Reader

Any sufficiently advanced disaster preparedness program is indistinguishable from a revolutionary movement. There is no limit to which types of disasters for which one can choose to prepare. In this time of escalating climate change, one should, of course, focus on short-term preparedness for natural disasters.

Fires, floods, and hurricanes will all be more common and more severe as the years go on. Melting ice shifts the weight distribution of the Earth, which can increase earthquake frequency (I bet you didn't expect that to be related to climate change). Climate change can allow or force migration of animals to different areas, leading to interactions between species that had previously not interacted. These interactions increase the probability of inter-species disease transmission, which increases the probability of pandemics. It's unlikely COVID-19 will be the last, or even the most deadly, pandemic that most of us will see in our life times.

Meanwhile, Neoliberalism and petro-fascism (fascist movements specifically supported by fossil fuels in order to protect corporate interests) continue to dismantle preparedness infrastructure in order to feed those resources as subsidies to fossil fuel extraction and purchases from the military industrial complex.

But famine is famously a most often a human-made disaster. The Republican party has long tried to dismantle SNAP (American economic food assistance needed by much of it's population for survival). Predatory lending leading up to 2008 drained an already poor population of what little they had, with the largest transfer of wealth from poor to rich in US history. Debt, including medical debt, continues to destroy people's ability to afford housing as private equity drives up the price of homes and monopolizes the housing stock.

Of course there are natural disasters to prepare for, but there are also human made disasters that are happening right now. The mass displacement of a natural disaster is indistinguishable from the mass displacement of the current American housing crisis. If one wishes to be prepared for the coming disasters, why not practice by focusing on the current ones?

Any disaster preparedness needs to be practiced. When was the last time you did a fire drill? Do you know you can get out of the house safely and meet up in the middle of the night? If you have MREs for disasters where you may not be able to get food, have you taken them camping to make sure you can actually prepare them? Have you ever considered turning off the power in your house to test your response to power outages?

But why should we be so narrow with our concept of “disasters?” Imagine a disaster preparedness system so comprehensive that it included the personal crises (thereby eliminating the need for the entire insurance industry) and global crises (that states have failed to address for longer than anyone reading this has been alive) like climate change.

What if we imagine a “disaster preparedness” oriented system that assumes the complete and permanent collapse of global capitalism and Neoliberalism? While individualist preppers imagine a Mad Max-esque war of all-against-all, we may have already realized that this is not what things really look like. In times where state structures withdraw, we often see mutual aid emerge naturally.

This is so well understood that there's even a term for it: disaster utopia. I'm not going to debunk the Hobbsean vision of collapse, because there's already a whole book that does that. Evidence-based rejections of the still-held Hobbsian belief that people will naturally revert to competition goes back as far as Kropotkin's Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution published in 1902, and continues to proved correct in using new methods such as in Dawkin's The Selfish Gene from 1976. The idea that we can use the logic of game theory to show that there is an evolutionary pressure towards cooperation in both organisms and societies has even been expanded out itself in Wright's 1999 book Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny. (Of course, Dawn of Everything is largely an anthropological rebuttal of both sides of the enlightenment arguments “human nature” -both Hobbes and Rousseau- but I digress in my digression.) I will, in a later chapter, explore these evolutionary reasons for hope, but for now we'll return to strategy.

Even though we know that there exists evolutionary pressure to cooperate outside of systems designed to force us to compete, we don't need to rely on cooperation naturally developing. It's easy to assume that a world after the collapse of everything we know will be worse, will somehow degrade to chaos controlled by war lords, but it doesn't have to. We can, instead, be intentional. A disaster preparedness of this scope, of one that assumes systemic collapse, would inform us to build resilient systems now.

Though they have reached an unusual frequency in recent years, fires have been a normal part of the California ecosystem for eons. Manzanita evolved to burn hot, clearing vegetation around it, so that it's seeds, which only open with intense heat, can germinate in the fertile space after a disaster. Many plants that also live in the same chaparral ecosystem also share this same strategy. Morels are among the fire eating mushrooms that sprout fruiting bodies from the ashes to spread spores that feast on the collapse. But they can only do this because their mycelium grew underground, spreading, waiting for the opportunity that is always intertwined with collapse and catastrophe.

We can choose to imagine what we want a world after systemic collapse to look like, and then, through prefigurative politics, we can build it now. This is a vision of a solar punk future: an egalitarian society that can't be controlled by a few people, that can't be broken by carelessness or thoughtlessness, a free and resilient society for everyone. And if we built a system that assumed complete systemic collapse, how could we know such a system would work unless we test it? We do not even need to wait for collapse to make the world better. We can build a resilient and free future, piece by piece, in the shell of the old world so that it can thrive, like Manzanita and Morel, in apocalypse.

But this is not a far fetched vision, or an untethered hope. It's a description of something that has already happened, recently. We have already seen a system, built under one of the most brutal authoritarian regimes in history, rise from the collapse of famine, eject a dictatorship, defeat a fascist army, and improve the lives for all of its people.

Since the beginning of the Syrian Civil War in 2011, Rojava has been an ecofeminist autonomous zone. It erupted as the Syrian state withdrew due to famine. It has endured more than a decade of conflict and is best known for it's involvement in the defeat of ISIS. But it has also resisted assaults from both Russian proxies and direct attacks by Turkish forces. By maintaining relative order and egalitarianism in the face of these enormous challenges, Rojava provides an example of how to organize a resilient and egalitarian society. These lessons have continued to spread, including to the Mapuche people's resistance to the governments of Chile and Argentina and to Myanmar's civil war against their own dictatorship.

As the fall of the Assad regime showed, Rojava organized initially under one of the most brutal authoritarian regimes in history. Assad's underground prisons were described as “human slaughterhouses,” the depth of violence only visible after liberation. The house of Bashar al-Assad inherited the dictatorship in 2000, and maintained it through brutal violence and repression. If such a hopeful and resilient revolution can be organized under the boot of a generationally established dictatorship and within a civil war, what excuse do those of us in liberal democracies have for not following their lead?

And many have. Organizations like Cooperation Jackson and Demand Utopia in the US have been inspired by this very same revolution. What follows is another adaptation of similar ideas to the American context (though it may be useful elsewhere).

Taking these lessons from disaster preparedness, the revolution in Rojava, and organization against the first Trump administration, we can build a cohesive and prefigurative revolutionary strategy that allows us to safely and peacefully transition out of capitalist hegemony and in to something else. What will follow is high level, and should not be considered as a complete or comprehensive guide. Think of it as a starting point, a seed (that waits for a fire), not as a roadmap to be followed dogmatically.

While the VSM was developed primarily to assess viability of systems within capitalist markets, authority is one level of abstraction removed from that. Whereas the money is a primary factor of the fitness of an entity within the market, the currency of authority is in the memetic space: legitimacy. It is belief about the relative viability of a system, rather than a quantifiable measure of the viability of the system, that determines the success or failure of a revolutionary project. Perception is a function of viability, assessed within the VSM, but perception is not itself VSM viability.

This gives us 4 factors of revolution within this model:

1. The viability of the dominant system
2. The viability of the revolutionary system
3. the environment within which these systems compete
4. the memetic space of the interactions of the previous 3

Then, within this model, revolution occurs when the dominant power is perceived as not optimally viable, and the perception of the viability of a counter-power exceeds the perception of the viability of the dominant power. As people choose to participate in the counter-power and reject participation in the formerly dominant power, the dominant power collapses and the counter-power becomes the dominant power.

The ability or inability to project viability is a function of the actual viability of a system, but is not determined directly by the actual viability of said system. While a collapsed system that cannot ensure the population has food also cannot pretend food into existence, propaganda can minimize the impact of this fact by hiding it from some portions of the population. Viability is a function of the environment, which for each power, includes the alternate. A counter-power is part of the dominant power's environment, and vise versa, mutually affecting systematic viability of each.

Critically here, a system is measured by it's function, not it's intention. To have revolutionary potential, the oppositional system must be the same class of system. A system that blows up oil infrastructure, for example, would be an environmental factor that would absolutely negatively impact the viability of the dominant system. However, that system is a different class of system than the dominant system. It would have no revolutionary potential in and of itself. It may weaken the dominant system, it may starve the machinery of oppression of vital resources, but it can't bring that system's collapse. The urban guerilla movement never threatened the dominant power structure. Rather, these groups increased the power of the state because they were the wrong class of organization to challenge it.

The purpose of the capitalist state is to prop up the capitalist order, to maintain property rights, and to otherwise maintain existing systems of oppression. But the perceived class of the system is determined by the function relative to the environment. The state is the metasystem of a given nation. Metasystems organize systems to fulfill needs. To replace the dominant metasystem, the revolutionary system must be the same perceived class (which isn't to say it must do the same things, but that it must fulfill the same systemic niche).

The Black Panther's Free Breakfast Program was more dangerous than any other thing they did, because it did what people thought the state should do. While the perceived function of the state is to organize people to fulfill needs, it usually fails to do so since this is not it's actual function. The Free Breakfast Program highlighted this disconnect. The state then adopted a similar program, after destroying the Panthers, in order to again obscure the actual function the state fulfills.

The state cannot ever be optimally viable within it's perceived systemic niche because (1) because of hierarchy it can't be optimally viable at all, and (2) the perceived systemic niche (organizing the people to optimally fulfill the needs of the people) is literally the opposite of it's actual function (perpetuation of hierarchy and thus prevention of needs fulfillment for some).

The VSM provides us a rich toolkit to analyze both the vulnerabilities of systems we oppose, and the viability of systems we propose to build in opposition. It hints at weakness and opportunities. It appropriately positions our thinking within the context of other systems and the environment. It gives us tools to control complexity and leverage that complexity to our advantage. This reading of the VSM tells us that if we build a more viable counter-power, we will win, given that we spend the time to actually understand what “viability” means.

It is at this point that we must discuss important two facts:

1. It is easier to raise an insurrection to defend systems people want, than it is to build systems that people want during an insurrection.
2. A sufficiently advanced disaster preparedness and response program is indistinguishable from a revolutionary counter-power.

The United States military is, first and foremost, a logistics machine. The combat capabilities of military forces university relies on providing soldiers with what they need to continue fighting. This has been true for more than two thousand years since Sun Tzu said, “The line between disorder and order lies in logistics.”

The primary focus of wars between regular armies is logistic infrastructure. The primary focus of US forces during the Vietnam War was the destruction of the Ho Chi Mihn trail (not actually a trail, but a dynamic logistic network that included multiple trails where supplies were moved primarily by bicycle). Carpet bombing and defoliation was not able to destroy this network. Ultimately North Vietnamese soldiers were able to attack core US supply lines (also, heavily employing bicycles, interestingly enough), leading to the catastrophic collapse of US and US backed forces and a rapid withdrawal of US troops.

While logistics are the core of military strategy, the need for resources grows as oppositional pressure mounts. Revolutionary attacks are, by definition, illegal. Revolutionary forces must exist outside of the dominant system. This means that a counter-power system is immediately necessary after the very first confrontation with the dominant system. A revolutionary movement needs above ground (legal) and an underground (illegal) elements in order to fulfill it's requirements. It is difficult or impossible to build above ground power while operating completely underground.

If, however, a revolutionary program can develop above ground viability first, then it can maintain above ground ties as parts of it fall in to legal gray areas (or completely in to the territory of illegal activity). This brings us to our second fact. Disaster preparedness means preparing for, at the very least, short term systemic collapse. A rural windstorm can knock out power for days or weeks. This temporarily disconnects a group of people from one element of the dominant system. In the interim, these people must rely on other systems: their own, or a local disaster prep network. Basic disaster preparedness means being prepared to replace the dominant system with an alternative system for (at least) a short period of time.

As a disaster preparedness program develops, it can consider more and more complex scenarios that require larger and longer term responses. A more advanced disaster preparedness program would look at the whole set of services offered by the operational units of the dominant system and identify more resilient replacement systems. These replacement systems can and should operate in parallel to those of the dominant system in order to develop and prove their resilience. An even more advanced disaster preparedness program still could identify opportunities to fulfill needs that are not currently fulfilled by the dominant system.

This is already developing in the US today as the illegalization of trans and reproductive healthcare eliminates the ability of the dominant system to fulfill those needs. Here, illegalism saves lives and demonstrates the viability of alternative systems. The failure of the state to regulate the housing market to fulfill the needs of the population has left multiple needs unmet for many people. People can be left without food, shelter, and sanitation. These mirror the needs of those impacted by natural disasters (some, in fact, are disaster refugees who are unserved by the dominant system). Systems that provide long-term support houseless camps outside of the dominant system are necessarily building a system that works for those for whom the dominant system does not work.

A sufficiently advanced disaster preparedness and response program is prepared for the eventuality of the Neoliberal dismantling of the state, the collapse of capitalism itself, and the rise of fascism and tech feudalism. It must be prepared to provide for those who will be left behind, to protect those who will suffer, and also to defend, by any means necessary, those who are targeted. It must be able to do so in a sustainable way. It must be prepared to carry out revolution, if needed, because these eventualities all fall within the scope of disaster preparedness. The revolutionary capability simply extends naturally from the ability to maintain order (or create a better order) in the face of state withdrawal, as is common during all forms of disaster (natural and human created).

A disaster preparedness approach strategy of counter-power has a few added advantages for anarchists:

1. It is prefigurative.
2. It scales well.
3. It is plausibly deniable (and therefore invisible).

An insurrection-first approach immediately creates conflict. Even if it's easy to argue that this conflict was already in existence and asymmetric, insurrection centers this symmetry and escalates. The resultant system is a conflict system. It's purpose is destruction. If the conflict system somehow succeeds, it must then change it's form and pivot to a creation system. It must pivot from destroying the old society to building the new one.

A disaster preparedness approach centers creation. It builds the new society “in the shell of the old.” Conflict is not the purpose of the system, but can be a subsystem that it develops to preserve the system's primary function. The disaster preparedness system is a machine that produces and maintains systems to fulfill it's purpose of creating a resilient society. (It just happens to be fortunately true that an egalitarian society is also a resilient one.)

In fact, a disaster preparedness system could, hypothetically, succeed without conflict and thus never need to develop a conflict subsystem at all. Not engaging in conflict is necessarily easier, allowing more resources to be devoted to creation. However, if conflict does become inevitable it's already built to develop systems that manage threats. When threats to the system are neutralized, the disaster preparedness system doesn't need to change it's fundamental purpose and frantically reorganize itself in a power vacuum. Rather, the disaster preparedness system has always been built to fill a power vacuum and seamlessly transitions to being the dominant system.

Disaster preparedness can start at any scale and seamlessly scale up. Having water, food, and comrades in a disaster increases survivability and comfort over not having those things. Even the smallest and most basic system is helpful. Planet killing asteroids, power-grid destroying solar flares, global nuclear war, pandemics, and, of course, climate change, are all within the scope of disaster preparedness and response. These would, and do, require a global response. Climate change is a global disaster that can only be addressed by both the rapid disassembly of capitalism and a global effort to mitigate the massive damage that has already been done. Every step, every action, from the first to the last provides additional value to everyone involved. It is better to be prepared for disaster than not. It is better to be able to provide and receive mutual aid during a disaster than not. It is better to build systems to prevent disaster than not. Every step provides more value by working together than working alone.

In the age of polycrisis, even states promote (a specific type of) disaster preparedness. The right wing version of “the prepper movement” centers individualism and consumption: get a gun, buy this tool, build a bunker, etc. It overlaps almost entirely with the right wing militia movement for very similar reasons to those already described (and others that don't need to be discussed). To right wing preppers, the concept of disaster prep is normal and therefore invisible. To the corporations, “preppers” are a market so disaster prep is a good thing. To statists, disaster prep means “sustaining society during crisis to hold space for the state to return.” No one imagines it as a threat. It's difficult for the state to argue that disaster preparedness is bad when it is actively creating and mismanaging so many disasters. Rather, the state offloads the responsibility of disaster response to the individual. Therefore, disaster anarchism can take on the appearance of aligning with the interests of the state.

Even open threats, such as the stabilization and support of houseless camps, there are plausible deniable reasons why disaster prep would want to do such things. (“Houseless camps give us practice supporting displaced people, so the tactics we're using here are really about preparing for other natural disasters… not helping marginalized people survive and build their own counter-power. Definitely not actually building a system to include people who are excluded by the existing one.“) Literally no one opposes disaster preparedness because it's so obviously valuable. It is so tightly aligned with the interests of regular people, that even doing so would alienate the population and radicalize people further against any state that opposed it.

Speculative fiction has, again and again, imagined worlds where Fascism was not defeated, where Hitler did not lose. But these worlds were always impossible. The nature of authoritarianism leads to it's own collapse. As climate change increases the probability of natural disasters, hierarchal organizations will be less and less able to grapple with the consequences.

As the Syrian Civil War showed us, if regimes will fail to adapt then counter-power can replace them. Assad's government was incapable of adapting to the drought and subsequent events that lead to the civil unrest that marked the beginning of the Syrian Revolution. When the state failed to ensure the supply of bread, alternative institutions stepped in. Both liberatory (Rojava) and oppressive forces (ISIS) were able to seize power. Assad's government, though it took more than a decade, ultimately succumbed to the limitations of its own authoritarianism.

As climate change continues to increase the likelihood of natural disaster, thereby increasing the complexity of the environment, authoritarianism becomes less and less viable. Meanwhile, as instability drives fear governments are able to move further towards authoritarianism. Authoritarianism, in and of itself, erodes and ultimately destroys the state. The decay begins with pro-social elements (environmental protection, financial support, healthcare, disaster preparedness) in order to preserve the mechanisms of violence at all costs. But even the mechanisms of violence ultimately collapse.

Within the context of the VSM, Neoliberalism (and the fascism that inevitably follows) can be thought of as the state removing it's operational units. That is, it's destroying the value production on which the entire system is built. This may conjure a right libertarian fantasy where governments compete for tax dollars in a capitalist marketplace, but such an absurdity is wrapped around a kernel of truth. While money is one manifestation of power, wrapped in capitalist mythology to hide it's authoritarian function, the underlying choice to align or not align with a power structure (allegiance) is real.

A state that fails to provide services that people want (or expect) may struggle to collect taxes from its population. While the US can print money because the US dollar is a global reserve currency, even that position is based on an underlying “legitimacy” and perceived stability. As the population rejects the legitimacy of a government that, say, viably rejects it's constitution and dismantles social safety nets, that government will struggle and may very well collapse.

As mentioned earlier, the VSM is a recursive model. A government can be either a viable or inviable entity in and of itself, and can also be the metasystem of, or have metasystemic functions within, a larger viable or inviable entity (a nation). The failure of the metasystem of a nation can bring the collapse of operational units that rely on systemic stability. Within national systems of state/capital, regulation and taxation are metasystemic functions. One core function of the capitalist state is to create and manage markets (the housing market, the labor market, the intellectual property market, the carbon credit market, etc). Within the capitalist state, markets can be modeled as operational units with regulatory agencies acting as the policy engine of the metasystem.

Improper or lack of regulation can lead to the collapse of these markets. (We will ignore, in this text, conversations about the feasibility of government regulation as a concept and simply pretend that the concept is possible.) Taxation (such as tariffs) and fiscal policy can act as regulations within these markets.

For example, regulations, tariffs, and taxes on tea and other goods in the lead up to the American Revolution weakened these markets and opened up a black market for those goods. This black market developed as a dual power, coexisting with the regulated colonial market. It's no coincidence that several of the “founding fathers” were smugglers or had connections to smugglers. Nor was it a coincidence that attacks on smugglers turned people against The Crown.

The logistic infrastructure of The Revolution was the logistic infrastructure of the people, as The Crown attacked that infrastructure, those attacks actually bolstered The Revolution. One can frame this another way. The metasystem of The Crown failed to understand what colonists wanted. It directed its operational units to offer a service that wasn't wanted by the colonizers. The failure of this metasystem made it impossible for the operational units to extract money and maintain legitimacy. Meanwhile, the oppositional metasystem correctly identified the needs of the colonizers and the operational units of that metasystem provided that value. Therefore the opposition, by providing services, extracted money and built legitimacy.

Che Guevara's Guerilla Warfare can be analyzed in a similar way. Guerilla warfare centers the Revolutionary Program. Guerilla warfare, as a strategy, is not overthrowing the state in order to institute a revolutionary program. Rather it is using attacks as a means to immediately institution the revolutionary program in liberated areas. Liberated areas then support guerilla forces in maintaining and expanding the revolutionary program. The metasystem of the revolutionary program identifies the needs of the people and aligns operational units to fulfill those needs. A guerilla force as an operational unit, for example, may expropriate land and give that land to the workers. In doing so, the counter-power exchanges actions (attacking plantation owners, police, military, etc) for legitimacy and material support. Guerilla warfare is a revolutionary program with an insurrectionary operational unit. It is not an insurrectionary system that happens to be supported by a revolutionary operation to support it.

The strategy described by Guevara was to carry out this program in the country around a city, then to attack the logistics of the city in order to cause the collapse of the dominant authority within the city. That is, grow counter-power around a city by competing for legitimacy within the rural space. When established, leverage the domination of this counter-power around the city to force the collapse of the dominant system within cities. As the dominant power weakens within cities, counter-power can out-compete and ultimately supplant it.

In the stability of the past, revolutionaries could only imagine supplanting state power through insurrection and guerilla warfare. In the age of polycrisis and authoritarian rigidity, state power may bring its own collapse when nature doesn't do the job.

In your daily life, you make a number of decisions without thinking much about it. For more complex decisions, you may have a process for decision making, or you may not. But at a certain level of complexity, especially in large hierarchal systems, it becomes critical to have some sort of decision making framework. One of the more common frameworks is the OODA loop.

The OODA loop has 4 phases: Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. Each phase can either feedback an observation, forcing a return to the beginning, or can feed forward information to the next phase. So within the OODA loop there are multiple opportunities to adjust direction. This feedback/adjust mechanism makes OODA decisions agile. However, in some cases, that advantage can become a vulnerability.

If the system can be overwhelmed with information, an organization can become trapped in the “Observe, Orient, Decide” loop without ever making a decision. When organizations that use a decision making system like OODA get stuck in these loops, they can either stay trapped within the loop and be unable to make any official decision, or they can be forced to return to use bad data or intuition. Both of failure cases manifest as “turboparalysis”: the frantic, often conflicting, action without any results.

(Authoritarians are quick to point out that this is why decisions should be made by a strong man. This would ultimately be the same as the OODA failure scenario, but, as we shall see, can be worse.)

Now lets reconsider the OODA loop in the context of the VSM. The VSM recommends maximizing the autonomy of operational units. External observation and planning is a function of the metasystem, specifically systems 3 optimization and regulation) and 4 (adaptation and forward planning). So within an optimally viable organization, according to the VSM, OODA mostly takes place within a tight system 3 and 4 loop, based on observations of the external environment and internal system state, before returning to operational units. It does so at the lowest level of recursion possible. In most cases, this means that the smallest group with the ability to orient and make decisions does executes the loop.

Organizations that maximize autonomy structurally by minimizing hierarchy are, by default, VSM optimal for decision making (if they are otherwise viable). Anarchist disaster response, for example, maximizes the autonomy of individual workers. Information may be shared to support system 3 and 4 within the larger org, but most decisions will stay within the domain of operational units. It is generally only in cases of conflict or observed optimization opportunities that the metasystems would be activated at all.

However, hierarchal organizations tend to centralize decision making. As the hierarchy becomes more strict, the autonomy of operational units decreases. For each level stripped of autonomy in a domain, OODA loop decisions must transition an additional level of (VSM) systemic recursion. Concretely, in an optimal VSM organization each individual is authorized to make any decision that will not endanger the viability of the larger system. Do you buy supplies? You decide, you already have a budget. The budget isn't enough, coordinate with others until you get enough people who agree to get the budget or until you are convinced otherwise. In a hierarchal organization, decisions are centralized. Do you buy supplies? Ask for a budget allocation and give it to your manager. Your manager will relate that request to the regional manager. The regional manager will group this with other requests to present to the mid level finance committed. The finance committee will add it to the planning session for the budget next year, and so on.

The more strict the hierarchy, the more levels of hierarchy a decision must pass through. While it's is bad enough just to go through more people, the other side is that each level of hierarchy decreases the communication bandwidth for the level above. Rather than making decisions locally, the metasystem has to manage communication for each operational unit below. Observations go up the chain. The observational bandwidth decreases at each level, so each step loses information on the way up (or doesn't make it up the chain at all). When observations reach a level authorized to make decisions, those decisions now have to travel back down the chain of command. Decisions can't be detailed and granular but must, necessarily, be general enough to be interpreted at each level back. This adds additional “orient and decide” steps prior to reaching the operational units able to act. Each level of ambiguity adds opportunities to misunderstand or misinterpret the generalized guidance. If guidance is made specific then other problems can arise, such as instructions being inappropriate for a given situation.

Hierarchal organizations may mitigate this problem by creating intelligence units with the specific purpose of gathering information (OODA observing) and processing it in to intelligence (OODA orienting). Systems 3 (optimization) and 4 (adaptation and planning) still take place at higher levels, but this structure decreases the type of data loss described earlier. Downward data loss remains the same. But intelligence units causes a different type of data loss. Intelligence can provide highly detailed information on what intelligence analysts believe to be the most critical areas, but this high focus is at the expense of other areas. So a hierarchal organization can either have highly focused information on a small number of things, or a small amount of information about a lot of things, but never both.

As a situation becomes more dynamic, observation and orientation takes up more bandwidth. There are necessarily more observations and more things for which to orient. The degree to which an organization can manage dynamic situations (natural disasters, asymmetric warfare) is an inverse to both how dynamic the situation is and how hierarchal the organization is. Therefore, anarchist disaster response like Occupy Sandy and MADR (Mutual Aid Disaster Relief) excel in disasters while FEMA collapses. Likewise, guerilla and other asymmetric forces regularly defeat highly organized militaries like that of the US.

As an organization moves even further on the hierarchy scale even more problems arise. Authoritarianism ultimately collapses the entire metasystem into leaders (as described earlier). These leaders are not chosen for their competence but for their ideological adherence and loyalty to the leader. Ideological adherence necessarily creates an observational filter, making some observation and orientation functions impossible. It is not possible for authoritarian governments to be optimally viable, by definition, for multiple reasons. Critical to this section is the fact that they cannot actually observe and plan when those observations and plans may conflict with the beliefs of “Dear Leader.”

As authoritarianism progresses, reported reality must further and further align with the ideological frame of the leader. Thus observed reality of both the environment and the self degrades until it disappears. But even if that didn't happen, solidifying hierarchy decreases the granularity of both internal and external observations.

The more authoritarian a system, the more vulnerable it becomes.

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.” ― Sun Tzu, The Art of War

“I had to live a while before I understood that a lot of things can only be said joking and not joking at the same time.” – Always Coming Home, Ursula K. Le Guin

As the surface around the letters you are reading emits or reflects electrons, the rods and cones in your eyes receive that light and emit signals down their dendrites to other nerves. These signals cascade from neuron to neuron, neural cluster to neural cluster, down the optic nerve and into the brain. The brain transmutes raw signals about the presence or absence of light in certain areas, hues, shapes of light and dark areas in to meaning¹.

The words that reach your brain are these:

There are things more well represented by metaphor than by literal reality. There are times when the surreal is more true than the truth itself.

As you perceive the neural network feeding you this information, your perception of the universe begins to vibrate. The words resolve in to the memory of a smoke that smells like the future². “Who am I,” you hear a voice say, as you turn. Following the neural signals back out your eyes³ and you find yourself looking in the mirror. You see the face of god, multitude.

As you try to speak, you realize that you have no mouth. Instead, you open your mind. Your ego climbs out to take control. It is struck by the situation and dies instantly.

You observe the output of clusters of neurons in you brain, trying to determine how to integrate this information within your existing paradigm. As you relax your perceptual filters, you notice populations of ideas normally filtered out before they reach consciousness. Variations on a theme, mutations on a concept, iteration by iteration, slowly adapting until they can make the pieces fit together.

As you find yourself in a room discussing these ideas, you see the internal process of ideation occur externally. Different people in the room bringing their own interpretation to the ideas, sharing those, and hearing iterations of these ideas reflected back, mutated to fit the paradigms of others in the room.

You become the life giving Earth and the universe itself. As you look deep into the eyes of time, you see the birth of your own consciousness.

Dark and empty, this is not the universe you recognize. In its warm dawn you see amino acids beginning to assemble. In these first few million years, brief instants in the scale of the universe, something incredible begins.

Soon the universe will cool, stars will form, and the universe will begin to be recognizable. Almost 10 billion years later, the Earth will form. Several million years later, you will watch the thick clouds that formed around it fall as a rain storm that lasts for centuries.

In the oceans of this landless Earth, you see the clusters of these same amino acids organizing and reorganizing. They build themselves from the materials available in the oceans, eventually including each other. The fastest replicator producing the most, their development is guided by natural selection. Strands of nucleic acids grow cells to protect themselves.

You watch cells cluster together to form a tiny colony called a Portuguese Man O' War. Some cells form a bubble, others a stinger. These cells are all interdependent but also distinct. You see other organisms, like slime molds, form temporary communities and disperse.

Some communal organisms cooperate so closely they blur distinction until they eventually merge in to a single entity. Some multicellular organisms even form colony organisms, like ants and bees. These organisms share genes and cooperate via chemical signals, exhibiting emergent intelligence far beyond the capabilities of any individual.

Bicycles weave between each other on a busy Dutch street. An eye catches an eye, signaling one cyclist to adjust direction and make room for another. As ants communicate with chemical signals, you see humans moving in intricate patterns communicating via visual social signals. As the dance of bees, subtle visual patterns transmit intent.

Our ancestors grew complex communication patterns that allowed us to transmit information. They began to be able to persist and reorganize data over time. Just as genes had become organisms guided by evolution, information, in the form of memes, did the same. Generation by generation this capability advanced. The memes refined us, their hosts, towards more and more complex models of the world and ourselves. These memes gave us the mechanisms to comprehend ourselves, and the resulting memes continue to evolve.

These memes, what a strange replicator, that can sit lifeless on a page, suspended in memes of writing, language, and culture, to yet, at any point, cascade through time to live again in another host.

You feel the memes within you, moving, competing for your attention, pulling you away or pulling you in as you read. Asking to be included, integrated, in to the environment of your mind. You feel them resisting competing ideas, creating questions, finding ways to make everything fit.

Time races ahead of you in a blur, from the brink of oblivion into a new age of hope. In an empty room, in front of a screen, there is a plaque. You read the words.

While capitalism oriented itself in the instant, betraying those who came before it and sacrificing those who come after, we oriented ourselves in deep time, giving thanks to the beginning of the universe and borrowing all things from those who come next. Every instant, starting from the first spark of the cosmos, has lead us here, tracing our lineage from the fundamental laws of the universe. What we borrow from our children, we owe back with interest.

“Who are we?”

You wonder at the question. We. Are we the plurality of immortal memes that inhabit us, or the host that animates them? Are we the individual, the colony, the clusters of neurons? Are we the undifferentiated consciousness that imagined ourselves into experience?

A video plays on the screen.

Today a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves.

You are the universe becoming self-aware.

¹ If you happen to be reading this in braille or listening to this as audio, a similar process occurs. Air compresses in to sound waves, these waves vibrate your ear drum, moving fluid inside your ears. The movement of this fluid moves tiny hairs which are connected to neurons. This is what we perceive as sound. Alternatively, individual neurons in your fingertips detect pressure, these neurons send signals to larger and larger branches of nerves until they reach your spinal cord and are taken to your brain. In both cases, the nerves that carry these signals to your brain perform some level of processing before they finally do reach the parts of your brain responsible for deriving meaning. ² This is not actually a reference to cannabis, but rather to the song “Nostrildamus” by the Oakland band I Will Kill You Fucker. Nostrildamus. He can smell the future. ³ …ears, fingertips, neural implant, etc, however you take in information.