Metadata-Version: 2.4
Name: anarchy-a
Version: 1.0.2
Summary: Draw the Circle-A anarchy symbol in your terminal
License-Expression: GPL-3.0-or-later
Project-URL: Homepage, https://github.com/fourzerosix/anarchy-a
Project-URL: Bug Tracker, https://github.com/fourzerosix/anarchy-a/issues
Project-URL: Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchist_symbolism
Keywords: terminal,anarchy,circle-a,ascii,animation,cli,punk
Classifier: Development Status :: 5 - Production/Stable
Classifier: Environment :: Console
Classifier: Intended Audience :: End Users/Desktop
Classifier: Operating System :: POSIX :: Linux
Classifier: Operating System :: MacOS
Classifier: Programming Language :: Python :: 3
Classifier: Programming Language :: C
Classifier: Topic :: Games/Entertainment
Classifier: Topic :: Terminals
Requires-Python: >=3.8
Description-Content-Type: text/markdown
License-File: LICENSE
Dynamic: license-file

# anarchy-a

```
          ----------
      //--          --\
    //        \        \
  //          \          \
//          //  \          \
||          //  \          ||
||        //      \        ||
||        //      \        ||
||      ------------        ||
||      //          \      ||
  ||    //          \    ||
  \    //          \    //
    \//              \//
      \--          --//
          ----------
```

> *You didn't ask permission to draw this. Good. You never needed it.*

`anarchy-a` draws the **Circle-A** -- stroke by stroke, arc by arc, in ANSI
color -- right in your terminal. Five stages. Sparks flying. Optional explosion.
Optional blood. Absolutely no rulers.

A sibling project to [`cool-s`](https://github.com/fourzerosix/cool-s).
Same energy. Different symbol. Significantly more theory.

---

## Install (no permit required)

**From source:**
```bash
git clone https://github.com/fourzerosix/anarchy-a.git
cd anarchy-a
make
sudo make install
```

**Via pip** *(the system works for us sometimes)*:
```bash
pip install anarchy-a
anarchy-a
```

**Via Docker** *(containerized dissent)*:
```bash
docker run --rm -it fourzerosix/anarchy-a
```

---

## Usage

```
anarchy-a [OPTIONS]

  -f                Fast mode (no animation)
  -d USECS          Per-pixel delay (default: 30000)
  -s SCALE          Scale 1-8 (default: 2, auto-fits terminal)
  -r                Rainbow finale
  -c, --crass       Crass mode: all red, no mercy, faster
  -p, --punk        Punk: A breaks free of the circle, dripping red blood
  -b, --bakunin     Bakunin: builds it, then blows it up
  -k, --kropotkin   Mutual aid: two symbols meet
  -n, --nogods      "No gods, no masters"
  --plain           No color (for the truly ascetic)
  -h, --help        Help
```

```bash
anarchy-a               # The full experience
anarchy-a -p            # Punk graffiti mode - A explodes out, screen bleeds
anarchy-a -b            # Builds then destroys
anarchy-a -k            # Two symbols slide in and shake hands
anarchy-a -n            # Fire. Fire. Fire.
anarchy-a -c -b         # Red/explosion. No further notes.
anarchy-a -f -s 4       # Instant, large, no patience
anarchy-a -d 60000 -r   # Slow drag/rainbow, for the dreamers
```

---

## The Lore

### Nobody asked your permission and that's the whole point

The Circle-A is a capital A - for *anarchy* - enclosed in a circle. It is the most
universally recognized symbol of anarchism, one of the most reproduced political
symbols on the planet, and almost certainly on a jacket within 50 feet of you right
now. You have seen it on walls, on patches, on record sleeves, on the forearms of
people your parents warned you about, and on the inside cover of at least one notebook
from 1999.

You have probably drawn it yourself. This symbol wants to be drawn. It has five elements:

- Upper arc of the circle
- Lower arc of the circle
- Left leg of the A `/`
- Right leg of the A `\`
- The crossbar `-` -- always red, because F%!$ YOUR FEELINGS

Five strokes. Efficient. Defiant. No committee approved this design. No trademark
was registered. No logo brief was issued. A nineteen-year-old in Paris decided
the world needed a better symbol and drew one. Then everyone else drew it too.
Forever.

---

### Born in Paris, 1964 (yeah, that Paris, those 60s)

The Circle-A was invented by anarchists from the Paris Libertarian Youth group.
The primary credit goes to **Tomás Ibáñez**, a Spanish anarchist exile, and his
companion **René Darras**. Ibáñez was nineteen at the time, which is the perfect
age to decide you're going to design the visual identity of a global political
philosophy.

The motivation was embarrassingly practical: communists had the hammer and sickle,
a simple, spray-can-friendly symbol you could tag in three seconds. Anarchists --
who had been around longer, had more interesting ideas, and were arguably more
fun at parties - had nothing equivalent. Every time they wanted to mark their
presence they basically had to write an essay on the wall.

Ibáñez laid it out plainly: they needed something that would make "practical
activities of inscriptions and postings more efficient" and ensure "a broader
presence of the anarchist movement in the public eye." The anarchists wanted a
logo. The anticapitalists needed branding. History is full of this kind of irony
and it's fine.

The symbol spread through European anarchist circles through the late 60s. Then
punk happened and it went everywhere.

---

### What does it mean? (Ask five anarchists, get six answers)

The received interpretation: the **A** stands for *anarchy*, the **circle** is the
letter O for *order*, referencing Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's famous 1840 line from
*What Is Property?*: *"As man seeks justice in equality, so society seeks order in
anarchy."* So the symbol means: anarchy IS order, actually, you just haven't
thought hard enough about it.

Ibáñez himself, in a 2024 essay on the symbol's 60th anniversary, pushed back on
this. He noted that the O-for-order reading wasn't something he and his companions
debated when they created the symbol - it was a retrospective interpretation
that spread and stuck. He pointed to the punk variants where the A's legs
extend beyond the circle as evidence that the circle-as-O reading was never
the original intent.

So the official meaning is: whatever you need it to mean, right now, in this
context. Which is very on-brand for a philosophy that disputes the legitimacy
of central authority.

---

### The punk chapter (this is the part that matters for our purposes)

The symbol lived largely within European anarchist circles through the late 60s
and 70s. Then, in 1977, a band called **Crass** formed in a commune in Essex,
England, and everything changed.

Crass weren't your average punk band. They lived collectively. They self-released
records. They designed their own artwork - angular, confrontational, black and
white. They printed their own posters. They practiced what they screamed about.
And they adopted the Circle-A in **red**, making it the visual centerpiece of
anarcho-punk's aesthetic.

Through Crass's records, gig posters, and the broader anarcho-punk network of
zines and tape trades, the Circle-A went from a European activist symbol to a
global shorthand for a very specific kind of pissed-off. By the early 80s it was
on walls from London to São Paulo, Detroit to Tokyo. It no longer required
any theoretical background to understand. It meant: *I am not okay with how
things are. I'm telling you directly.*

That's `-c / --crass`: everything in red, delay cut down, moving faster. No time
for subtlety. The walls aren't going to tag themselves.

---

### The black flag (a brief history of fabric and fury)

The Circle-A is a 1964 invention, but anarchism's relationship with symbols goes
back much further. The **black flag** predates it by about a century.

By the early 1880s, black was already established as an anarchist color. The "Black
International" name was used by a London-based anarchist group founded in 1881. But
the moment that cemented it happened on **March 9, 1883**, in Lyon, France.

**Louise Michel**  teacher, poet, veteran of the Paris Commune, already convicted
once and sentenced to a penal colony for her role in the uprising - carried a black
flag made from a rag and a broom handle through the streets in protest against hunger
and poverty. When put on trial, she told the court:

*"Why did we shelter the demonstration under the black flag? Because this flag is the
flag of strikes and it indicates that the worker has no bread."*

She got six years in prison. The black flag became the permanent symbol of anarchism.

A French anarchist paper called *Le Drapeau Noir* (The Black Flag) printed its first
issue months later. The flag appeared in Chicago at anarchist demonstrations in 1884,
described as "the fearful symbol of hunger, misery and death." Thousands marched
behind it at Kropotkin's funeral in 1921. It never stopped.

---

### The cast of characters (your field guide to the flags)

**Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865)** - The first person to call himself an
anarchist. Coined *"property is theft"* in 1840. Was subsequently unable to attend
a dinner party without causing a scene. Wrote *What Is Property?* at 31. Had the
confident beard of a man who was absolutely certain he was right.

**Mikhail Bakunin (1814-1876)** - *"The urge to destroy is also a creative urge,"*
1842. Russian. Revolutionary. Imprisoned, exiled, escaped, kept going. Feuded with
Marx for years in a conflict that was genuinely about ideas and not at all about
the fact that they had identical energies and couldn't both be in the same room.
The `-b / --bakunin` flag is his: the symbol is built completely, there is a
pause, and then it is destroyed in an expanding shockwave. Creative destruction.
Philosophically correct.

**Peter Kropotkin (1842-1921)** - Wrote *Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution* (1902),
arguing that cooperation rather than competition was the primary driver of evolutionary
success. Was a prince. Gave it up. Moved to London. Kept writing. Had the most
impressive beard in the entire history of anarchism, which is saying something.
The `-k / --kropotkin` flag draws two Circle-As that **slide in from opposite
edges of the screen and meet in the middle** -- because mutual aid, because
cooperation, because two symbols arriving alone and becoming adjacent is the
whole argument in 200 milliseconds.

**Louise Michel (1830-1905)** - "The Red Virgin of Montmartre." Teacher, poet,
anarchist, Paris Commune commander, twice convicted, twice kept going. Carried
the black flag. Never stopped. Icon. Full stop.

**Crass (1977-1984)** - The Essex commune punk band who painted the Circle-A
red and spray-painted it onto the walls of a generation. Brought anarchist theory
to kids who otherwise would have just been angry with no framework. Made it look
cool to be principled. Still unavailable for reunion tours.

---

### "No gods, no masters"

*Ni Dieu ni Maître* - no gods, no masters - has been attached to anarchist
philosophy since at least the 1870s. It appeared as the title of Auguste Blanqui's
newspaper in 1880. It spread through Kropotkin's *Words of a Rebel* in 1885. It
appeared in the 1896 Bordeaux anarchist manifesto. Margaret Sanger used it as the
slogan for her birth control newspaper *The Woman Rebel* in 1914. It appeared on
tombstones. It appeared on a 1964 French protest song against capital punishment.

It appears on t-shirts at every record fair, vintage shop, and punk show that has
ever happened.

`-n / --nogods` displays it as the tagline and then **burns the screen down**,
because some phrases deserve punctuation.

---

### Punk mode (`-p / --punk`)

Punk variants of the Circle-A frequently show the A's legs extending **beyond**
the circle - breaking free of the enclosure, refusing containment. This is the
visual argument: the A doesn't need the circle's permission. The symbol exceeds
its frame.

In `-p` mode, the A is drawn taller and wider than the circle, its peak above and
feet below the arc. After the symbol is complete, **red paint starts dripping** from
every lit pixel, running down the screen in streaks that pool and spread until the
whole terminal bleeds. Then it clears.

It's the most visually dramatic mode. It's also the most thematically accurate.
Punk didn't stay inside the lines.

---

### The terminal dimension

The Circle-A has been spray-painted on walls, stitched onto patches, pressed into
vinyl, printed on zines, tattooed on shoulders, painted on the sides of buildings,
stamped on boots, and screamed through PA systems in every city with a venue and
an audience that knew the words.

It had never been drawn, arc by arc, in 5-stage animated ANSI color with a
Bresenham circle algorithm, correct tangent-based character selection, optional
blood drip and fire finales, and a mutual-aid handshake mode, in a Linux terminal.

*Until now.*

---

## How it works

### Construction

| Stage | What is drawn        | Color   |
|------:|----------------------|---------|
|     1 | Top arc of circle    | Yellow  |
|     2 | Bottom arc of circle | Yellow  |
|     3 | Left leg `/`         | Cyan    |
|     4 | Right leg `\`        | Magenta |
|     5 | Crossbar `-`         | Red     |

### The geometry

Square-pixel space (0..19 × 0..19), circle center (9,9), radius 8.
Terminal: `col = ox + sq_x * scale * 2`, `row = oy + sq_y * scale`.
The x2 corrects for terminal character aspect ratio.

Circle characters are chosen from the **tangent direction** at each point:
the tangent to a circle is perpendicular to the radius, so at point (dx,dy)
from center, tangent slope = −dx/dy. Near-zero slope → `-`, near-infinite → `|`,
positive → `\`, negative → `/`. No lookup tables, just geometry.

### The finales

**`-b` Bakunin** - flash, shockwave ring, every lit pixel becomes debris with
velocity and gravity, fallout of ash. Named for Bakunin's 1842 "creative urge."

**`-p` Punk** - the A extends beyond the circle, then red paint drips from every
pixel down the screen until it floods red. Clears. Named for nothing, explained by
everything.

**`-n` No gods** - "No gods, no masters" tagline, then fire crawls up from the
bottom and burns the screen bright before dying down to ash. Named for Blanqui,
Kropotkin, Sanger, and everyone who wrote it on a wall.

**`-k` Kropotkin** - two symbols slide in from opposite sides and meet in the middle
with a small bounce, then rest adjacent. Named for *Mutual Aid* (1902).

---

## Installation

```bash
git clone https://github.com/fourzerosix/anarchy-a.git
cd anarchy-a && make && sudo make install
```

```bash
pip install anarchy-a
```

```bash
docker run --rm -it fourzerosix/anarchy-a anarchy-a -p
```

---

## Platform support

Linux, macOS, WSL -- full support. Needs a VT100-compatible terminal.
If your terminal was built after 1990 you're fine.
Windows cmd.exe -- no.

---

## License

**GNU General Public License v3.0** -- see [LICENSE](LICENSE).

You are free to use, modify, and distribute this software under the terms of
the GPL v3. If you distribute a modified version, you must also distribute
the source code under the same license.

The circle-A symbol belongs to everyone and no one. That's kind of the point.

---

## Credits

- [Anarchist Symbolism -- Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchist_symbolism)
- [Tomás Ibáñez, "The circled A at 60: True and false"](https://freedomnews.org.uk/2024/04/12/the-circled-a-at-60-true-and-false/) -- Freedom News, 2024
- [Crass](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crass) -- the band that made it red
- [Louise Michel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louise_Michel) -- carried the flag
- [Peter Kropotkin, *Mutual Aid*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_Aid:_A_Factor_of_Evolution) -- 1902
- [Mikhail Bakunin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Bakunin) -- 1842
- [`cool-s`](https://github.com/fourzerosix/cool-s) -- the original
