“The Anarchist Cookbook” has come to be associated with a lot of things over the years. Lots of people link it with extremists on both sides of politics, and with the shadowy and mysterious sub-culture of computer enthusiasts and hackers. The book is said to do everything from teaching you how to grow drugs at home to building bombs and making zip guns. As the years have gone by the rumors have grown to include things like secret techniques for becoming an unbeatable street fighter and building your own, at-home Taser or tear gas Mace. The irony is that like any urban legend from the Slender Man to the Illuminati once you actually start shining a light around and introducing some hard facts, “The Anarchist Cookbook” becomes just one more over-inflated myth that people will only buy because they read about it on the Internet. So, let’s get to poking some holes in the mystery, shall we?
“The Anarchist Cookbook” was originally written by a very young, and very angry teenager by the name of William Powell in the late 1960s. Powell was angry at the Vietnam war, and the idea that he would be drafted, and all of that energy that only a really motivated 19 year old can possess lead him to go to the public library and start pulling down reference material. Powell wanted to learn how to make bombs, how to sabotage a communication network, how to win fights and how to make drugs. These facts and others could be found right at his fingertips, hiding in plain sight within innocuous materials like chemistry books that detailed steps for cooking drugs at home and manuals given to the army and special forces like the green berets.
Powell took all of the information in, internalized it, and then spewed it out in a book full of dangerous how-to articles that ranged from making poisons to cobbling together homemade explosives. Like anything written by an angry 19 year old who didn’t want to do too much fact-checking, “The Anarchist Cookbook” is more dangerous for the things it leaves out than the things it contains. Powell’s writing style was catchy and down to Earth, but he left out a lot of important, need-to-know information that anyone who attempted a single how-to from the book should have. And like any proud author who hadn’t yet realized the monster he’d made, Powell sent the book to a publisher.
The publisher gladly accepted Powell’s book, but rather than letting the author maintain the rights the company took them. Powell signed them away without much thought at the time, but would later come to regret it. In addition to keeping the publishing rights, the publishing company didn’t fact check or alter the text. As such all of the dangers were left in, leaving readers to suffer the fate of Crowley’s Homunculus (short history lesson: the famed occultist Aleister Crowley left behind his book of shadows when he died, but he left out information deliberately so that anyone following the book would immolate themselves because of the missing components). Powell eventually realized what he’d done, and has asked several times for the owners of the publishing rights (they’ve changed hands a few times since the 1960s) to stop publishing the book. Unfortunately the legend has made “The Anarchist Cookbook” so popular that no company that wants to keep making money would stop printing it.
Now, even though “The Anarchist Cookbook” was written before the computer boom and hacker culture of the late 1980s and 1990s, its influence there was keenly felt when it was reborn online. “The Anarchist Cookbook” was re-written by users, such as the infamous Jolly Roger, and re-distributed on the networks to those in-the-know in online communities. These versions are essentially what you can find today on any message boards if you look; sets of dubious instructions that give useless if not outright harmful instructions to achieve often illegal ends, followed by assurances from the posters that the how-to really work. Of course the newer versions had parts of the original cookbook in them, but there were even more half-truths and outright lies in these versions because it wasn’t about whether or not you could actually build a bomb, but rather about the satisfaction that you had the knowledge to do it and other people didn’t.
When you get down to it, that’s what the mythical status of “The Anarchist Cookbook” is all about; having secret knowledge. This idea also accounts for the success of other texts, like “The Poor Man’s James Bond.” Secret knowledge has always prompted curiosity, and reading a book can’t actually do you any harm. However, attempting to follow instructions that were improperly copied and pasted by a 19 year old based on the notes he made on procedures in a U.S. Army manual from the 1960s might pose quite a risk to life, limb and even your freedom if you get caught afterwards.
“The Anarchist Cookbook FAQ,” by Anonymous at Anarchist Cookbookz
“Anarchists Cookbook, Don’t Use This Book!” by Catman12 at Totse
“The Anarchist Cookbook Turns 40,” by Matthew Honan at Wired