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.

Revolutionary disaster preparedness can, if necessary, exploit the previously described authoritarian weakness of plausible deniability. A coordinated swarm, rather than a centralized organization with a dictated structure and strategy, can exploit both the bandwidth limitations and the variety limitations inherent to authoritarian systems. A swarm is a special type of threat that, at a certain scale, becomes impossible to oppose.

While critiques of mass organizing have existed for decades, it can still be hard to imagine organizing a large scale movement without also thinking about centralization. We have been trained to imagine social network structures as hierarchies.

Yet we may also be aware of the potential of “flash mobs” or of strategies like black bloc. For those unfamiliar, black bloc is a strategy of leaderless resistance where a group of people all dress in black (coving their faces and any other identifying marks) so that they can act as an anonymous group. The group cannot identify a leader, so organizes organically. Even very large protests can be easily managed by police, assuming centralized leadership. But the black bloc can, and often does, fragment and disperse. This can rapidly become impossible for police to manage. While some blocs distract police, others can destroy the property or infrastructure of an oppressive regime. Sometimes the chaos is enough to cause police defenses to collapse entirely.

Leaderless resistance is notoriously hard for state actors to infiltrate and suppress. Occupy was crushed by the largest coordinated police action in US history. On the digital front, Anonymous remains a significant and difficult to mitigate threat because of how unpredictable a distributed group can be. It is simply impossible to predict the actions of such a group, and impossible to hire enough security engineers to protect large organizations that it targets.

With the development of digital social networks, the data they provide, and the science of social network analysis (which is worth reading about), we're able to understand much more clearly that there are different social network shapes. Not only that, but different network shapes have different properties.We are now able to talk about the tradeoffs of different network structures, and defend any decision we make about such networks with data. But what is a network?

“Network” is a term used to describe how things, in this case people, interact. What do we mean by the word “shape” when talking about social networks? We're talking about what interactions are allowed or develop within the system.

When playing the game of “telephone,” everyone sits in a circle. Each person is allowed to listen to the person on one side of them, and allowed to speak to the person on the other side. If we were to draw this as a technical graph, we would represent each person as a circle (called a “node” or “vertex”) and each interaction as an arrow (called an “edge”). We would want to draw out a network like this with as few lines (edges) crossing as possible to avoid confusion. The natural way to do that would be to draw it as a circle. So the network shape of the game of “telephone” matches it's physical shape of a circle. We would probably call the shape of this network a “ring.”

Of course, physical and network shape don't always match. Thanksgiving conversations may happen around a table (physically similar to a circle), but imagine you drew each person as a node and drew a lines connecting everyone who talked to each other. Depending on the size of the table, how well people know each other, personalities, and how much alcohol there is, the network could look like a set of small disconnected clusters or like a tight web (difficult or impossible to draw without crossing lines). This would either be a “fireworks” network, if it was clustered, or just a single “firework” if everyone is connected. If people talked to their neighbors and perhaps a person across the table (but not everyone at the table), this may be called a “fishing-net” network.

Now, if we imagine the shape of authoritarianism as a network we can begin to visualize the bandwidth restrictions, and resulting turboparalysis, described earlier. Variety (also described earlier) is a product of the interaction of diverse nodes. Hierarchy both restricts nodal interaction and bandwidth from the larger pool of nodes. Therefore, hierarchy necessarily has a lower capacity for variety than does a more egalitarian network.

One would assume that an egalitarian network with centralized coordination would be optimal, but the truth is a bit more complex. Damon Centola describes an experiment to test “innovation” (which could be used interchangeably with “variety”) in his book Change: How to Make Big Things Happen:

We recruited 180 data scientists from university campuses and job boards, and randomly divided them into sixteen teams—eight organized into fireworks patterns and eight into fishing-net patterns. On the eight fireworks teams, the researchers (or “contestants”) were completely connected with their teammates. Information flow was maximized. The team network was a dense pattern of fireworks explosions. Everyone on a team could see all of their teammates’ best solutions as they discovered them.

Researchers were being paid to solve a data science problem. Firework teams were all connected to each other and able to see each-other's work, while fishing-net teams were only able to see the work of a few team members. Fireworks teams got answers much more quickly but the best answers came from the fishing-net teams. From the book again:

Devon and I discovered that the problem with the fireworks network was that good solutions were spreading too quickly. People stopped exploring radically different and potentially innovative approaches to the problem.

What we learned was that discovery, like diffusion, requires social clustering.

The reason is that clustering preserves diversity. Not demographic diversity. But informational diversity.

So then a distributed network, rather than a centralized one, a higher capacity to generate variety. Returning to cybernetics, we tend to think about organizations as being coordinated, by people, intentionally. But organization doesn't exactly need to work like that.

A religion is necessarily made up of multiple groups (churches, temples, etc), themselves organized in to groups (sects, branches, tenancies) that can have little or no centralized control. Religious sects can be so different they have fought wars between each other, but may later act in a more unified way, say, when a group votes more-or-less as a bloc on a specific issue. Political and anti-political groups may act in similar ways. Anarchists may or may not identify with one or more anarchist tendency. They may disagree strategically or tactically in a siltation, may choose to not work together on projects, but may still align on other goals or strategies. Anarchists will often collaborate harmoniously with tenancies they otherwise criticize to put together events, like book fairs (where they will again argue and criticize other tendencies, but as within a unified space).

On the most radical end of the distributed collaboration, algorithmic violence and stochastic terrorism allow leaders from Osama Bin Ladin to Tucker Carlson to call for harassment, attacks, and even assassinations against opponents in a way that maintains plausible deniability. (This can, occasionally, backfire, such as in the case of neo-nazi ghost writer Milo Yiannopoulos, or, even more spectacularly, white nationalist stochastic terrorist Charlie Kirk.) Right wing stochastic terrorism has quite a long history in the US, being used successfully to kill US Civil Rights agitators, organizers, and politicians, including Martin Luther King and John F. Kennedy. It's not hard to argue that the Red Summer of 1919 was largely kicked off by a distributed campaign of stochastic terrorism, in a very similar style to the tactics later used to incite the Rwandan and Bosnian genocides.

Some time after the end of legal segregation in the US, the Republican party in the US realized it could no longer make the core of it's platform keeping or bringing segregation back. Aligning with evangelical Christians, Republicans began to promote an anti-abortion message. Anti-abortion terrorists bombed clinics and killed providers, coordinated only by a shared religious identity and a common media.

Nazi terrorist groups and mass shooters have continued to act based on, among other things, the book “Siege.” With no central command and control, these terrorists have carried out an extensive campaign of violence so extreme it's hard not to recognize as a civil war. One group, of Nazis who were also US army soldiers, was even found to be building a dirty bomb. Yet legacy media remains unwilling to call this loosely coordinated terrorism anything but “lone wolf attacks,” despite the obvious pattern.

But radically stochastic organization isn't simply limited to terrorism and genocide. Open source software is its own ideology that elicits its own behavior. While many projects are centrally coordinated, large enough projects can invert the capitalist control model. Rather than a central organization demanding that tasks be completed, the central organization largely exists to coordinate, optimize, and provide a conflict resolution function.

Development teams act as operational units which work within the strategic objectives of the open source ideology. These operational units complete tasks (often at the request of a classical hierarchal business). They may coordinate with maintainers or standards bodies. Then they ask changes to be merged. A well maintained piece of software will have a well developed system 5 (identity, authority, policy) in the form of things like a clear mission statement, coding standards, and interface documentation. They will also provide a conflict resolution (system 2) during merges, and will look for optimization opportunities (system 3) during merges or may discuss ideas in community forums such as mailing lists. This sometimes leave adaptation and forward planning mostly in the hands of users who submit feature requests and the operational units choosing which functionality to implement. (This ends up with a very nice, if unusual, system of the environment directly feeding information into system 4, rather than system 4 seeking new information.)

Outside of a specific project, the open source movement remains largely coordinated but even less centralized. Developers start new projects based on their own perceived need or desire. In this case identity comes from the license they choose. They coordinate with other projects (sometimes even competitors) using news streams, mailing lists, and other wider media. Conflicts are not always resolved directly, but are sometimes accepted (there isn't a problem with multiple overlapping editors because people like different things). Conflicts that do need to be addressed may be identified, again, by users as bug reports or support requests or via testing. Conflicts are then resolved by coordinating directly with the team maintaining the problem software. Optimization similarly can happen via standards bodies, protocol documentation, or other public documentation.

Open source development and maintenance can be extremely complex, chaotic, and challenging. But it has proven itself, repeatedly, to be superior to closed alternatives. Open source software has become the dominant model for the development of the vast majority of software that runs the Internet. And it does this with loose organization that sometimes is hard to believe.

It can be hard to imagine the years, decades, centuries, perhaps more, human hours worth of work that has gone into open source software guided by only a vision of freedom and sharing. It's impossible to overstate the value that this work has provided back to humanity. And yet, it's, perhaps, not even the simplest thing that has produced this level of complexity (if, perhaps, that can only be attributed to time constraints).

No, we have others, and one may spring to mind: capitalism. From every useful product to every scam, markets drive the evolution of ideas with the fitness function of “maximization of capital.” Let's talk about these terms for a moment.

If you are unfamiliar with genetic algorithms the term “fitness function” may also be unfamiliar. Actually, if you're unfamiliar with “genetic algorithms,” the term “genetic algorithm” might be a bit hard to wrap your head around. So let's start there.

A “genetic algorithm” is where a programmer defines “constraints” (boundaries on how the system works) and the computer tries a bunch of things until it finds a solution. But it doesn't exactly just try a bunch of random things, or even try a bunch of stuff from a list. There's another term for “genetic algorithm” which is “evolutionary algorithm.” This might give some hints as to how the system works, for anyone familiar with evolution.

In the natural world, organisms that reproduce more are more common. That's almost a tautology, but the obvious truth of the statement reveals a bit about how simple it really is. This simplicity will become relevant later. Genes in an organism define how the organism is built and how it operates. Genes that create organisms that are more likely to reproduce, then spread those genes on to the next generation. Depending on the reproduction method, genes may randomly mutate over time or may be (somewhat) randomly combined to make new genetic sequences. The technical term used to describe an individual that survives to reproduce, in evolutionary terms, is “fit.”

A “fitness function” in genetic programming is a thing that measures individuals from a population to determine which ones are the most “fit” to “reproduce.” A genetic algorithm will often start with a population of randomly generated values. The fitness function then measures those values and selects ones with the highest “fitness function” score. These are then combined with each other in different ways based on a set of rules (depending on the problem the programmer is trying to solve) to create a new population, and the whole thing runs again. The program keeps running, generation after generation, until a stopping point is reached. This could be reaching a maximum score, a maximum number of iterations (such as when maximum scores are not possible), or fitness cores don't change for some number of iterations.

Concretely, let's say we're trying to find factors of a very large number. We can start with a population of 1000 groups of numbers randomly selected from between 2 and the square root of that number. Now, to check fitness we multiply the numbers in each group together find out how far they are away from our target number. We take the closest 10 and create 900 combinations, then we randomly generate 10 new to add back in. For our combinations we could take every other number from two and combine them together, we could take the first half from one and combine it with the second half of the other, and so on. Once we have our new population, we start again. We keep going until the difference between the product of one of our groups and the target number is 0. When that happens, we've found some factors.

Genetic algorithms are extremely useful in finding (good enough) solutions to really complicated problems that were considered unsolvable before. By capturing the power of evolution, with a very simple set of rules, humans can make computers do really complicated things. But it's not really just computers.

If we return from our detour into genetic programming, we're using the word “fitness function” to describe something happening under capitalism. Surely we can't say this because businesses don't “breed” (to continue the biological metaphor), do they? Well… not exactly. A successful business may become a model for others, and there's a whole industry devoted to selling “tips and tricks” on how to emulate rich people. Large companies are, necessarily, successful companies. People who work at those companies often carry with them ideas from their former employers about how to organize as they join other companies or start their own businesses. So, memetically, yes, pieces of the sets of ideas that make a company successful are then injected into other companies to create new populations of companies.

Some systems are defined primarily by their fitness function . Markets then, one could argue, are a type of genetic algorithm. They are systems that offload metasystemic functions either up to the capitalist fitness function or further up to the a government's market regulation, or down to the operational units they are evolving.

Evolution is not simply something that nature does. It's something that we do, intentionally or unintentionally, all the time. We evolve natural language, art and visual themes, programs, and markets. We often don't realize that we're creating evolutionary systems.

There are often times when intentionally built systems are incapable of handling the complexity of reality. But, and this is critical to remember, absolutely nothing stops us from designing evolutionary systems. Human engineered evolutionary systems are absolutely not restricted to computers. We have clearly demonstrated that social systems can also be evolutionary.

Capitalism makes this especially easy because it uses an easily quantifiable fitness function. You know which business is the most successful because it has the most money. You can look at the spending in your business to identify opportunities for improvement. It's hard to imagine a system that could be better. Or so would one could be easily lead to believe, if one understood absolutely nothing about how almost anything in the modern world works.

Capitalism is absolutely an evolutionary algorithm. This is true. But there are a number of things that partially or completely negate the benefits listed in the previous paragraph. One of the more thorny of these is the problem of “costing.” There's a secret in the medical field: no one knows how much anything actually costs. Any bill you get from a hospital is almost completely, if not completely, made up.

Doctors don't really keep track of time they spend on different tasks because they can't. They're actually doing things. The overhead of then recording all the things would make actually doing things impossible. The same is true for most of the medical staff. Inventory can't be tracked per-patient. No one knows how many meters of bandage, or tongue depressors, or pairs of gloves a specific patient uses. Even medicine can be tracked poorly, depending on a lot of factors. Machines, such as MRIs, aren't charged based on how much electricity it takes to run a scan, or how many hours are spent by diagnostic specialists, or how much the radioactive kool-aid you have to chug before going in to one costs. No. When they charge insurance they make things up. They basically divide up the operating expenses by number of people who visit, do some fancy shuffling to make things believable, and then they send a bill. They may send another bill later because they need more money. None of it is real in any sense.

And this “costing” problem is true in almost every industry. The problem of measuring programmer efficiency is a well known one. Developers will often make fun of managers and their attempts to quantify an unquantifiable thing. If you measure lines of code, then developers can game the system by writing unless lines. The best code tends to be small and elegant. So should you then reward people who write less code? Then a developer wins by writing nothing at all. But some of the best code changes are actually ones that remove lines of code, so the best developers may actually subtract lines of code from a code base.

The problem compounds even more with additional abstraction. How do you even measure what a security engineer does? If you measure bug count, then you're actually incentivizing individual fixes rather than systemic fixes that eliminate classes of bugs moving forward. Then should you reward lower bug count? That's just obviously wrong. But the primary data you have is bug count. So what do you do? There are extremely complex ways to reduce this problem, but most people have no idea what they are. There will always be an quantifiable element. So the quantifiable part of capitalism is somewhat deceptive.

But evolutionary algorithms are a bit trickier than their apparent simplicity would imply. Because one of the most interesting properties of evolutionary algorithms, and evolution more generally, is that it can have unexpected side effects. See, a fitness function just measures fitness. They don't actually know why something is “fit.” The capitalist fitness function of accumulation of capital doesn't know where that capital came from, or how. The fitness function doesn't restrict the things that a company can do to reach that goal.

Thus the one of the more interesting behaviors (and sometimes bugs) that can come from genetic algorithms: side effects. Lets say you have a program that you want to demo, so you want to find the fastest input for the program to process. Your fitness function takes each member of the population and runs it through your program, then times it. You're off to a great start, except after running it you find out that the fastest input was to just provide input so garbled that it crashed your program.

We see all sorts of side effects under capitalism. Labor markets are supposed to regulate wages, but a cheaper way to drive down wages can be to hire a death squad to murder union organizers. Markets are supposed to drive down costs to consumers, but businesses can externalize costs to society by dumping chemicals in rivers rather than disposing of them properly, leading to expensive clean up paid for by the consumer. Today there are hundreds of oil rigs rotting off the coast of Texas, oil companies have externalized the cost of clean up by selling them off to companies that simply go bankrupt rather than fulfill their legally obligated responsibility to clean up. Sometimes it's simply cheaper to buy politicians who make regulation, or bribe the executives who enforce such regulations, than it is to comply with them. Other times it's cheaper to simply pay fines than to comply. These are all side effects.

But there are other side effects. Stress and depression can increase consumption, so there's an evolutionary incentive, within the larger system, to make people feel stressed and miserable. Mass media makes money by selling ads, so they have to maintain your attention. Humans evolved to pay attention to danger, so media is incentivized to report on horrible things. But humans are also known to emulate behavior they see, so reporting on horrible things enough can unintentionally manifest that behavior.

We are told that the fitness function of capitalism drives efficiency. This is partially true. When it's cheapest to increase profit by decreasing costs through efficiency improvements, then that's what it does. However, there is a point at which it stops being possible to optimize in that way. Over the past several decades, the age that children potty train has gone up significantly. Today it's not uncommon for children to be in diapers as late as 4 or even 5. Diaper manufacturers have, over the last few decades, promoted the idea that potty training is difficult. They have lead people to believe that babies are incapable of controlling their bladders and bowels. Meanwhile, traditional cultures around the world and those using a strategy called Elimination Communication can go without diapers and have no problem getting even infants to the toilet.

When room for improvement shrinks, it can become far more cost effective to instead manufacture desire. This is especially obvious in technology, with new devices forced on to consumers far before devices no longer meet their needs. Cars are perhaps the biggest example of this. I'm not going to expand on this, it's already very well covered.

Worse than all the side effects and gaps is the fact that maximization of wealth is, by definition, a Malthusian function. This fitness function can never be “fulfilled” so there is no point at which it's beneficial to not have more. Therefore, the only strategy for this fitness function is “infinite growth.” Organisms are described as “Malthusian” when their growth is exponential but the resources they rely on are static or grow linearly. This growth pattern leads to what is called a Malthusian catastrophe, where the population collapses as it exhausts the resources it needs to survive.

Your mind probably immediately snaps to climate change, forever chemicals, or the microplastics crisis, but there are any number of interrelated issues currently manifesting as “the polycrisis.” One that fascists love to talk about is population collapse. See, while capitalism is Malthusian humans are not. So, as pressure increases, people stop having so many babies. Humans, unlike rabbits or rain deer, are animals that plan and think about how to optimize the likelihood of survival for their young. Fascists, unwilling to accept immigration as an acceptable solution to declining birth rates, turn to forced reproductive labor as their solution.

They must make humans Malthusian, because their power rests on the illusion that capitalism is sustainable. And, of course, immigration can't be an acceptable solution for them because their control is also rooted in racial and ethnic stratification that is threatened by demographic changes. We can see, for so many reasons, why capitalism cannot continue.

But this system does manifest a high level of complexity. Even though it's obviously not a good system for most people, even though it's logically incompatible with the physical world, even though it mostly only works on paper, global capitalism remains an overwhelming force in the world.

Capitalism has an astounding way of appropriating and neutralizing all resistance. The image of Che Guevara is printed on a t-shirt made in a sweat shop. Every Guy Fawkes mask sold makes money for the same company that put out borderline fascist propaganda like 300 and The Dark Night. A metaphor for estrogen in The Marix gets turned into a whole industry that reinforces patriarchy.

It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.

But capitalism itself was not something that was so much intentionally created as something that evolved and was later described. Adam Smith didn't create capitalism, he just talked about how he thought it worked. He observed what he believed to be the rules, and recorded them. The system itself evolved from feudalism (and inherited much from it). It was able to overtake feudalism because it was better at managing complexity, because it could produce and consume greater variety.

It was competing in the space of social evolution over a specific niche. At the same time there were others competing for that same niche. Religous proto-communists like the Diggers were also competing for the same space. In fact, Christian communism has a long history going far back to their persecution under the Roman Empire. (We will revisit this later. I promise, it's interesting.) But the environment at the time was more amenable to the development of capitalism. It was a smaller change, one that allowed hereditary aristocracy to continue under a new excuse, than a system that would upend the entire social order. Though, in the environment of a Christian Europe, I suppose it's possible that things could have gone either way.

It is interesting to note the way the feedback loop in evolutionary systems. Entities within the system evolve to fulfill the fitness function of the system. In nature, they adapt to their environment. But organisms within the environment are also part of the environment. So the fitness of other organisms, as well as other impacts on the environment, can change the environment to open or close other ecological niches.

The manatee family adapted to feed on sea grasses. They competed with another aquatic mammal at the time. Though the other mammal had become highly adapted, the evolution of the manatee family ultimately drove the extinction of their competitors. Even the dominant species can succumb to the adaptation of another species. The reverse, and other variations on this theme, can also be true.

As capitalism evolved, it eventually created space for political changes. It's not hard to argue that the evolution of capitalism changed the socioeconomic environment in such a way as to make room for the evolution of Liberalism as an ideology. Liberalism included capitalism as an assumption.

Evolutionary systems can evolve other systems. This is exactly what a market does. It evolves businesses by forcing them to compete within it. These businesses can be modeled using the Viable System Model, where their viability is determined on how they manage their operational units. These systems may even use metrics to drive improvement within operational units in their own quasi-evolutionary way.

There is a tangled hierarchy between the evolution of Liberalism and Capitalism, one driving and influencing the other. It can almost be said, looking at it from the right perspective, that capitalism evolved Liberalism to protect it from both the monarchs that it displaced and people who Liberalism came to rule.

Capitalism almost seems intelligent, but why shouldn't it? Any person who has meditated may recognize the flow of thoughts, iterating on a theme, recombining with each other and other bits of information in our minds, until a thought passes some threshold such that it may be admitted to our consciousness, our world model, or said aloud with, wavering confidence, to be bolstered or silenced by the responses of our peers. Why should we claim systems cannot think? There's even a term for such simple rules giving rise to this sort of thing: emergent intelligence.

This system both creates an emergent intelligence, and incentivizes actual human intelligence to defend it. There are none of us who can, then, be expected to out think such a system. But all is not lost. We can, together, design a system to out think an evolved system.

If capitalism evolved Liberalism to protect it, there is no reason the relationship cannot be reversed. There is no reason we cannot design a system that evolves systems to replace these systems that currently constrain us. Actually, now that we have the context, we have all the tools we need to do it.

But first, one more detour. In computer security there's a testing method called “fuzzing” where a program is fed random (or random-ish) inputs by another program until it crashes. One of the great advancements in fuzzing was the integration of genetic algorithms. The first of these genetic fuzzers to be widely used was called “american fuzzy lop” (intentionally lowercase), or AFL. AFL could start with nothing and, using feedback gained from watching a program run, generate valid files, including files that could crash programs. Purely random input doesn't have the structure to trigger more complex crashes, and guided fuzzing (where a human manually describes the structure) can be labor intensive. Genetic fuzzing proved able to achieve what's called “code coverage,” meaning that it was able to test a lot of different things, in a way that pure random fuzzing couldn't but it could do so without needing large amounts of manual labor to define a “model” to guide fuzzing.

The big plot hole in The Matrix was that it never made any sense for the machines to use humans as batteries. But the original idea was not that humans were batteries, but that they were processors. The matrix wasn't powered by humans, it was executed on them. The idea that batteries could manipulate The Matrix never really make sense, but if they're processors then suddenly the metaphor becomes crystal clear. Society is a program running on people.

Now let's take another look at this metaphor again in the context of everything we've learned. We are in a cult, a system that enslaves our minds and controls bodies to perpetuate it. But if we are the system, then we have some control over the system. Yet we're still stuck because we can't simply exit or change it on our own. We need something more. We need to understand how we can manipulate the rules of the system to create an exit.

But the system we're up against is an evolutionary algorithm. It has an emergent intelligence, an intelligence that leverages the collective power of multiple human minds. It “thinks.” It uses the minds of people trapped inside to protect itself and close off any exit it can find.

But the systems it generates to protect itself are large and monolithic, they have weaknesses that can be exploited. And we can exploit them. If we exploit them one at a time, if we exploit them slowly, the system will see them and close them. But if we can overwhelm the system before it can adapt. In order to do this we need to build a system that's able to generate greater variety than the dominant system can consume or that can find variety outside of the constraints of the dominant system.

The way we do both is to use a genetic algorithm to “fuzz” the dominant system. Within our matrix we build an anti-matrix: we intentionally design a genetic algorithm with a fitness function we choose. We let the side effects of this fitness function find gaps that allow us to modify or crash the dominant system.

By using a loose, rather than tight, coordination, we increase the variety available to us. Stochastic, rather than explicit, coordination is harder for the dominant system to detect and adapt to. This increases the amount of “search space” we can cover, and increases the likelihood of exceeding the adaptive capacity of the dominant system.

We make ourselves a coordinated swarm, a system within a system, constantly looking for, creating, and exploiting opportunities to escape. We prepare for the coming disaster, do so by evolving systems that can survive through it, that can escape the constraints of the one that's dying around us.

We evolve the new world in the shell of the old. What do we need to build this system? We need a fitness function and a way to combine ideas (we'll use the term “recombination” rather than the generally accepted term “breeding” to avoid less than optimal connotations). We need to write a genetic algorithm that runs on people, and then we need to run it. Once we evolve this system, we can begin to “pivot” out of the current mess we have inherited and into a new world that we control.

Perhaps we can start by deciding to evolve a system that is not a Malthusian time bomb.

“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.