Central to the idea of the internet brand of anarchism is the idea of “fork”. People who are working as coders or hackers may recognize this word. This word means basically that on the Internet it is free to duplicate somebody else’s projects and somebody else’s designs. “Free” is meant in two different ways: First at no cost or at very little cost. Then again when people relinquish the copyright you don’t have to ask permission. We call that “forgiveness of permission”. So if you see a website or an internet protocol that doesn’t work entirely to your liking you can fork it meaning that you take the same program, you run it on your computer and you change a few things so it works differently. That means you don’t eliminate what has come before but you take it to a different direction. If you also make your modifications public, as early Internet hackers always did, then the original people will become the upstream people. The people you get the fork from may decide to take your contributions. This is how science advances.

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