I haven’t written for a few weeks now. As I write the closing chapter and begin rewriting previous sections, everything feels both more distant and more immediate. The working title has only continued to feel more and more resonant, both during the writing and during my pause.

When I started this project, I referencing Zion from The Matrix. Our narratives omit or obscure the collective work that makes “hero” stories possible. I went on to challenge even the modality of the hero narrative as reactionary in and of itself. As the genocide in Gaza continued to escalate, writing about the process of “building Zion,” through referencing an Afrofuturist influence in The Matrix, could not be separated from the genocidal settler colonial Zionism of Israel.

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

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.