RAW Semantics on Bluesky: "I'm currently reading Robert Shea's 'Every Day is a GOOD Day' (the new collection edited by @jacksontom.bsky.social - see my post above) & like it a lot. I've quickly warmed to Shea's voice, but I don't know enough about him to attempt a review such as this one."
Thanks, Brian, and thanks again for the review, Michael! As I noted earlier, Brian has posted notes on the new Robert Anton Wilson book, A Non-Euclidian Perspective.
More here on Every Day is a Good Day.
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I'm currently thinking about Robert Shea's piece called 'Worlds Without Government', where he muses on anarchistic societies as imagined in speculative fiction (particularly sci-fi). Robert Anton Wilson talks about decentralised vs top-down globalization; he encourages the decentralized type, of course, and suggests this might come as a result of Internet and the decentralising effect of advanced technology more generally.
We seem a long way from that, and we need the sci-fi, as Shea suggests, that gives us ways of imagining what that decentralization would look like in practice - difficult in a world where people take so many "globally" functioning things for granted (including basic functional "regulation" of those things on a big scale - air traffic control, nukes, vaccines, etc. The kind of regulation you really don't want to see disappear).
Rasa and Jesse both comment briefly on this global/local tension in the new RAW anthology, and I think there's so much more to say on it. The cyberpunk sci-fi I love (from an era after Shea's essay?) mostly has giant tyrannical corporations taking over from nation states as the top-down power centres. That poses a somewhat different challenge for anarchistic societies. Or at least a differently framed one.
(As RAW puts it, the world contains "many, many peoples who want to get out from under the heel of the IMF, the World Bank and the multi-nationals" - TSOG).
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