# Human-Computer Insurrection: Notes on an Anarchist HCI

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.06167 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06167/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 10 Aug 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Do Datasets Have Politics? Disciplinary Values in Computer Vision Dataset Development](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.04308/) (2021)
- [Stop! In the Name of Flaws: Disentangling Personal Names and Sociodemographic Attributes in NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17159/) (2024)
- [Beyond "Fairness:" Structural (In)justice Lenses on AI for Education](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.08847/) (2021)
- [DiffusionWorldViewer: Exposing and Broadening the Worldview Reflected by Generative Text-to-Image Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.09944/) (2023)
- [What is Safety? Corporate Discourse, Power, and the Politics of Generative AI Safety](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.06981/) (2026)
- [Information Access of the Oppressed: Freirean Design for Emancipatory Information Access](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.09600/) (2026)
- [Slurry-as-a-Service: A Modest Proposal on Scalable Pluralistic Alignment for Nutrient Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.02420/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The HCI community has worked to expand and improve our consideration of the societal implications of our work and our corresponding responsibilities. Despite this increased engagement, HCI continues to lack an explicitly articulated politic, which we argue re-inscribes and amplifies systemic oppression. In this paper, we set out an explicit political vision of an HCI grounded in emancipatory autonomy - an anarchist HCI, aimed at dismantling all oppressive systems by mandating suspicion of and a reckoning with imbalanced distributions of power. We outline some of the principles and accountability mechanisms that constitute an anarchist HCI. We offer a potential framework for radically reorienting the field towards creating prefigurative counterpower - systems and spaces that exemplify the world we wish to see, as we go about building the revolution in increment.