This is going to be a long section. It can be easy to be overwhelmed by all the details here. But before you give up, take a moment to realize that you already know some of these things. If you've gotten friends together for a party, then you've already organized something. If you've worked together on a project, you've already organized something. Organizing larger things is different, but it's not radically different.

We're going in to a lot of detail because detail gets more important at scale. It gets more important when you want to think about longevity and stability. But nothing stops you from just starting. You can always restructure. You can always change things. You can always improve. You don't have to be perfect. This text isn't perfect. It's a start. It's something to work from.

I could spend the rest of my life reading up on theory, writing formal proofs, and making sure everything I never write is perfect. Instead, you have this. I decided to work in the open, let things be a bit messy, and fix them as needed. Something imperfect now, something you can learn from and improve on, is better than a perfect thing that never happens. The real world is always more complex than you can model, so any system you actually create is better than any hypothetical one.

You will always know more about your situation than anyone else. You will always be the expert in yourself and the expert in your situation. Some solutions will just come intuitively. Some can come more easily when prompted. Consider these prompts to help you build your own system. That said, this comes from my own organizing experience combined with the theory I've already discussed. So then, let's get to it.

With the operational units and structural anatomy laid out, it's time to return to the metasystem. Let's review. We are using the Viable System Model (VSM) as a model to identify the functional components necessary for a system to survive and change in a dynamic environment. These 5 systems are…

1. Operational Units
2. Conflict Management
3. Synergy (Regulation and Optimization)
4. Adaptation and Forward Planning
5. Policy and Identity

The operational units are the micro-bureaucracies that handle the 4 pillars of social reproduction. Each micro-bureaucracy is one operational unit. Since we've discussed these in a previous chapter, we won't go in to additional detail here, other than to point out that, since the VSM is a recursive model, these subsystems will themselves be expected to viable systems. This modeling can continue, recursively, until systems are simple enough to be managed intuitively. If there are problems with intuitive operation, the VSM can always be employed to troubleshoot and resolve problems.

Jon Walker's The VSM Guide is valuable for this troubleshooting. This framework is based on the guide, among other things, but we're deviating a bit since that document was written largely with existing systems in mind.

We've started with operational units and structural anatomy because, for small enough systems, the metasystem can “just kind of work.” But it can also “just sort of break” in ways that can be really frustrating and confusing. If we follow the VSM, we impose a functional, not anatomical, hierarchy. Let's briefly revisit this concept: anatomical hierarchy means that there is, structurally, a person or people who have authority over another person or people. The “anatomy” or “structure” of the organization is hierarchal. Functional hierarchy means that there is a procedural ordering. For some things to be operational, other things must be made operational first. Concretely, to put on shoes you first put on socks. You can't invert the order. There is a “functional hierarchy” to putting on shoes with socks. But we wouldn't argue about socks having “authority” over shoes.

Operational units do all the work. An organization without operational units, one that's just a metasystem with no function, does nothing (see most Marxist-Lenninist “organizing”). The metasystem is supported by and supports the work of the operational units: It is made possible by them, and exists to serve the them. In a way, it is subservient to operational units. This is the inverse of how management is imagined under capitalism, where “workers” are simple subjects who carry out the will of the metasystem. Yet, the metasystem aligns the efforts of all the organizational units. Any decision they make should align with the organizational objectives of the metasystem they are operational units within. In this way, the operational units are subject to the authority of the metasystem.

But the metasystem is not necessarily (or even optimally) a separate system that commands the organizational units. The components of the metasystem are functions. Conflict management could be resolved by a rotating committee of elected managers, or it could be resolved with a paper calendar posted on a wall. Each situation will inform specific solutions.

Functions may also be fulfilled by multiple actions or subsystems, while single actions or subsystems may fulfill multiple functions. A single meeting can fulfill part of the functions from systems 2 and 3, while both a budget and a calendar may be needed to fulfill system 2. Sections may overlap or bleed into each other. They do not need to be clearly delineated.

And that functional hierarchy does exist. Starting from system 5, working down, each element of the metasystem informs the system below while the metasystem coordinates to regulate operational units. Let's start from the top and work down.

System 5 (Identity)

System 5, policy and identity, necessarily derives from the fitness function we discussed earlier:

Maximize the number of people you can help escape from the dominant system, and keep them out of the dominant system, while these people are still able to leave your system.

Getting even one person out of the system temporarily might take a lot of resources. So we could define a precursor fitness function. If we agree that “voluntary” here as the opposite of “coerced” or “controlled,” then we could use “maximize the number and strength of voluntary social connections” as our fitness function. This is, of course, a technical way to say “build community.”

But let's be a bit more concrete about it. How do you actually form a shared identity as an affinity group or other social organization?

Unity, Identity, and Exclusion

Nations use names, flags, heroes, and other symbols to solidify a unified identity. These can be leveraged for great things, such as great public works and programs (the US space program and the moon landing specifically come to mind), as well as unspeakable evils. Likewise, religions have used symbolism to build communities of care and mutual aid but have also carried those same symbols into wars. Unified identity can cast a powerful spell over the human mind.

Group identity can be a complex thing. All sorts of oppression and conflict can be connected to in-group/out-group dynamics, but so can cooperation and resistance to oppression. Strong group identities can merge with individual identities, turning into oppressive personality cults. However, unified identity is also extremely useful for cohesive coordination. Community is little more than a shared identity built and realized through cooperation and mutual aid.

As Zizians showed, cult dynamics can emerge even in groups that identify as decentralized. What we are trying to build is the antithesis of a cult. But we are also surrounded by, and have been socialized within, authoritarian systems. So it is all the more important to make sure we are building compassionate and open systems. Tools like the Influence Continuum can help, but it's also important to understand things like healthy boundaries.

Cults, such as the cult of capital, force us to suppress our own emotional experience in order to continue. Ignoring feelings can become a survival mechanism under these oppressive systems, and this is exactly why our emotional wellbeing is the best indicator of the health of the communities we are creating. There is, perhaps, no better guide than that of conviviality. Community can be challenging. Humans can be hard to deal with, can be dramatic, can be annoying. But cooperation, community, can also be full of joy and a deeper contentment.

Before we build any sort of unified identity, we should take a moment to appreciate the risk and attempt to mitigate it.

As discussed earlier, there exists a continuum of privilege relative to sovereignty. Thought of another way, there is a gradient of exclusion that grows as we move away from the dominant class or individual in an authoritarian system. People within the dominant caste are “people” while everyone outside is continually less “people” as they approximate the dominant group less. It's a gradient of dehumanization. Dominant group identity is then defined against the dehumanized, such that any individual may slip into that group if they fall out of favor. These are the dynamics of a cult.

But what we're trying to build is the opposite of a cult. Explicitly identifying with other members of a group is not inherently a bad thing, but dehumanizing those outside of the group is. Dehumanizing those outside the group can ultimately trap people within the group (not to mention the horrible things that such dehumanization can permit people in the group to do to outsiders).

The gradient of dehumanization essentially says, from the perspective of the in-group, “the more you conform to these group properties, the more I see you as like me (a human, worthy of life).” An anti-cult must start from the assumption that everyone is a human worthy of life, care, and compassion. Even actions that must be taken in self-defense are taken against a human who is, at least in some way, like us. The inverse of a gradient of dehumanization is a gradient of responsibility. That is, from the perspective of the group, “the more I know about you, the more I can work with you, and the more responsible I become for your wellbeing as part of my own.”

A social organization built to change the world must center compassion as a core part of their identity or risk repeating the horrors of past revolutionary failures.

Defining a Vision

To build a healthy group identity, start with joy. What brings you joy? What brings others in the group joy? Write it down or talk it out. Share with each other. Prompted by reading the book Farming While Black, a group of folks I was organizing with wrote a questionnaire for each other, answered it, and read the answers together. This type of exercise can help identify shared goals, capabilities, and boundaries. Here is an example questionnaire for defining vision:

1. What brings me joy?
2. What kind of world do I want to exist?
3. Why do I want to form an affinity group?

Once each person has answered these questions, it's time to write down a collective answer that everyone agrees on. Take the same questionnaire and replace all the singular pronouns with plural, then fill it out together:

1. What brings us joy?
2. What kind of world do we want to exist?
3. Why do we want to form an affinity group?

Put this somewhere safe, you will want to refer to it at least once per year if not more. You may also update this later.

The answers to these questions (or other questions, if you decide to create your own or use another questionnaire) will help you define your group vision. These are local fitness functions (things that you want to all work towards, things that shape the evolution of your group). These do not need to be achievable, they are aspirational. The point is not to achieve them, that they should always guide you. Choose at least one, but try to avoid choosing more than 5.

These become your vision. When making difficult decisions, you can refer to your vision and talk about how any decision you make aligns or doesn't align with the vision. You can always change these if you find what you are collectively drawn to deviates from your vision. Sometimes people will grow beyond a vision. That can be a sign that the group should split (mitosis is described further down).

Building Group Agreements (Policy)

With a shared vision, it's time to define agreements and protocols. Group agreements are collectively defined rules that describe how members should interact. They may function to simplify interactions, ensure access needs are met, or to protect against the emergence of hierarchical behavior. They can also include boundaries and help to enforce healthy boundaries. You can use the following prompts, or define your own:

1. How should we interact with each other?
2. What are your access needs?
3. What would help you feel safe and respected?
4. How should we deal with conflict?
5. How do we deal with unanswerable questions?
6. What is the process by which we update these agreements?
7. How do we know we're working towards our vision?
8. How do we know our vision is still relevant?
9. What are we not OK with?

Write down these agreements. Edit them until you reach consensus. If it isn't possible to reach a consensus, the group may need to break apart to form separate entities.

Keep these available to refer to as they may be needed during meetings. These agreements will change over time. Keep them updated and be sure to check in regularly, perhaps even through a specific yearly ritual, to make sure they all still apply and no more are needed.

Some of these answers will inform or shape other systems.

Symbolism

With Solarpunk, both the name and iconography play a central role in aligning acolytes. It is a movement where aesthetics guide action in a ritual of the collective creation of reality. The words and symbols you use to identify yourself inform the reality you want to create.

With these things in mind, you should choose a name and glyph to identify your affinity group. Simplified glyphs can be useful for note taking, but they can also be useful to ritually unify a group. One type of glyph is called a “sigil,” common in occult ritual.

Both naming and glyph creation can be a fun challenge and an activity that builds trust. They can also help refine and test decision making processes in a situation with minimal stakes.

Choosing a Sigil

While I won't go into naming, it's worth touching on sigil creation for anyone interested. A sigil can be anything, it can be drawn any way you choose. The following method may help if you are struggling to come up with one.

1. Write down the names of members (names known within the group to other members, not necessarily legal or given names).
2. Write out the most important words for each agreement.
3. Write out the most important words from the vision.
4. Circle common or favorite letters from these words.
5. Break these letters apart in to common shapes.
6. Draw these shapes connected to each other.
7. Draw several different collections of these shapes and choose which everyone likes the most.
8. Modify them as esthetically appropriate, adding arrows or circles based on how the shape makes you feel.
9. Choose the symbol that feels best to the coven.

Remember, this is an opportunity to test and improve coordination. Use this practice to learn how members work together, identify gaps in agreements, and improve decision making protocols. But most importantly, be creative and have fun! This is also an opportunity for conviviality.

Cadence

Over time everything changes. How often will you revisit this identity to see if it needs to change? How often will you check in to make sure the protocols still work, the symbols still fit? Outside of the equator, there are clear natural cycles for change: the seasons. You should probably check in at least once a year, if not on each solstice and equinox.

System 4 (Adaptation)

I'm writing this from Western Europe, where war with Russia is a raising concern. I came from the Pacific Northwest (PNW) of the US, where wildfires were the most common disaster. While in the PNW, I organized with a group around wildfire preparedness. In 2018 and 2019 we ordered large amounts of n95 masks. When the COVID pandemic hit, we had several boxes of n95s purchased in the years before to donate to first responders and hand out to houselss people. Our preparation for one disaster had prepared us for another. But this wasn't entirely a coincidence. The threat of a pandemic had come up during our disaster strategizing meeting.

But wildfires are not as great of a threat here, not so great as systemic disruption from cyber attacks. Preparing decentralized communication is always valuable, but it wouldn't have helped me prepare for wildfire where i was in the PNW. Meanwhile, masks are valuable for a number of different situations but they don't help with infrastructure disruption. Disaster preparedness can only be as good as your disaster model.

It will not be possible for an affinity group to replace the entire dominant system immediately. Therefore, it's critical to prioritize filling the most urgent gaps via the aforementioned four pillars of social reproduction. Aligning the work of the operational units requires a group level strategy, and strategy requires external information gathering, modeling, and model testing.

For our disaster preparedness organizing, we had set of meetings. In the lead up to the first meeting, everyone researched local disasters to try to understand the risks. In our area this included volcanos, fires, and earthquakes. There are, of course, others. Massive solar flares can knock out communication and other infrastructure. Political instability and war can happen anywhere, even in places once thought to be stable. Asteroids continue to be a significant threat to life on Earth. But it's important to both prepare for the most likely scenarios and scenarios for which preparation is actually possible. You will not prepare for a gamma ray burst, nor is it as likely as another pandemic.

During the first meeting we listed threats that we identified. The meeting facilitator wrote these on a large paper, then we collectively ranked them. From here we talked through the impacts of each disaster and how we thought we should prepare for each. We looked especially for overlaps between multiple disasters and prioritized those overlapping preparations.

In a following meeting we took our ideas and ran them through a table top scenario. The general format of this is that there is a facilitator (commonly called a DM, for “Dungeon Master,” for anyone coming from the DND world or a GM for “Game Master” also coming from table top RPGs). The facilitator describes an event and the impacts of the event, then the players talk through how they respond. You should go through as many variations as possible. For example, if you keep supplies in a shed the shed may fall down in a hurricane or earthquake. The DM should notice this possibility and ask players what they would do in any given variation of a scenario. Dice can be helpful in deciding which branches to take through a scenario.

While going through these scenarios, players should expect to find gaps. Repeat these scenarios multiple times until there are no clear gaps. Then repeat this process, occasionally on the same scenario, regularly.

Strategy practices like these will likely manifest as a set of meetings and games. These games will give you insight into gaps. You will then develop a strategy to fill those gaps using the four pillars.

During the regular operation of systems 2 and 3, you will identify ways to reduce conflict and improve collaboration. Merge these with your gap remediation plan. This may involve decreasing the priority of some tasks and pushing others off until later. There's no easy way to do this, but one option is for each person to write out their own list of the top priorities. Each person then ranks each other list. The top 3 lists are chosen and then each person rewrites their list from the items on the other list (combining or changing a bit if it helps). Repeat this until time runs out (no more than 90 minutes) or you reach a clear consensus. Whichever has the highest rank becomes the priority. Use this process if it is helpful, adjust or abandon it if it doesn't exactly fit your needs.

Cadence

This type of strategy planning should be carried out more often than the Identity and Policy practices. If your group is checking identity on a yearly basis, then you should run strategy planning twice a year or quarterly. If identity is quarterly, then strategy should be monthly. The more often these are done, the faster they will be and the less they will need to cover.

Critical information from systems 2 and 3 may reveal a need to adjust strategy out of the regular cadence. Alternatively, strategic goals can remain the same, requiring less engagement during some periods. It may not be necessary to adhere strictly to a specific cadence.

System 3 (Optimization)

Strategy, as managed by System 4, identifies longer term and more generalized goals. System 3 operates more on the tactical level, identifying how to fulfill specific objectives. System 3 specifically deals with optimization. Within the VSM, there are two modes for identifying optimization: active and passive.

Active optimization requires specific actions taken by the metasystem. These can be audits or anomaly detection (in larger organizations). For active audits, the Tekmil process may help with this. Tekmil is a process of constructive criticism that can facilitate an individual to identify areas of improvement in themselves and for their group. This process can also help avoid engaging system 2 conflict resolution by preemptively identifying potential issues and resolving them.

Passive optimization opportunities can be gleaned from regular reporting or from chance conversations. It requires nothing other than a regular meeting schedule with regular topics. Regular meetings also provide an opportunity to identify something called “algedonics.” An algedonic signal is a piece of information so important that it bypasses the usual systems and immediately triggers system 5.

In the lead up to the COVID lockdowns, we had been focusing on wildfire preparedness. Some folks had been paying attention to COVID before it made it's way over to the US. Information about the arrival of COVID on the US mainland is an example of an algedonic signal. This information triggers an immediate re-orientation away from any other priority to full focus on pandemic preparedness and response.

The VSM maximizes the autonomy of operational units. No one needs permission for anything that doesn't require some form of coordination or somehow could threaten the stability of the organization. If each operational unit has a budget, for example, then actions within that budget require no permission and should generally not be reported on. However, if a operational unit needs to take some sort of action outside of the budget, that does require permission. Any operational unit may also identify an opportunity for optimization that requires cooperation. Such cooperation can be coordinated directly, but may be coordinated during a general meeting.

Coordination can use shared chat groups like those in messages like Signal, or Meshtastic conversations for off-grid coordination. Coordination can also just happen in conversations.

Cadence and Facilitation

General meetings should be held more regularly than strategy meetings. These can be weekly, or even daily for very active organizations. Meetings should be kept short. Humans tend to lose the ability to focus rapidly after 90 minutes. Anything beyond that is counterproductive. To keep things short, keep a clear schedule with times stated. Have a facilitator and a time keeper (separate roles). Take notes (also separate role) so people can refer to notes rather than having to request things be repeated.

Everything said in a general meeting should be actionable. Before saying something, ask yourself “what am I asking?” Then make that explicit so no one has to ask the question again. There are a few exceptions to this rule. One is that report backs can be helpful for accountability. It can also just feel nice to get recognition for good work. Report backs can provide an opportunity to do that. Another exception is the informational update. Such updates should only be raised if everyone, or at least the majority of people, need to know something for a reason. Both of these should also be kept short and minimal.

A well run meeting covering four operational units can and should take 15 minutes or less. Any remaining time can and should be used to just hang out and enjoy each other's company. What's the point of working with people you don't want to just socialize with anyway?

System 2 (Conflict Resolution)

The subject of conflict resolution will trigger most activists to immediately think about hard conversations and struggling through accountability circles. This can be one element of it, but part of the conflict resolution function is harmonization (which is conflict avoidance). Clear boundaries like budgets and calendars can prevent misunderstandings or conflicts over resources.

But even the best system will, at some point fail. Figure out how you're going to manage that failure before it happens. This is already mentioned in the system 5 section, but it's worth mentioning again. Conflict is hard enough to manage when you're ready for it. It's that much harder when you're not. What are the boundaries? What are the consequences for violating those boundaries? What is the process for resolving conflict?

Conflicts generally arise over shared resources. What are your resources? We are all limited in our time. Calendars and collaborative time budgeting can reduce conflicts around time. Within capitalism, money is a dominant resource. Monetary budgets maximize the autonomy of each operational unit. Shared funding accounts can increase the likelihood of mistakes that lead to conflict, so dividing up accounts across operational units decreases the probability of mistakes that impact the resources of other units.

Durables, such as tools or vehicles, and consumables, such as food or soil, are also shared resources. The dispensary and library units need to develop a conflict management system for these. Shared space can also lead to conflict. Most activists have either lived in a shared house and are familiar with conflicts arising from chores from their friends complaining. The Works Committee is responsible for managing these shared spaces and is responsible for coming up with and maintaining a conflict management plan.

All of these conflict scenarios really revolve around commons management. Shared time is a common. Shared money is a common. Shared infrastructure is a common. Fortunately, there's been research into successful (and unsuccessful) methods of common management. Markets are extremely bad at managing commons, but there are 8 rules, identified by Nobel Prize winning economist Elinor Ostrom, for successfully running a commons:

1. Clearly defined boundaries: Individuals or households who have rights to withdraw resource units from the CPR must be clearly defined, as must the boundaries of the CPR itself.

2. Congruence between appropriation and provision rules and local conditions: Appropriation rules restricting time, place, technology, and/or quantity of resource units are related to local labor, material, and/or money.

3. Collective-choice arrangements: Most individuals affected by the operational rules can participate in modifying the operational rules.

4. Monitoring: Monitors, who actively audit CPR conditions and appropriator behavior, are accountable to the appropriators or are the appropriators.

5. Graduated sanctions: Appropriators who violate operational rules are likely to be assessed graduated sanctions (depending on the seriousness and context of the offense) by other appropriators, by officials accountable to these appropriators, or by both.

6. Conflict-resolution mechanisms: Appropriators and their officials have rapid access to low-cost local arenas to resolve conflicts among appropriators or between appropriators and officials.

7. Minimal recognition of rights to organize: The rights of appropriators to devise their own institutions are not challenged by external governmental authorities.

For CPRs that fire parts of larger systems:

1. Nested enterprises: Appropriation, provision, monitoring, enforcement, conflict resolution, and governance activities are organized in multiple layers of nested enterprises.

This resource management is already nested (8) in the framework of the solarpunk fractal organizing we're talking about. This entire project is really about expanding the domain of the right to organize (7) through the concept of this “solarpunk fractal” project.

Clearly defined boundaries (1) are partially handled by defining specific resources within the domain of operational units, and others in a shared domain with a specific process for management. Group agreements are another way to define clear boundaries. Which resources are and are not shared, how they are shared, and how they will be managed needs to be explicitly defined as part of group agreements, if not explicitly defined elsewhere (such as operational unit definitions).

Sanctions (5) may not be necessary to ever use, but they are critical to define in order to avoid feelings of unfairness that can come from arbitrary sanctions developed when problems arise. Without auditing (4), problems can be difficult to detect until problems have become so bad they are difficult to fix. But items 2 and 3 also tell us that there can be no global solution to these problems. Each organization will have to solve them. Each organization will have to, collectively, define the rules and methods by which these needs are actually fulfilled.

The monitoring (4) process for collective level resources should be defined as part of group agreements, while monitoring for operational units must be defined explicitly by the operational unit.

Finally, there must be an arbitration (6) function at the group level. Arbitration must also be clearly defined, including a low-effort and clearly defined initiation process. This must also be defined as part of group agreements.

Not every conflict can be resolved. Determine in advance what you will do when conflict resolution fails. When it's not possible to agree on what to do with a set of resources, it is often possible to split the resources evenly. This may feel suboptimal since capitalism and centralized systems have trained us to think about efficiency, but there are a lot of benefits to this type of “cooperative competition.”

Open source software does this all the time, forking and splitting both the developer and user pool. While this can be challenging at times, and can even end projects, it can also make each project stronger. Development working separately can arrive at solutions that wouldn't have been possible if they'd been working together. Users notice features in other projects and request those features in their own fork or project.

As a personal anecdote, I use an editor called “Emacs” while I have friends who use a different editor called “Vim.” Both of these editors have a lot of functionality that's expandable via plugins, but the way they do those integrations are very different. By comparing what we do with each editor, we can find things in each that we want in the other. These two editors could never merge. The user bases of each are very different, even though they both do, fundamentally, the same thing. By taking different approaches, they are able to fulfill the needs of their users. But the existence of each editor also helps the other to improve.

Meanwhile, the users of these can sometimes also work together more directly. Each editor uses external tools to add functionality. So they have a shared incentive to push tools to expose “interfaces” (ways of interacting with software) that support the same type of integration. Working apart they end up working together.

We have come to believe that irresolvable conflict is inherently a negative thing, but it can be a positive thing (given that there is still shared ground to collaborate on). Splitting resources can make amicable separation lead to friendly competition and future collaboration.

Federation

While the above is written for an affinity group, it can easily be adapted to a collective, cluster, or any level of federation using something called “a spokes council.” Group agreements at different levels restrict the amount of decision making needed at higher levels, thus decreasing the complexity of coordination.

Addendum: Meeting Template (system 2 and 3)

Meetings can be useful for daily or weekly coordination. However, it can, sometimes, be challenging to start from scratch. Here's a basic meeting template that could serve as a starting point and adapted.

1. Announcments
2. Report Backs
   1. Dispensary
      1. New projects
      2. Completed projects
      3. Inventory Check
         1. What is critically low
         2. What is empty
         3. What is expiring
         4. What is needed
      4. Funds status
   2. Library
      1. New projects
      2. Completed projects
      3. Inventory Check and Items needing return
      4. Library acquisition requests
      5. Funds status and budget check
   3. Works Committee
      1. New projects
      2. Completed projects
      3. Upcoming projects
      4. Subcommittee updates (Following the Works Committee agenda)
      5. New committee formations
      6. Funds status
   4. Services Committee
      1. New projects
      2. New capabilities announcements
      3. Completed projects
      4. New needs requests
      5. Subcommittee updates (Following the Works Committee agenda)
      6. New committee formations
      7. Funds status
3. All committee blockers
4. Task Check

Closing

At this point, we have the theory and tools we need. We have identified the problem, understood it's structure, and developed a social algorithm, a genetic algorithm, to attack the problem. We have defined an initial population, it's functions, and talked about how to iterate and improve. We are far from solving the discovery problem, but I'll leave you with a good first pass beyond what I've already said.

There is not really much left but to dream of the world you want to exist, and then to create it. As you experiment and build systems, keep track of what works and what doesn't. Write about your experience. Revisit this and update your own copies of this text. Make your own version, and make it public. Learn and share, work in the public, and don't be afraid: you are not alone. This is a new reality that we are dreaming and weaving together.

Let's return briefly to the central problem of government commons management (at least as a monolithic systems). We're going to restate it a bit differently here so that we can walk through a way to mitigate it. Let's start by returning to the basic forms of domination as outlined in Dawn of Everything:

1. control over violence (sovereignty)
2. control over information (bureaucracy)
3. and charismatic competition (politics)

Government as a commons manager aligns with the second form of domination. Any organization that manages the commons has the power to restrict the commons. In order to keep such an entity from doing that, there may be restrictions placed on the organization. But whomever maintains and enforces the list of those restrictions could simply take over the system and bend it to their will, So there must be restrictions placed on the oversight group. This continues infinitely, thus there can be no real oversight. This is not a new problem, it was stated a thousand years ago as “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” (Who will watch the watchmen?) But it dates back almost 400 years earlier still to concepts brought up by Plato in some of the earliest political writings.

Although this question points to the root cause of oppression and authoritarian collapse multiple times through history, it's largely ignored, suppressed, or treated as a curiosity. It is considered unanswerable, and thus rejected before consideration. In the previous section we solved this problem by inverting authority. This gave us the option to leave any system, which could then collapse it, if required. But it would be better if we could find a solution that doesn't risk systemic collapse.

Fortunately, there are additional steps we can take to mitigate the risk of facilitating coordination turning into a system of domination. In computer security, we think about the concept of “attack surface.” In essence, the more stuff a program can do, the more things can go wrong. The more complex a system, the harder it is to implement in a safe way. To reduce risk, we recommend minimizing the specific things any given application can do. We can, then, chain together small applications to make a larger application.

Rather than having to understand the whole system all at once, we can analyze each component as an individual piece, with specific focus interfaces. The more we can simplify interfaces, the fewer scenarios we need to analyze to determine the security of an application. An application that can do everything has an infinite attack surface and thus can never be secured. An application that can only do one very specific thing may be possible to not only secure, but to mathematically prove that security.

This is roughly the reason behind the concept of “microservices.” These are small and reusable systems that can be more easily understood than a large complex system. We can leverage a similar concept. In fact, this isn't even a new idea. It predates computers entirely.

The majority of the Netherlands is below sea level. Over the course of hundreds of years, the Dutch have reclaimed land from the sea and kept it dry using a series of pumps and dikes. Very early on people realized that water management was far too important to entrust in “normal” government. Political incompetence could wipe out entire towns. So, almost a thousand years ago, they created a distributed micro-bureaucracy with the sole purpose of managing water.

Because this micro-bureaucracy is extremely limited in scope, because it only exists to managed one shared resource, it can't really be leveraged for other power. But since it's outside of the normal government, it also can't be held hostage for other political projects (as Republicans hold SNAP and Social Security hostage to achieve their goals in US politics).

In the last section, we introduced a structure that included 4 such micro-bureaucracies:

• the dispensary to provide consumable goods,
• the library, to provide access to shared durable goods,
• the works committee, to build, (own,) and maintain infrastructure such as housing, and
• the services committee, to identify and provide services, such as child care, for its members.

Using to the VSM (that we discussed earlier), these micro-bureaucracies would all be operational units of the social organizations (affinity groups, collectives, clusters, and federations) that we described in the last section. These organizations would themselves be systems with their own metasystemic functions (and the ability to autonomously create subsystems), while interactions between these systems would be managed at by metasystemic functionality at the level of the social organization.

Let's first talk through these micro-bureaucracies in a bit more detail, then talk through systemic interactions. Remember that these are only suggestions. Nothing that follows is to be taken dogmatically. These are based on my own organizing experience, historical research, and other sources. All of these have been filtered through my own perception. This list may not be complete. It divisions may be wrong for your situation. There may be any number of reasons these are not optimal. They should be considered a starting point for anyone who doesn't already have a better idea.

There can be no perfect recipe for every situation. You will always be the ultimate authority on what is best for you. Take what follows for what it's worth.

The Dispensary

A dispensary provides consumable goods. It can start simply as a shared pantry, stocked with the products of guerrilla gardening or food preservation by canning or pickling. It can be foraging, processing, storing, and sharing horse chestnuts for soap and acorns for flour to make acorn grits and bread. It can be as easy as shared bulk purchases from restaurant supply or warehouse store, or as crust-punk as rotating dumpster run shifts. It could even start as small regular potluck or shared dinners. It could simply be an agreement between members to volunteer with a local chapter of Food Not Bombs on a rotating basis.

As your network grows, so can the dispensary system. A federation of four or five covens could start a coop for themselves. A federation of 20 may even be able to open a storefront.

As much as people would like to live their daily lives without inflicting suffering on ourselves and others, capitalism cannot seem to provide for the needs of people without committing atrocities. From sweatshops to toxic byproducts, union busting death squads, unnecessary packaging, micro-plastics, and landfills full of fast fashion, simple participation is a minefield of harm.

One reason many of us wish to escape is so that we can live our lives without inflicting suffering on others. Since no similar objective can exist within capitalist markets, operating a collectively owned dispensary as a coop style business for non-members offers a harm-reduction opportunity that capitalist markets cannot fulfill. We can do what the market cannot: offer products that people can buy without having blood on their hands.

Taking notes from the successes and failures of the Russian revolution, a group of anarchists (including Nestor Makhno, a Ukrainian anarchist militant who was critical in defeating the Tzar's army and who later also fought the Red Army) wrote a document titled “Organizational Platform of the Libertarian Communists.” This document came to be known as “The Platform.” It remains one of the most important first-hand revolutionary documents, outlining a clear revolutionary plan. The Platform identifies the problems of production and consumption as core to the success of a revolution:

Without doubt, from the first day of the revolution, the farms will not provide all the products vital to the life of the population. At the same time, peasants have an abundance which the towns lack.

Within the capitalist system, production, acquisition, transportation, and distribution (logistics) are all handled by markets. As we move away from this system, the dispensary system (perhaps with the support of the services committee) will need to address production and transportation logistics. Starting within the capitalist market provides a low-risk proving ground from which we can iterate and improve. If a social organization can operate a business within capitalism while planning beyond it, there's a good chance it will be able to transcend its capitalist roots.

The technology that made the short supply chain-based capitalism, which dominates the world today, also makes capitalism itself irrelevant. By attacking this problem as a swarm, we will come up with multiple competing solutions. Good solutions will merge or replace bad ones and the best solutions will spread across the federation. Like the open source software movement, we may, and probably will, end up with multiple systems. This is not a problem as long as those systems can interoperate with each other.

The Library

A library is a shared set of objects, often (but not always) located in a specific repository. Americans are most familiar with municipal library systems where the objects are books and occasionally other media. The simplest library for us to build is a tool library. A library consists of inventory and a way to track that inventory.

The simplest library can be ma e up of tools owned by members and a simple spreadsheet to track them. A library could create a shared bank account for purchasing new tools for the library. Libraries will also maintain objects that belong to the collective.

While give-away or free-stores exist and do work in some situations (they are not uncommon in the Netherlands), these can be exclusionary in the US context. They can be seen as “charity” or “for people less fortunate” rather than a shared resource. While a library can choose to operate in exactly the same way as a free-store (not tracking what comes in or goes out), the conceptual framework of a library is more aligned with American sensibilities (outside of existing punk and anarchist spaces).

A library also doesn't need to be specific to a given organization. This is something that can be organized first outside of a social organization, or something that could be managed by a social organization but have open membership. There's no reason not to have a tool library shared with your neighbors, even if they don't share your politics. There's no reason not to share a media library with your friends (you probably already share books).

If you're wanting to convince people that things could be better, there is no argument more powerful than proof.

The Works Committee

Works Committee is responsible for identifying, acquiring or producing, and managing infrastructure needed for the operation of the organization and the lives of its members. The mechanism by which it does this is up to the social organization. Management of infrastructure such as vehicles or housing may be handed off to the library system once acquired.

The Works Committee is responsible for organizing work parties to maintain infrastructure. One easy example is a garden party where organization members design and implement a garden either on property they own or via guerrilla gardening. The Works Committee would then be responsible for regular maintenance, harvest, and delivery of goods (harvest, processing, etc) in coordination with the dispensary.

In most cities horse chestnuts (buckeyes) trees are common in parks. The nuts contain chemicals that can be used as soap. Four of these crushed and thrown in a sock can be used in place of commercial detergent. In the fall, these nuts are easy to collect from sidewalks and parks.In the spring and summer, their leaves can be picked and processed into hand soap. Many other soap producing plants are common, and invasive in much of the US, such as English ivy. A works committee could organize foraging and processing parties to make things for the dispensary.

The Services Committee

The two most critical permanent purposes of Services Committees are to coordinate leadership of regular meetings, either by a specific appointed member or by rotating ordination, and to organize collective defense. There may also be a third critical service if the social organization is also a legal entity: accounting. The committee must ensure taxes are filed on time and correctly, that any shared expenses are paid, and that all money has been accounted for.

Beyond these, the Services Committee identifies the needs and capabilities of its members to provide services. The Services Committee should operate on the principal “From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs.”

The most important goal of any entity that wishes to continue to exist is reproduction of itself. Therefore, the most important objective of the organization must be supporting the reproductive labor of the collective, especially supporting members with children.

For organizations with children, rotating childcare eases the burden on families, making the organization more stable, and setting an example for members too young to start their own organizations. Some members may have technical skills and can provide tech support or automation of tedious tasks performed by others. Those with mechanical skills may be able to repair objects for The Library.

Within an urban area, municipal services take care of many things that rural people have to take care of themselves. Trash collection and disposal may make sense for a rural organization where it wouldn't be imagined by an urban coven outside of a disaster.

As an affinity group grows to a collective or federation, new services will become available. At each coordination level, it becomes more and more important to provide a mechanism to discover capabilities and protect people with specific skills from being overburdened.

A Services Committee of a large enough federation could provide much more complex services that further free it from the constraints of capitalism. Insurance pools, banking via credit unions, and other services can all be organized by a Services Committee of a big enough federation.

As with the Dispensary, services may also be externalized to offer things unavailable under capitalism. A services committee may decide to take on organizing protests, gatherings, or other events where other community organizations are not taking on the task. The Services Committee may also identify external organizations that organization members can coordinate with to fulfill organizational objectives and fill operational gaps.

Systemic Interactions

Each of these operational units, these micro-bureaucracies, exist to fulfill specific objectives that align with the greater objective of the organization. In cybernetic terms, the (system 5) identity of each of the above organizations aligns with the (system 5) identity of the social organization.

As described in each section, these systems have a lot of interaction opportunities. But they can also conflict. There is a set amount of time that members have, so it's important to keep some kind of shared calendar to make sure actions of one don't conflict with others. There may be shared money, which could be claimed by one or another group, so they also may need to keep a shared budget.

The very most basic mechanism to support this type of coordination is a regular (perhaps weekly) meeting. Each operation unit gives a brief report on what they've done, a high level status of anything worth noting (low inventory, some blockers, etc), and any requests they have (money, time, etc). This must be kept short. Humans tend to lose focus after 90 minutes, so meetings over that tend to rapidly lose productivity. Most things should be handled locally, so there shouldn't be a lot to report. Anything beyond a high level report back must be something that requires action. Including the action as part of a request can make sure everyone understands what's being asked.

In the next section we will describe the metasystem in greater detail, including some recommended meeting outlines and structures.

Any sufficiently advanced disaster preparedness is indistinguishable from revolutionary dual power. Under the right conditions, all systems are optional. One of the defining properties of a disaster is the fact that it disrupts systems that people rely on. Disaster preparedness could, then, be defined as “a system that makes other systems situationally optional.” This simple fact will let us begin to describe a blueprint with which we can start to build our initial population.

And with that paragraph, we've reached the axis mundi: the central point around which this entire text revolves. Everything written thus far leads logically to it; Everything I will write from here on out one can derive from it. If you remember only one sentence from this entire text, that first sentence is the single most important.

From here we'll get down to technical details about what to build (if you don't already have a better idea). We'll also come back to a couple of variations on the discovery problem. But first, let's go back quite a bit further.

We are trapped by two interlocking systems: capitalism and government. We spend the majority of our lives interacting with these systems, from working and budgeting, to shopping and using public infrastructure. We are trapped within these systems, and therefore vulnerable to abuse by those with the most power in these systems, because we are forced to rely on them.

But what do they have that we actually rely on? What, specifically, would we actually need to replace to no longer rely on these systems?

Dawn of Everything concluded with the suggestion that authoritarian structures emerge from an intermingling of care and violence. Slaves were captured in many societies in order to care for others, to prepare food, harvest crops, or raise children. This is an externalization of care work through the use of violence. Ancient temples and the homes of chiefs, in other cultures, became places of refuge for those outside of other systems: orphans, elderly widows, refugees. They were taken care of, but also may work for the chief or temple in return. The community funded this care, but at some point these people could turn around and work for the temple priests or chiefs, allowing them to assert power over the community. In some ways, we have all become subjects of the sovereign state, both funding the infrastructure that makes our lives possible and being a possessed by it.

We allow both the state and capitalism to exist because they solve an array of commons management problems. Though markets are one of the worst possible ways to sole such problems, because they lead to “the tragedy of the commons,” they are a way to deal with any arbitrary commons in exactly the same way (and thereby destroy everything, but in a systematic, orderly, and well regulated way).

The generic problem we're trying to solve is this:

We have a limited amount of stuff, we have things people need, and we have things people want. How do we make the stuff fulfill the needs and wants?

Traditional economies manage common resources using a combination of government agencies and capitalist markets. These two entities fulfill needs roughly along the following four pillars:

• consumable goods
• durable goods
• infrastructure
• services.

Any viable alternative to the dominant system must fulfill at least these same needs as are currently fulfilled by that dominant system. As the state withers and capitalism collapses, it will become easier to fulfill these needs outside than inside the system. A disaster preparedness to revolutionary strategy, which we will refer to from here on out as “Fractal Anarchism,” should fulfill these needs via bottom-up recursive institutions.

Each level of the social entity can establish (formally or informally) a set of institutional systems to address these needs as aligned with the aforementioned pillars.

These systems are…

• the dispensary to acquire and distribute consumable goods,
• the library, to acquire and provide shared access to durable goods,
• the works committee, to build, (own,) and maintain infrastructure such as housing,
• the services committee, to identify and provide services, such as child care, for its members.

One may notice that all of these committees are consumption oriented. This matches well with the existing orientation of the dominant economic systems, making it easier to transition from one system to another. Committees start by identifying needs within their domain, then work backwards from consumer, through logistics, to production. Humans also naturally enjoy producing things. Any artist or gardener will tell you the same. This text has been (as of the writing of this section) been entirely written and edited by volunteers. So opportunities may well present themselves to work in both directions and meet-in-the-middle.

Any committee is, by default, authorized to create subcommittees of it's own members to solve challenges related to the completion of the committee mission. While the orientation may be more obvious, it may be harder to notice that these committees may be interrelated. Committees may task other committees with actions, as appropriate. They may also share subcommittees. Both the dispensary and library manage goods, if different types. A shared “logistics” committee may be valuable. Perhaps this would make sense outsourced to the works or services committee.

Following the VSM, each committee has maximum autonomy within it's domain. We have also mentioned that needs are fulfilled via “bottom-up recursive institutions.” Let's unpack that. Today many societies, at least with which an average reader would be familiar, with are largely centralized. Federalism is as close as might commonly be recognized to this type of recursion.

American federalism is a layered model. Towns and cities make up the base. Larger cities may be broken in to districts with some representation. At this “municipal” level, there are generally executive, legislative, and judicial branches. These branches have maximum authority to create and enforce laws, or carry out social programs, to the degree to which these actions don't conflict with the laws at the state or national level. Counties are exactly the same, except that they have additional courts for resolving conflicts between the municipal and county level. They also have other courts and law enforcement capabilities for enforcing laws in unincorporated areas. States are the ultimate authority for all municipal and county systems under their jurisdiction. States have their own constitutions, which override all lower level constitutions, and are overridden by the national one. At the national level, the “federal” government provides the same function for states that state perform for counties and municipalities.

At each level, the level above is responsible for enforcing restrictions on the power system's authority. However, there is no “ultimate authority” above the national level. Put another way, unrestrained authority comes from the top and is enforced down on to the people. This is the problem we previously discussed as essentially being two vulnerabilities:

1. The logic of the constraints on the system are defined within the context of the system that is intended to be constrained and all constraints within the system are mutable.

2. Power over the constraint logic enforcement mechanism is within the system, thus the system can fail to or choose not to enforce constraint logic.

This seems impossible to solve, and it is for all systems where authority flows from a top level down. This top level can never be restricted because there must always be a level “above it” to maintain and enforce these restrictions. But how do we trust the system at the top? Well, we need a set of rules to control that authority. So we need a system above that one to constrain it. But how do we know…

Any top level authority is necessarily unrestrained, and unrestrainable. But that top level authority is always actually stolen. It is only possible by restricting the autonomy of individuals, by enslaving the population and impressing them into it's service. The answer is quite simple then: reverse the flow of authority.

There's another way to think about this. If freedom and authority are thought of as a commons, that commons must be managed or it will be squandered. By centralizing management of this resource, we incentivize those in control of the resource to hoard it. If we do not manage it, then some will hoard it while bothers will suffer. Only by collectively managing it can we actually make sure everyone gets the maximum that they can without taking from others.

All commons are best managed as locally as possible, by those most impacted. Those most impacted by mismanagement are also those most incentivized to maintain the commons. This would be the inverse of the current system.

Indeed, the whole socioeconomic system is actually just this: commons management. Under capitalism, markets manage labor and goods while the state manages the commons of the markets themselves. Money is simply a stand-in for autonomy, which, at a high enough imbalance, can allow people to control the very machinery of the state's stated goal: “freedom management.” Our autonomy is restricted by the mismangement of these commons via markets and manipulation.

To invert this is to return to the natural root of authority: the individual. The familiar Liberal model of authority is that the individual trades freedom for the protection of the community. All criticisms of Liberal ideology aside, this is exactly not untrue. Individual humans don't tend to live very long on their own in the wild. But why does Liberal ideology refuse to accept such an exit as an option? The question of safety vs autonomy is never posed within the ideology in such a way, but rather relative to authority and violence. It is posed as an answer to “why can people acting on behalf of an authority commit violence?” It's never posed as, “should I be allowed to exit the system if I choose?” Put another way, “Shouldn't I be able to withdraw my authority if I do not feel collective freedom management is working?”

This text works from the answer “yes.”

Now the individual retrains maximum autonomy, yielding autonomy in exchange for the ability to fulfill larger objectives that require coordination. This will be familiar to anyone who has ever lived with another person, giving up the autonomy to do whatever one wishes in exchange for lower costs (by sharing meals, heating, etc) and companionship. Similarly, this will be familiar to anyone who joined an existing organization and done volunteer work. Volunteering one gives up the autonomy to solve a problem their own way in exchange for the efficiency of not having to set up all the infrastructure to solve that same problem. In the later case, authority is always revocable while in the former there may be additional systemic restrictions that make the system harder to leave.

Then the system becomes a recursive volunteer organization: each layer can leave, thus minimizing the friction to exiting the system which forces the system to organize towards the maximum benefit of all members.

Individuals make up the base layer. The individual is maximally autonomous, giving up autonomy to the affinity group in exchange for the ability to achieve greater things. Affinity groups are generally small enough to work by consensus, ranging from 3-10 individuals but usually operating best at around 5. Affinity groups can similarly join together to form a collective. A “spokescouncil” is a system by which affinity groups can choose delegates to send to represent them on such councils. By maintaining small sizes, it can be possible to know other members well enough to accurately represent the interests of each individual during meetings. Collectives can join (federate) together to form a “clusters,” clusters can form “federations,” and federations can form “meta federations.” (Whomever achieves that is more than welcome to name the next level.) When spokescouncils stay small, Each layer can represent all members below their level. Even at 5 levels of recursion, accounting for just over 3k people (assuming 5 in each group), any individual delegate only needs to work with 25 people in total at any time.

As described earlier, the ultimate rejection of authority is to exit the system. In this case, that rejection is built right in. Any member, collective, cluster, federation, federation of federations, and so on, can leave at any time, for any reason. This means that each layer is incentivized to consider the interests of everyone if they wish to achieve their objectives.

Each level fulfills their needs either directly at a given level, or by coordinating to build larger systems. Thus each level will solve more complex variations of similar problems at greater levels of efficiency. Each level will likely operate some variation of the four committees. Within the VSM, each committee will operate as operational units, while each level will also execute a collective management function, such that the remaining systems (2-5) will also be executed at each level.

We will walk through an example implementation of systems 2-5 as recursive systems in the next installment. In the immediately following sections, we will introduce each section again within the context of disaster preparedness.

Individuals

The individual is the smallest unit we will focus on. Individuals are responsible for personal disaster preparedness and supporting collective preparedness via affinity groups. Personal preparedness depends on the disaster situation, but, at a minimum, must cover water, food, shelter/heat, sanitation, and entertainment for at least 72 hours.

Individuals should have at least two ways to achieve any objective. There should, for example, be twice as much water as the minimum needed for any individual. Taking care of additional supplies rapidly become easier as group size grows. One person needs twice the supply of water and food, but 3 people can safely only need supplies for 4 people, and 5 only really needs supplies for 7 to be comfortable. A single pack of playing cards or some dice can easily provide entertainment and distraction for a group when conversation might run out.

Supplies all fall in to the category of a dispensary (or pantry) at the individual level. Libraries and other committees don't exist at this level.

The Affinity Group

An affinity group is generally a group of roughly 3-5 people, but no more than 10. It is small enough that every member knows each other so intimately that they can predict, at a basic level, what decisions others might make in a situation. It is small enough to allow pure consensus democracy. Any group that grows too large should split in to two groups and federate (described in the following section).

At this level, a dispensary can focus on making sure each member has sufficient consumable supplies as well as extra. It would make sure supplies are distributed at different locations to make sure a disaster in one area doesn't destroy all supplies. The affinity group library would track (survival) tool locations and similarly make sure caches are distributed.

It also becomes possible to directly address some of the immediate challenges of capitalism. The same library affinity group library can facilitate tool sharing. A works committee could collaborate to purchase and maintain technical infrastructure such as file shares or mastodon instances. An affinity group could buy and own vehicles (such as cars or e-bikes), vehicle repair facilities, land, or housing.

A services committee could organize foraging to fulfill basic needs such food and soap. It could organize guerilla gardening or support gardening to fill shared pantries. It could organize community dinners. Libraries and dispensaries could distribute things crafted by members, and could even facilitate either giving away supplies or selling them within capitalist markets to fund growth or new activities.

An affinity group must work together to identify it's internal agreements and codify them for future reference. This will be discussed in more depth later, within the context of the VSM and systems 2-5.

Collectives, Clusters, and Federations

In the text we've been using the term “collective” A federation (or “cluster”) is roughly an affinity group of affinity groups. Federations are also recursive, so they can also be federations of federations, or federations of federated federations, etc, to any level. Just as every affinity group needs to figure out how they work together, so does every federation.

Federations are generally expected to coordinate via “spokes councils.” A spokes council is a meeting where appointed representatives speak on behalf of their entities (affinity groups or federations).

As federations grow, more things become possible. An affinity group in the US may be able to reduce costs by getting a shared Costco card or shopping together at a restaurant supply store. A federation of affinity groups may be able start an informal coop. A federation of such federations may be able open a storefront for a coop.

Social Insertion

A fractal is roughly defined as something that has the same shape at multiple levels. We've defined the levels, how they nest and interact, and touched on the shape of these levels. Next we'll talk about the four pillars of the system (dispensary, library, works committee, services committee) in more depth. But in order to build any of those, we'll need to work with someone else.

We've come back to the problem of discovery that we that we pushed away for at the time. But we can't really escape it anymore, so now we need to turn and face it. The nice thing about facing a problem is that sometimes you also realize you can solve other problems at the same time.

Social insertion is the practice drawn from Especifismo (an Anarchist tradition that developed in South America) of working to forward local struggles as members of a specific (political) group. Anarchists, as anarchists, will be involved in groups like Food Not Bombs because it aligns with their existing beliefs. Anarchists, as anarchists, may be involved with campaigns to improve transit infrastructure because car culture feeds petro-fascism and lends itself well to authoritarian social control. These individuals are open about their political alignment and also are honestly working with external organizations. They try, where possible, to work with existing organizations rather than trying to start their own.

This is distinct from “entryism,” where members of a political movement will try to hijack a social movement towards their own ends or will try to take members away from social movements and shift those members to their own, organization controlled, social organizations.

The practice of social insertion can solve two problems. The first is the aforementioned problem of discovery. At any level of organization, doing volunteer work that you identify as important can help you identify other people with similar objectives.

If organizations already exist align with the objectives of fractal anarchism, and these organizations are viable and healthy, there's no reason to duplicate the work of organizing in parallel. Not only that, but organizing in parallel could draw people away from an already valuable organization. It tends to be more efficient to join an existing organization rather than start a new one, both because established organizations have already learned lessons that new ones would need to learn and because established organizations can benefit from scale that a new organization would not quickly achieve.

Even if an organization doesn't completely align with the objectives or optimal structure of your specific group, it may still be useful to participate in those organizations in order to fill gaps in one's own organizing.

Where there exists organizations that are not antithetical to fractal anarchism, individuals, affinity groups, etc, should practice social insertion and support those existing entities. Unless there is a clear reason not to, such as authoritarian organization structures, general non-profit dysfunctionality, bigotry, or other toxic patterns, it's far easier and more efficient to find and support existing organizations as a group than to create one's own.

Food Not Bombs and Mutual Aid Disaster Relief are both excellent examples of organizations that covens should actively work with and support, where possible.

One of the first objectives of a services committee could be to identify local organizations that align with one of the four pillars described earlier and organize members to work with these organizations.

Let's leave the actual definition of a first population to the next section and only discuss the idea at a high level in this one. Assuming we have our population and our fitness function, we've described a distributed system without central control. If a bunch of random groups of people are starting their own systems to exit capitalism, how do we recombine (or “breed” if one wishes to use the technical term, which I don't) them ? How do we take parts of strategies of each to create new strategies? But before we even get to recombining strategies, how do we find other groups with other strategies to pull from? Finding each other is known as “discovery” in technical circles. We'll use this terminology from here on out as we explore solutions to the problem.

Discovery at a small scale can be a difficult problem. We'll talk about some approaches to mitigating it in a bit, but first let's jump ahead. If you start taking people out of capitalism, at a certain point it's hard not to notice. When you've liberated hundreds or thousands of people, people are already paying attention. Once other groups are aware you exist, then they just need to be able to adapt what you're doing to their own situation.

This brings up the importance of transparency. Transparency is the key to systemic recombination. How can a system combine elements of different systems if they simply don't know what they are? How can a system adapt one model to another situation if it has no information at all to adapt from?

And what about threats from the dominant system? If the system is defined in opposition to the dominant system, then the dominant system has an incentive to attack it. In some cases, such as especially authoritarian regimes, it could be dangerous to broadcast what you're doing.

If we prescribe a solution here it may be suboptimal, or worse. An authoritarian intelligence service would find a consistent signal extremely useful. Discovery can go both ways. Fortunately, we can also think about this in terms of evolution and fitness functions.

Any system that produces a good solution for discovery will be discovered. Others trying to implement the same strategy are likely to copy this mechanism. Perhaps this strategy won't work, it will be identified by an adversary. Then another, more discrete, mechanism can evolve.

But the problem of discovery isn't a new one. Every organization that developed under threat has had to solve this same problem. Christians under threat of death in Rome adopted pagan symbols that gave them plausible deniability as part of their discovery solution.

Because this is better solved evolutionarily, we won't prescribe a specific way to do things in all situations. We will, however, include both discovery and transparency later as we provide an example blueprint for our first population.

There is another way to manage discovery though, and this is worth talking about also: mitosis. Mitosis is an asexual reproduction process carried out by cells. If a single organization splits in to two or more organizations, they can, at that point, create a connection that allows them to share information back and forth. Like cells, they will start with the same set of rules. Unlike cells, they can change those rules over time and can feed adaptations back and forth between each other.

If a single organization splits in to multiple organizations, they can maintain a connection as a “federation.” If a federation becomes too large to manage, that can split and the split federations can federate. There will be an amount of natural variation within federation members. Simply by having people who are different, and recognizing the value of this diversity, each organization will adapt it's own strategy and tactics. At the federation level, report backs can fulfill the “information sharing” function. And with a simple recursive structure, we can fulfill all the basic requirements of a genetic algorithm.

Sets of isolated federations focused on maximizing the number of people they can get out of capitalism would necessarily need to do this through scale. They would be incentivized to solve the discovery and transparency problem. If each group within a federation autonomously tries to solve the discovery problem, there will be many variations. The first one to solve the problem could then report their solution to the federation, which would likely lead to it being inherited by most or all other members. Discovery of new groups or federations would lead either to the inclusion of new groups in existing federations or the creation of a new federation that links distributed groups.

How large should these groups be? How large should federations be? How should we organize these groups? What do they need to do? All of these things, and a few others, can ultimately be solved genetically. But we also don't need to invent everything ourselves. There are models we can already look to, things we can already leverage, to build our initial population and begin this process.

The framework of disaster preparedness gives us a huge advantage in a couple of areas: It is already oriented towards solving the right problem, by default, and it is plausibly deniable (for situations where that is, or will become, especially important). But that doesn't mean it's the only way to solve this problem.

While a disaster preparedness group is one potential vector for systemic escape (one that we will talk about in more depth as we continue), there are many more. As I mentioned, I lived for a little while on a commune that was run as a religious retreat center. (It was originally purchased from the Baháʼí, which is itself a somewhat interesting subject. They had also run it as a commune and retreat center.) The commune had resident houses and guest houses, and made money primarily through renting out space for events (such as local burning man meet ups), as well as occasional donations and services. Residents worked for housing, and sometimes food, by maintaining the space (taking care of animals, housekeeping for guest houses and public space, and general maintenance). This included both priestess working in service to the head priestess (who owned and controlled the land) as well as non-believers who lived there for other reasons.

Land was available to grow food on. Some people focused on permiculture and maintaining the garden, which provided some food for people. Anyone working “full time” on the land, in service as a priestess, otherwise had no income and lived primarily off government assistance and other odd jobs, though some could get along without the government assistance. “Full time” tended to be between 2-4 hours per day, though not really every day. Work was done on an as-needed basis, which meant that there were often days with no work at all.

There were, of course, a lot of problems. The primary being that centralized land ownership meant that there was a massive power imbalance. The priestess was occasionally abusive and manipulative, sometimes throwing people off the property for some petty reason or another. But even in this, she was not much worse than any normal land lord. When “the lady” wasn't present, folks generally got along well. It was an escape from capitalism (if into another authoritarian structure) that gave a lot of people room to heal.

Residents were often people who struggled to exist under capitalism, or came there specifically to resist it. There was a fay herbalist who I chatted about soda recipes with, one of the only male priests at the temple, who occasionally worked as a figure drawing model at the local college for extra cash. There were a few folks who came there after coming out of prison. It was a calm space away from the demands of capitalism that gave a lot of room to heal. There were various priestesses, some focused on their faith, some recovering from addiction or mental health issues, some just burner butterflies just passing through. My neighbor was a writer, William Kotke, who introduced me to permiculture and Kombucha and who I introduced to Linux in exchange. Two of my best friends were an old rockabilly punk English major who lived in a yurt next to the drive way, who was unable to work under capitalism at the time (we all miss you Miles), and an ex-cable installation business owner who decided to leave everything behind and drive across the country after coming to the conclusion that his financial success hadn't made him happy and it was time to figure something else out.

There was such a richness there that's hard to find elsewhere, and my experience isn't actually that unique. My partner also lived a couple of years in a similar place: a non-profit retreat center. While these places often use legal loopholes to evade taxes and exploit workers (my partner later got back pay for work that had been paid under minimum wage, back pay that only came after legal threats), they can also, paradoxically, be a sanctuary from capitalism. Places like these operate under different rules. I was also aware of other, similar places. Folks at the commune I lived at would occasionally move from there to a Buddhist commune near by, or talk about plans to move there. Another friend who left prison found his way to a Christian monastery which, even though he was not religious, provided him a place of structure, peace, calm, and healing.

There are also such places that are not abusive. When William finally got sick of arguing with “the old lady,” he moved to a commune somewhere in rural Oregon. Home, Washington was founded initially as an anarchist intentional community. I've visited other anarchist rural land projects in distant parts of rural Washington. Such places can be invisible, because rural America is full of such strange things.

Heavily armed cult compounds up in the hills tend to be left alone, local gossip but places that police avoid (unless they cause really significant problems for locals). Even then, as evidenced by the Rajneeshpuram, they can threaten local sovereignty and even stand against the federal government (go watch Wild Wild Country and ask what would have happened if federal agents weren't extremely lucky). If cops tend to ignore even neo-Nazi compounds , quiet anarchists can easily fly under the radar as “weird hippies” that don't cause problems. Live in a rural place long enough and you'll find out about at least one of these little communities.

These land projects may be especially fertile ground for escape, especially when paired with religious exemptions. There are significant exemptions carved out, not simply eliminating taxes but also limiting or eliminating other regulations such as health insurance requirements for members of religious communities such as monasteries. Insular religious communities, such as the Amish, have their own exemptions to maintain their religious freedom. Suffice it to say, there's a lot worth exploring here, but such an exploration is beyond the scope of this text. The subject could probably be it's own book.

Secret societies are another interesting area that has come up when talking about these things. Acéphale may spring to the mind of any weird antifascist philosophy geeks (and thanks for the rabbit hole friend). But it's not simply these obscure corners. Secret societies were common at the dawn of what tends to be recognized as European anarchist thought. Erica Lagalisse documents this hidden tendency, not only of anarchists but of the left, in “Occult Features of Anarchism.”

Houseless camps are their own autonomous zones. They are, by their very nature, illegal. They are, by their very nature, a form of being external to the regular rules of capitalism. This is exactly the reason they are targeted. In the lead up to the (first?) American Civil War, maroons were similarly illegal spaces populated by the most marginalized people. These spaces had huge revolutionary potential, ultimately becoming the launch points for raids against plantations. Their work in freeing slaves ultimately forced the Civil War.

Again, the literature here is rich with writers such as Hakim Bey focusing whole books on the subject of illegal spaces (Temporary Autonomous Zones), and the Revolutionary Abolitionist Movement writing an entire text, Burn Down the American Plantation, on the overlap between the pre-civil war movement for the abolition of slavery and the current era. All of these are well worth the time to read.

All these opportunities and many more opportunities may present themselves, and may be more or less applicable at any given time or situation. There is no need to restrict oneself even to a single strategy. Diversity of tactics is not simply a good thing to respect, but is an essential element of any evolutionary resistance.

However, the next section will focus on the concrete elements of a disaster preparedness system with the potential to transition to revolutionary dual power. Others are welcome to take up the task of following alternative threads from here.

The system is dying, consuming itself and everything else to keep going. Even though we all see this plainly, we can't seem to change things because the system keeps adapting. The system is thinking, and it has the ability to out think any individual human. But now we have the tools to build an adaptive system, a genetic algorithm, to move faster than the system can adapt.

Now we return again to where we started. We need to escape capitalism. If we can build the new system inside the shell of the old, then we can pivot out. But what do we do to build such a system? We will see in a bit that the answer somewhat implied by the question.

Let's go back a bit though. We're trapped, this much we know. But can we describe how we're trapped, or what we should do about it? The classic response to such traps, to authoritarian overreach, was to establish some kind of bill or declaration of “rights.” This is a list of supposed restrictions on governmental power. Of course these restrictions are almost always ignored, sometimes without ever being enacted in the first place (such as “Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen” from the French Revolution that was ignored until hundreds of years later).

But, as Graeber and Wengrow pointed out in The Dawn of Everything, a lot of freedoms really just boil down to some variation or incomplete specification of the three fundamental freedoms:

(1) the freedom to move away or relocate from one’s surroundings; (2) the freedom to ignore or disobey commands issued by others; and (3) the freedom to shape entirely new social realities, or shift back and forth between different ones.

None of these freedoms are fully recognized by any existing government, and perhaps they can't be. The very nature of government and national sovereignty necessarily limits these, especially the third. If we invert our perspective, we see that the entirety of the BITE model is basically just a list of ways systems of authoritarian control violate these freedoms.

But if we change our orientation away from individual freedom and constraint and towards systemic constraint, we can actually resolve these freedoms all back to one single constraint. This one constraint determines the difference between a free system and an authoritarian one:

For a system to be free, participation must be optional for all members.

We can immediately see that freedom to move is one type of participation and freedom to disobey is another. A system is a description of relationships, so exiting one system necessarily requires entering another. One can't exit all systems any more than one could create an object that's not made of any sort of matter. A system is defined by its participation, thus to not-participate is to exit. To exit a system is to create or enter another system, thus the third freedom is also contained within this constraint.

It can be hard to believe that one single constraint can really be the difference. What about all those rights. Surely this one single constraint couldn't take an authoritarian system and suddenly make it free, or a system with a large number of rights suddenly authoritarian. Let's illustrate the difference that this one single constraint can make by two examples.

The rules of Simon Says are maximally authoritarian. You must perform any action ordered, with the only restriction that the authority must say “Simon says” first. Were you forced to stay in this system, it would be the most despotic autocracy possible, completely subject to the wills of one person. This is one step away from literal slavery. But it's not. It's a silly game. The difference is that you can leave at any time.

Let's flip this and imagine a room. During a specific period of time you will have absolute control over everything in this room. In this room you have total freedom. This is not even the limited freedom, the coordinated freedom, the compromising freedom of civil society. You could, without consequence, perform any action you wish in this room. You could say anything, destroy or steal any object, order any individual to perform any action, kill any person in the room with you and take anything they own. This is the sovereign freedom, the absolute freedom, of dictators and kings. The only restriction is that you are not allowed to leave the room while you have this freedom. In fact, you really only have this level of freedom because the room is actually empty other than for you. I am, of course, talking about solitary confinement, a form of internationally recognized torture common in US prisons (including against children).

But, surely, if you simply have enough protections, a complete enough bill of rights, you don't really need this constraint. Surely, with the right structure, with the right checks and balances, with the right list it must be possible to preserve freedom without including this one requirement that people be allowed to exit the system.

No, and I can prove it.

1. There will exist actors in a system who will wish to take advantage of others. Evolution drives survival and one strategy for increasing survival in an altruistic society is to become a parasite.
2. Expecting exploitative dynamics, a system needs to have a set of rules to manage exploitation.
   1. If the set of rules is static it will lack the requisite variety necessary to manage the infinite possible behavior of humans so the system will fail.
   2. If the system is dynamic then it must have a rule set about how it's own rules are updated. This would make the system recursively defined. If you can change a system from within that same system, then you add to it an enumeration of all known mathematical axioms. Any system that can contain mathematics is at least as complex as mathematics. Any system at least as complex as mathematics is necessarily either incomplete or inconsistent (by Gödel's incompleteness theorems).
      1. If the system is incomplete, then constraints can be evaded which then allow a malicious agent to seize control of the system and update the rules for their own benefit.
      2. If constraints are incomplete, then a malicious agent can take advantage of others within the system.
3. Therefore, no social system can possibly protect freedom unless there exists a single metasystemic constraint (that the system must be optional) allowing for the system to be abandoned when compromised.

Interestingly enough, Gödel is known to have identified an “inner contradiction” within the US constitution in 1947 (called Gödel's loophole). This contradiction could allow the country to be turned into a dictatorship. Following from the logic we've thus far already explored, there are two such vulnerabilities:

1. The logic of the constraints on the system are defined within the context of the system that is intended to be constrained and all constraints within the system are mutable.
2. Power over the constraint logic enforcement mechanism is within the system, thus the system can fail to or choose not to enforce constraint logic.

The first of these matches closely with the most popular argument that this refers to “Article 5.” Gödel is known to have only explained the issue to Einstein, and the two agreed to not divulge the vulnerability. This is known today as “security through obscurity.” It violates a well established cryptographic principal called “Kerckhoffs's principle,” which was restated by a contemporary of Gödel, Claude Shannon, as “the enemy knows the system.”

Gödel found problems that can't be solved in a field of math called “typographical number theory.” But his theorems were so strong they impacted all of mathematics forever. Not only could “typographical number theory” not solve the problems it set out to solve, Gödel proved that these problems were not possible to solve in any way and under any conditions.

The problems I've described here similarly cannot be fixed. There can exist nothing that operates like a government which can be so constrained as to not become a dictatorship. There are infinitely many ways to write rules that prevent it, and infinitely many ways to circumvent these rules.

Of course neither of those theoretical vulnerabilities matter much anymore, since we watched a proof-by-example exploitation executed in real time. But when the time comes to rebuild, you will be told that the system can be constrained, that it can be fixed, that we can do better. This is a lie. The logical proof of this sitting right on this page. Any system that cannot be abandoned at will is a dictatorship waiting to happen.

But there is good news, and that good news is that same logic works in reverse (though I will leave the formality to someone else and present it as a corollary). Any system with the complexity to handle humans has infinitely many vulnerabilities that allow people to escape from their constraints. Ultimately, all social systems are optional. The question is only the level of work necessary to execute this option.

Oh, you might say, but this just means you have to infinitely abandon systems to retain freedom. Yes, that may be true. But there's an evolutionary advantage to cooperation so there's evolutionary pressure to not be a malicious actor. Thus, a malicious actor being able to compromise the whole system is likely to be a rare event, especially if there are other controls in place. (There are also other ways to mitigate this threat that we'll go in to in another seciton.) Compromising a complex system can be a lot of work, so the first thing a malicious actor would want to do is preserve that work. They would want to lock you in. The most important objective for a malicious actor compromising a system would be to violate that one metasystemic constraint, to make the system mandatory, or all of their work goes out the window as everyone leaves.

And, perhaps, now you understand why borders exist, why fascists are obsessed with maintaining categories like gender, race, ethnicity, etc. This is why even Democrats like Newsom are on board with putting houseless people in concentration camps. And this is why the most important thing anarchists promote is the ability to choose not to be part of any of that.

The implications are interesting enough when we apply this to systems like capitalism or national governments, but there are other very interesting implications when applied to systems like race or gender. Like, as a cis man the only way I can be free to express and explore my own masculinity is if the masculinity I participate in is one which allows anyone the freedom to leave. Then I have an obligation to recognize the validity of nom-masculine trans identity as a necessary component of my own. If I fail to do this, then I trap myself in masculinity and allow the system to control me rather than me to be a free participant in the system.

But if it's OK to escape but not enter, that's it's own restriction that constrains the freedom to leave. It creates a barrier that keeps people in by the fear that they cannot return. So in order for me to be free in my cis masculine identity, I must accept non-masculine trans identities as they are and accept detransitioning as also valid.

But I also need to accept trans-masc identities because restricting entry to my masculinity means non-consensually constraining other identities. If every group imposes an exclusion against others coming in, that, by default, makes it impossible to leave every other group. This is just a description of how national borders work to trap people within systems, even if a nation itself allows people to “freely” leave.

So then, a free masculinity is one which recognizes all configurations of trans identities as valid and welcomes, if not celebrates, people who transition as affirmations of the freedom of their own identity (even for those who never feel a reason to exercise that same freedom).

But you don't need to accept the trap of authoritarian masculinity on logic alone, the proof is right there in male influencers like Andrew Tate and their followers. These dipshits get so obsessed with gatekeeping they don't realize that the gates they're tending keep them in, that the more walls they put up to protect their privilege, the smaller their identity can be. They huddle in tiny pens, terrified of crossing imaginary bounds that they imposed on themselves.

They have built their own torture chambers and locked themselves inside, and for what? They turn themselves into dragons, hoarding what they see as valuable while repressing every emotion including joy. And if they let themselves experience joy, they would, perhaps, realize that all these privileges are inconsistent with it. They might, perhaps, recognize that they have built up these privileges so they don't have to admit that their suffering and fear are not, in fact, admirable. They might have to face the fact that they have lived lives that are deeply pathetic, might have to face the fact that only empathy can give one access to deep satisfaction, might have to face the fact that they have lived their whole lives on a treadmill, going nowhere.

But I assume that they won't ever do that, because to do so would force them to face the enormity of the emotional debt, the pain and suffering they have inflicted on the world, and those are big feelings. It's far easier to hide in a hole, forever alone, making up silly rules to keep everyone inside scared and keep everyone outside from seeing in.

Well kept borders on any system trap everyone, those on the inside and on the out. Then we must add a corollary to our constraint:

A free system can only be kept free if one can freely leave; the freedom of a system is defendant on the existence of other free systems.

Or, to adapt an MLK quote:

Un-freedom anywhere is a threat to freedom everywhere.

The most irritating type of white person may look at this and say, “oh, so then why can't I be <not white>?” Except that the critique of transratial identities has never been “that's not allowed” and has always been “this person didn't do the work.” If that person did the work, they would understand that the question doesn't make sense based on how race is constructed. That person might understand that race, especially whiteness, is more fluid than they at first understood. They might realize that whiteness is often chosen at the exclusion of other racialized identities. They would, perhaps, realize that to actually align with any racialized identity, they would first have to understand the boot of whiteness on their neck, have to recognize the need to destroy this oppressive identity for their own future liberation. The best, perhaps only, way to do this would be to use the privilege afforded by that identity to destroy it, and in doing so would either destroy their own privilege or destroy the system of privilege. The must either become themselves completely ratialized or destroy the system of race itself such being “transracial” wouldn't really make sense anymore.

But that most annoying of white person would, of course, not do any such work. Nevertheless, one hopes that they may recognize the paradox that they are trapped by their white identity, forced forever by it to do the work of maintaining it. And such is true for all privileged identities, where privilege is only maintained through restrictions where these restrictions ultimately become walls that imprison both the privileged and the marginalized in a mutually reinforcing hell that can only be escaped by destroying the system of privilege itself.

Let's go back to the “fuzzing” metaphor. The point of security testing is to find ways to intentionally violate system constraints in ways that threaten the viability of the system. Tests are often prioritized by how great of a threat they are to viability. Being able to delete a patient record in a medical system is extremely bad, but not nearly as bad as being able to expose all those patient records or modify them. There are occasionally single, critical, vulnerabilities that allow an attacker to completely compromise the system.

And there we have it. The most important constraint an authoritarian system has is the constraint against leaving. The most important thing about an authoritarian system is that it absolutely, under all conditions, MUST be mandatory. To violate this constraint is to fundamentally break the control of the system.

Now we return to our earlier question, but restated a little differently: what is the fitness function we use to evolve a system that can find and exploit a vulnerability in an authoritarian system so that we can escape? The fitness function now presents itself:

Maximize the number of people you can help escape from the dominant system, and keep them out of the dominant system, while these people are still able to leave your system.

This doesn't exactly give us a clear solution, but it does restate the problem in a useful way. Oh, but there are three things we need to do. We need a fitness function, we need a recombination (“breeding” is the technical term, but I'm going to try to avoid that) function, and we need an initial population. We have one of these. Next we'll talk about the other two.

“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.