I have a book pairing to suggest if you are interested in anti-authoritarian action and horizontal organizations: A Country of Ghosts by Margaret Killjoy (@magpiekilljoy) and The Democracy Project by David Graeber (@davidgraeber).

A Country of Ghosts, a novel by Margaret Killjoy, employs a journalist protagonist who is required to report back to the Borolian Empire about their recent attempted acquisition: Hron. Like many early European invaders of the American continent, Dimos Horacki finds himself taken from colonialist forces and experiences a better, more interesting and fulfilling life with people practicing direct democracy and horizontal consensus.

Killjoy's plot is full of beautiful fantasy and keeps you engaged and inspired from cover to cover.

A line that just keeps coming back to me from the novel is "freedom is a relationship between people, not an absolute and static state for an individual."

A fictional romp through Hron before diving into the Occupy Movement grounds Killjoy's philosophy into the direct democracy and consensus building that you can start doing around you right now.

Like all of Graeber's work, The Democracy Project is a somewhat disjointed collection of effective arguments. Much of it shows a potential facilitator how to start thinking about running a general assembly. Graeber suggests readers study Starhawk's guide to consensus facilitation: starhawk.org/short-consensus-summary/

A line that I just can stop thinking about is: "the system itself was undemocratic—having been reduced to a system of open institutionalized bribery, backed up by coercive force. We wanted to make that fact evident to everyone, in the United States and elsewhere."

Reading this back-to-back in any order is valuable and worth your time.