Le Guin understood something about anarchism that anarchists won't admit: it requires constant physical presence to work.

The Unified Theory doesn't need Shevek's body on Anarres—the equations don't care where they're written—yet the novel insists, structurally, emotionally, and politically, that Shevek must go back.

He must stand in the Hall of the Open Planning and speak the theory aloud to the people who matter. When Shevek considers transmitting the theory across the wall via radio, the book treats it as insufficient—not technically impossible, but morally incomplete.

The act of physics requires witness. It requires the friction of actual bodies in actual space deciding together whether the work is true. What Le Guin was really mapping wasn't anarchism's promise but its ceiling: face-to-face communities scale to maybe two hundred people—Dunbar's number, though she wouldn't have called it that—and beyond that, consensus breaks.

We chose different. We built networks that promised scale without presence—digital platforms that would let anarchist thinking spread infinitely—and instead built surveillance capitalism: systems that demand total information about every body, everywhere, all the time. The opposite of anarchism's intimacy.