Freedom winter 2025-6: Watched, databased, yet to be controlled

Editorial from our new journal issue on Surveillance exploring states’ ambitions to constrain and refuse our freedom – and ways to fight back

Anarchism in its essence is a lived philosophy of freedom. It is also a recognition that freedom, as Mikhail Bakunin knew, depends on equality. Only when we are equal can we be truly free from domination; free not just in mind but in body, to realise all the possibilities of life in a society forged through mutual aid and solidarity.

But in a capitalist society guaranteed by the power of the state, we anarchists are engaged in an everyday war to preserve, protect, and expand freedom. If, as Freedom’s own Colin Ward claimed, anarchism remains a seed beneath the snow, ready to blossom if the conditions are right, then the fight to secure those conditions has seldom been more desperate.

In this issue, we explore the challenges and possibilities of anarchist freedom in a time when supposedly ‘democratic’ states – aided and abetted by digital firepower – are seeking to constrain and refuse freedom in ways that would make some authoritarian regimes blush.

In Ukraine, war itself is the testing ground for the technologies that seek to reduce freedom to a memory, with AI targeting systems demonstrating in the sharpest relief the power concentrated in the hands of right-wing tech barons such as Peter Thiel. These technologies fuel killing on the battlefield and the analysis of health data here in the UK, with the desperate Labour government also betting big on the magic beans of AI to somehow deliver ‘growth’, at any cost.

How to fight in a situation where the implications of totalitarian technologies are – to paraphrase one of our writers in this issue – simply ignored with a shrug is a critical question for we anarchists. A return to more traditional forms of communication and the resurrection of zines and hardcopy media represents a partial way out, but it requires us to fundamentally reorient our audience – addicted as they are to the instant hits of easily-surveilled social media platforms.

Also in the UK, the ongoing Spycops inquiry – in which Freedom is a core participant – is a constant reminder that the state’s ambitions to constrain and refuse freedom are in its very nature. The state’s aims today are unchanged from the era in which police officers lied to women and fathered children with them; indeed as our author notes, what is being investigated by the inquiry has actually been made legal for future state agents.

But there remains cause for hope. From the Twin Cities in Minnesota where abolitionist initiatives are contesting the authority of the Trump regime, to Greece where anarchist groups are mobilising actively around the cause of prisoners arrested for protest, battles are being won.

The German police’s lack of appetite for scrutiny comes up too, but while the police may not be comfortable with being watched, the security apparatus is perfectly delighted to watch us. So much so that we at Freedom recently learned that two separate US Department of Homeland Security accounts were subscribed to our newsletter.

Meanwhile, despite civil liberties being up for grabs on a daily basis in the form of a Labour government who thinks an eternal right-wing drift is the cheat code for success, the popular response to the government’s heavy-handed attacks on those protesting genocide implies very strongly that Reform voters are not, nor should they be, the centre of gravity for UK politics.

The veteran Spanish anarchist Jose Peirats once said ‘the state is a virus, it can exist in all of us’. The key question in the coming weeks and months will be how can an anarchist immune system effectively fight it? Some of the ideas are in these pages. The rest are in our communities.

Together we have everything we need.

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