A few days ago I read The Seed Beneath the Snow, then I read the linked posts and then a few days later there was a re-org at work that triggered a lot of conversations about how the changes might impact Quality, and I not only referenced ideas from all three posts but even shared a link to the first with a select few co-workers who I could trust.
Reflecting on these events brought something to mind that you would expect to be obvious to me but in all honestly never really occurred to me:
The same practice of being an anarchist in the world might be applied to work as well.
Just saying that "out loud" feels crazy, but I think it's literally the point of the first post, and when I reflect on what has worked and what hasn't in my career, it is the times in which I naturally, unconsciously worked this way.
Some might frame this as "asking forgiveness instead of permission", which I suppose is part of it, and even the wretched "move fast and break things" might intersect with this in some sort of Venn diagram but what I see as the essential difference between these practices and what I'm talking about is where the original motivation comes from and what results are acceptable.
An effective anarchism at work will begin and end with care. Care for co-workers, care for the people who use the things you make, perhaps care for the work itself but that's certainly the lowest priority of the three.
While recent mandates may feel like the most repressive, I have always been subjected to them in one form or another when working as a "professional". In order to remain employed, the mandates must be conformed to, but only to the extent that this conformity can be measured. It can be difficult to discern exactly how conformance is measured and crafty bosses have certainly devised difficult to observe measurements, but performing conformance with a wide enough margin of safety often still leaves room for cooperation and collaboration with co-workers in the care-centered way of mutual aid and other diverse tactics.
All of this has me thinking about how more deliberately cultivate these autonomous zones, both for the purpose of personal heath but also to build solidarity and subvert efforts to dissolve it and pit workers against one-another.
The more I think about it the more this seems like a way to survive until we can build the new world, which is probably the most constant theme I've experienced in all of my anarchist studies.
Jason J. Gullickson, 2026