Reader

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) 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,” 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 (a “breeding” function). 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This gives us 4 factors of revolution within this model:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“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.