Book excerpt: Technology lies at the heart of the issue. The technological order—the expanding web of physical technologies and bureaucratic systems of control that we call global civilization—exists despite our evolutionary preparation for a distinctly different kind of society: a society of near equals in which participation is voluntary. Anarchy—society founded on organic and direct relations with others, unmediated by artificial systems of power and authority—is the natural and preferred social state for human beings. Anarchist by Design promotes the intentional dismantling of technological society, not merely to provide relief from the corrosive effects it has on individual freedom, and not to be replaced by something else, but in order to allow natural modes of social organization—underwritten by evolved psychological systems that continue to limp along beneath the surface, deformed, repressed, and misdirected—to have healthy and unfettered expression.