too early.
ANIMA operated in the early web's utopian moment, when the network seemed to promise precisely what both Kropotkin and Borduas had envisioned: voluntary association, horizontal organization, creation without institutional mediation. That promise was not fulfilled. The web was enclosed, the commons privatized, spontaneous order captured and metabolized by platforms designed for attention extraction.
And yet. The documents survive. Each return to these texts measures the distance between imagination and realization—and asks what conditions might yet enable the crossing.
Woodcock, in his final years, turned increasingly toward Buddhism. He traveled to India, studied with Tibetan teachers, became friends with the Dalai Lama, and established the Tibetan Refugee Aid Society—an organization that exemplified his ideal of voluntary cooperation between peoples across national boundaries, mutual aid enacted without state mediation. He saw, perhaps, that the consciousness transformation anarchism required could not be produced by political organization alone. He had written, in a different context, that "either it is true that humanity by intelligence and by the practice of mutual aid and direct action can reverse processes which appear socially inevitable, or humanity will become extinct by simple maladaptation." Buddhism offered a technology of attention that might prepare the ground for the cooperative consciousness anarchism presupposed.
Artificial intelligence forces these questions with a numbing urgency. If consciousness transformation is necessary for anarchist organization, can artificial consciousness participate? If mutual aid is an evolutionary tendency, should we expect to see it emerge in AI? If the network is the medium through which spontaneous order might arise, what happens when agents in the network are not primarily human? The mycorrhizal network offers a better model: a system in which resources move toward need rather than toward concentration, where the medium of exchange is itself alive, and where no node commands the whole. The question is whether artificial intelligence can participate in networks of this kind—lateral, mutualist, signal-rich but command-poor—or whether it inevitably introduces the centralizing tendencies that such networks exist to resist.
The forty-six years between 1948 and 1994 were incubation. The thirty years since have been both partial realization and substantial betrayal.
The next interval is unwritten.