BOKK Glossary

Words have power because of the meanings they embody – and conversely ‘jargon’, with its ability to limit the cryptic meanings of certain words within small groups, limits the power of the public to take part in debates. Hence the creation of the BOKK Glossary, to explain some of the critical labels and terms often used in political, economic, and technical debates so that more people can participate and express their views.

To access the alphabetic pages of the BOKK Glossary, use the navigation bar at the foot of the screen.

As has sometimes been said in reply to The Free Range Network’s work, ‘that’s just a meaningless word salad’. If we use long or or jargon words in our explanation of issues, then it’s because those words most succinctly describe what it is we are trying to say – and most cirtically from our point of view, if you cannot say what you mean, then you cannot mean what you say!

Unless people are able to understand what’s being said by those who set or seek to influence policy, they cannot take part in that process; and unless they can take part in that process then they cannot begin to make meaningful change to their position in the world. This ‘Glossary’ has been created to explain key terms and phrases, briefly outline all those ‘-isms’ that the media like to threaten people with, and most importantly, link to related materials to create routes for ^Aself-exploration and education of the political and ecological realities of the modern world.

Finally, the other motivation for the creating the Glossary is the growing limitation of access to knowledge on-line – either via national laws, paywalls around leading reference publications that were once commonly available in print, or ‘shadow-banning’ (censorship of certain words or phrases by the algorithms of social media platforms) – which restricts people’s ability to understand and thus participate in the governance of the world around them. In particular, given the mass media’s implicit censorship of allegedly ‘radical’ content (i.e., anything which departs from the right-of-centre/technocratic dialogue) the Glossary has been written from a clear and openly anarchist viewpoint that is critical of both technology and liberal modernism.

This Glossary forms the core of the BOKK Library, linking the Subject Index which lists the occurrence of Glossary terms within the materials of the FRAW site, and the Issues directory which provides learning/reading materials around specific topics. Together these deliver our ambition of creating a truly ‘Free Range’ learning resource.