Rainforest (work in progress)

The myth of the hero conceals both the importance of building systems and the vulnerabilities of existing ones. Heroic thinking allows us to accept the illusion of Atlas, a man on whom the world rests. The fascist uses this illusion to centralize power, but an anti-fascist may also be fooled by this same illusion into believing that killing a dictator ends the dictatorship. Illusion and reality are sometimes intertwined.

The assassination of Luis Carrero Blanco by ETA, many have argued, ended Francoism in Spain. But the end of Francoism did not bring a radically new world. Neoliberalism is simply a less extreme cult than fascism (depending on your place in it), and Neoliberalism can degrade into fascism rapidly. Returning to the framework of domination we've been using, this assassination opened up the opportunity for ideologies to compete for control over the system of domination. The winners made that system more viable, but did not abolish it.

Let's talk about that word, “viable.” It's chosen very intentionally here because it's actually a technical term within the field of cybernetics. We'll return to it shortly, but now we need to talk about cybernetics.

The word “cybernetics” is rich in the popular imagination, but the popular conception is almost entirely, if not entirely, disconnected from the technical definition of the field. The definition of the field of cybernetics was originally coined as the “theory or study of communication and control.” Cybernetics is the study of meta control systems. Let's unpack that a bit.

“Cyber” comes from the Latinized Greek root of “kybernan” or meaning “steering or piloting a ship.” Cybernetics is not the study of steering a ship, nor the theory of ship steering, but one level of abstraction above that. It is the study of all systems of governance, within natural organisms, machines, natural phenomenon, or any other system.

What is a system? A system is simply any set of things that interact such that they elicit a unified behavior. A wave is a system. The solar system is a system. A person riding a bicycle is a system. A government is a system. A social organization is a system. A human is a system.

“Control” in this sense is, perhaps, better understood as “regulation.” It is not “control” in the sense of the BITE model (though it may be). It's better to think about in terms of homeostasis (keeping things the same), reproduction, or guidance. An “Earthship” house may use large amounts of thermal mass (such as barrels of water) to decrease thermal fluctuation between a warm day and a cold night. Trees reduce the “heat island” effect within cities by providing shade and through evapotranspiration. Deciduous trees, shrubs, and vines can be placed near south and west facing windows to reduce seasonal temperature fluctuation (they block sun in the summer with their leaves, but allow sun in during the winter when they loose leaves). A PID is an electronic component designed to maintain something, such as temperature, within a specific set of bounds.

All of these are examples of control (specifically of temperature), while we would not say that any of them are examples of “authority.” All of these are also examples of homeostasis (though a PID can also help change state before maintaining it). But control is also not necessarily about keeping things how they are. A person on a bicycle is also a system. Steering and balance, based on the rider's proprioception, can keep a bicycle upright so that it can continue to be moved forward by another part of the control system (the rider's feet on the pedals).

Companies and cooperatives are also systems that require control. But if these systems remained the same, many of them would rapidly cease to exist. Capitalist companies need to respond to changes in technology and markets to keep making the money they need to survive. Then “control” means something else again in this context again. The “control” of a few types of social entities, government and companies, for example, is about maintaining viability. The control that we are going to talk about it going forward is about maintaining the “viability” of a given system. Here we are back talking about the word “viable” again.

“Viability” here means that a system has the ability to persist, perpetuate, or reproduce itself. In terms of a living thing, this simply means the system will “stay alive” as long as other systems function. Assuming all functional organs outside of the nervous system, the body will continue to operate as long as the nervous system fulfills it's set of functions. Thus the system is defined as “viable” within the context of the model. If a critical subsystem fails, such as the heart, the model doesn't really have anything to say about it's impact on viability. The interactions of different components outside of the control system falls outside of the scope of this model.

Why have we suddenly started talking about cybernetics? Because we can use cybernetic models both to understand why systems fail and how to build more resilient systems. More concretely, we can predict (or even create) situations that lead to authoritarian collapse and we can build systems to sustain themselves through systemic collapse.

The Viable System Model (VSM) is a cybernetic model developed by Staford Beer based on his work redesigning the economy of Chile into an experimental form of socialism (before the coup).

We've already touched a bit on how the cult system of state/capital has some fractal elements. The VSM is itself recursive, assuming that every subsystem is itself a system that can be similarly analyzed. Let's now talk more concretely about the ways in which these systems can be nested.

Neoliberalism assumes that the primary functions of the sovereign violence and bureaucracy are to maintain markets and protect property. Bureaucratic regulation creates markets, (including completely imaginary ones) such as the carbon-offset market or intellectual property market, and maintains them. Here we have “the state,” operating within the global system of international relations, maintaining markets for the internal “operational units” of businesses and individuals “doing the work” of buying and selling things within these markets. Some of these markets are productive, such as food and labor markets, and, through their excess production, are able to support the infrastructure of the state and other (completely extractive) markets. In turn, the companies within the markets employ individuals, allowing them to survive off a portion of the products of their labor and using the rest to maintain hierarchy, bureaucracy, and non-productive elements. Lower level units, families and individuals, are forced to sell their labor in order to pay taxes.

American Federalism is similarly recursive. We can model the same recursive system in multiple ways depending on what kind of information we are trying to get out of it. Any American who paid any attention in school (which is, some of them) should know a bit about how the US government has multiple levels: Federal, state, county, municipal. Laws at any level override laws at the levels below, and are not allowed to conflict with laws above. Where court decisions can't be decided at a given level (such as challenges to municipal, or state laws) higher level courts step in to make those decisions. Some laws or regulations can't be enforced by lower levels, some projects can't be managed by more local governments. It wouldn't make sense for every city to have a space program, for example, even though the infrastructure and maintenance of every city relies on satellites.

Governance structures are largely up to lower levels to determine for themselves, so long as they don't violate laws at higher levels. We see a verity of different types of governments at the state level, and quite a wide verity at the local level ranging from almost the highly democratic town hall to almost unaccountable city controllers and good 'ol boys clubs. This delegation actually quite well aligned with some of the concepts outlined in the VSM (even when some of the governments themselves don't). The VSM recommends maximal delegating autonomy to “operational units” within a given system, with the only constraint being that the higher level control system must be activated when lower level systems violate the integrity of the higher level system.

Trumpism represents it's own delegated system, similar to Putin's Russia or Pinoche's Chile. In some ways this also looks a lot like Feudalism. It is, in some ways, a way of sharing power between the Trump and the oligarchy. Oligarchs are no longer constrained by the law, so long as they don't threaten the integrity of the dictatorship. Those who enrich Trump gain special privileges. Trump uses sovereign violence to forward their interests, and otherwise uses it to protect the integrity of the system. Elites, in this system, may even be allowed to carry out their own lesser form of sovereign violence.

Trumpism places the dictator as the ultimate authority, delegating to oligarchs, and they to their corporate underlings, each earning their position through fealty to those above. Fealty being a key word here, as others have pointed out that this is just another take on Feudalism.

These are all organizational hierarchies. Organizational hierarchies are enforced through direct or indirect violence. A dictator may murder those who threaten the structure. Prigozhin's airplane being shot down in Russian airspace is a clear act of direct violence. But we often fail to think about indirect violence, such as being fired for non-compliance. This is more of a stochastic violence, where there is a probability that a person who is fired may be forcibly ejected from their home because they can't pay rent or mortgage anymore and end up houseless where they will be harassed and possibly murdered by police or die of hunger, thirst, or exposure.

Organizational hierarchy, hierarchy enforced through violence, is the type of hierarchy anarchists oppose. Anarchists refer to this as hierarchal domination or involuntary hierarchy.

This organizational hierarchy can overlap with a different type of hierarchy: functional hierarchy. Functional hierarchy is a functional description of a system or process. For example, the fact that you must put socks on before putting on shoes, not after, is a type of functional hierarchy. The operation of putting on socks has precedence over the operation of putting on shoes, which itself may have precedence over other operations such as tying the laces. This hierarchy of operations is not a form of domination, but simply a description of how things must work. Anarchists do not oppose this type of hierarchy.

Neither do anarchists oppose voluntary hierarchy. As a learning adult, a teacher/student relationship may be a voluntary hierarchy. The adult submits to the authority of the teacher in order to learn, but may, at any time, reject the authority by simply leaving the class. Skill-shares and workshops often have this type of authority, where a person or group teaches the class to students and students are free to come or free to leave. The key factor here is that this authority is immediately revocable. This is different even from an imaginary “perfect” representative democracy in that the authority of the representative can only be revoked either at regular intervals or through a complex revocation process.

Beer was a well known business consultant before his work became more radical. The VSM describes an functional hierarchy. While capitalist firms tend to conceptualize these as roles that overlap with the organizational hierarchy, Beer and others noted repeatedly later that function and organization were not the same. Rather, cybernetics predicts that an optimal system maximizes diffusion autonomy and minimizes hierarchal domination. Individuals within an organization my take multiple roles in different contexts. Organizational entities that fulfill functional units may be temporary as short-term committees or even just meetings.

The VSM describes functional 5 subsystems (short descriptions from Jon Walker's VSM Guide, a summary of VSM ideas for worker's collectives):

1. Operations: This is the system that “does” everything. In the biological model it's the organs and muscles. In a mechanical model it's motors and actuators. In a business model, it's workers and machines. In a government, this would generally be executive agencies. For a nation, this is the working class.
2. Conflict Resolution, Stability: This is the system that ensures the smooth interaction of other systems. In the biological model this is the autonomic nervous system. In the mechanical model this is governors, regulators, and control logic. In a capitalist business, this would be management or HR, depending on the conflict. Different governments have different ways of handling (or not handling) this, but in the US this was the mythical “balance between the 3 branches of government.” We'll touch on that again later. In a nation, this would often be a combination of law enforcement and the judiciary.
3. Internal Regulation, Optimization, Synergy: This is the system that keeps things going and identifies ways to improve things. In the biological model this probably also falls largely within the brain stem, including the autonomic nervous system, but also extends to functionality such as emotions and dreams that help drive subconscious behavior. This may or may not exist within the mechanical model, unless a machine integrates reinforcement based machine learning of some type. There is no consistent way capitalist businesses do this. Governments also have no consistent way of doing this, but the US government primarily puts this within the domain of the executive branch. Within a capitalist nation, this function has been largely fulfilled by capitalist markets. We will also touch on both of these later.
4. Adaptation, Forward Planning, Strategy: This is the system that models the environment within which it's operating and makes predictions from that model. In the biological model this is sensory processing in sensory cortices, and modeling and planning in the frontal lobe. Mechanical models will also generally lack this, though there are some counterexamples of predictive machines. Capitalist businesses will do market research and regular planning. Capitalist planning may or may not involve employees outside of “leadership.” We will explore how this manifests in governments and nations later.
5. Policy, Ultimate Authority, Identity: This is the system that defines the context within which all other systems operate. As anarchists, the concept of “ultimate authority” is likely to raise a lot of questions and concerns. But this is not a literal authority figure. Anarchism, as an ideology, can define the context within which we operate. Ideological assertions, like rejection of all non-consensual authority, can be the “Policies” by which we operate. The label “Anarchist,” with or without adjectives, is an identity definition that is collectively defined and enforced without the need for a central authority figure. In the biological model, this is fulfilled by the frontal cortex. For mechanical models, this must be embedded in their design. Capitalist businesses often document policies and procedures, sometimes in manuals, along with tenants or principles. We will again talk about governments and their nations in the following section.

Operations consists of a set of subsystem. Systems 2-5 make up a group called the “metasystem.” Capitalists understand the world as “operations” being in service to the “metasystem.” Leaders come up with ideas, and workers execute on those ideas. This reflects the feudal roots of capitalism, where the king is a “subject of God,” and the people of the kingdom express God's as projected through him. This is the opposite of how the world is modeled within the VSM.

In the VSM, operations is the most important system. Nothing happens without it. The metasystem provides a set of services to the operations systems to enable them. The metasystem may go dormant when not needed. The metasystem isn't actively managing. You don't think about how often your heart beats and rarely about when you take a breath or blink. Metasystem subsystems are activated by operations systems; operations systems do not serve the metasystem. (While this feels hard to mesh with the popular concept of identity and how brains work, it's more true to the actual underlying science.)

Each of these functional components interacts via communication channels. In the next section we'll dig in to the specific vulnerabilities around communication in authoritarian systems, what kinds of failures those manifest, and how such vulnerabilities can be exploited. In this section, we'll dig a bit more in to these systemic components and talk a bit more about how they break down, and what that means, under authoritarianism.

While operations is the most important part of the whole system, without which nothing happens, identity is the root of the metasystem. All systemic functions contextualize their behavior within the framework of System 5. It guides the metasystem and unifies operations. In the US, this was the Constitution and the myth of America. Americans are told that if they work hard, they can be comfortable. Americans are told that their social mobility depends on their effort. Americans are told that the law is applied equally, and no one is above it. Every American can be expected to be treated equally.

The ultimate viability of a government lies in the connection between the collective identity function of the nation it commands, and the internal identity function. That is, the identity at each level of recursion aligns with the top level identity.

A group of people define their own identity organically. If the identity of the people (say, “we live in a democracy”) deviates from the perceived identity of the government (“this is a dictatorship”), government viability is at risk. Or, thought of another way, if the function of the metasystem (what it actually does) deviates from the function of the operational units (what everyone is trying to do within the system) then the system cannot remain viable for very long.

The failure of the US government to enforce the constitution against perceived violations severs the alignment. Americans who maintain their own concept of collective identity, as believing in the myth of America and that their interpretation of the Constitution has been violated, may cease to align with the central authority asserting a different interpretation.

But “viability” is not measured as a boolean value against a static threshold. All systems exist within an environment. A top can spin on a table but collapse in the mud. A system with one or more components of the metasystem operating in a degraded state, or not operating at all, may continue to function if the environment is relatively stable. While the environment can introduce challenges, it can also stabilize an otherwise unstable organization. North Korea is essentially non-viable, but it remains due to regional support from China. US backed dictatorships that would otherwise be inviable remain in operation through constant US support. Putin's dictatorship remains viable, despite almost complete failure of the metasystem, because he has (thus far) simplified the operating environment by eliminating or capturing oppositional systems.

Liberalism aligns identity and ultimate authority, system 5, with the concept of “the people” and “the nation.” Using the Graeber/Wengrow domination framework, this means that sovereign violence flows from the identity function while elites participate in charismatic competition to temporarily control said violence. Competition between elites for symbolic control of power is the very definition of “freedom” as understood by those who believe in liberal democracy as an ideology.

The fact that the two parties are not bound by any laws or restrictions to operate democratically, that they are simply clubs that can operate by any rules they see fit, that they are transparently controlled by elites to artificially restrict the pool of acceptable candidates, is irrelevant to the faithful. Freedom to choose who represents one's masters is the ultimate freedom.

This, not the arbitrary use of violence, not the blatant distortion of reality, not being rooted in white supremacy and Christian nationalism, this is the most important difference between Trumpism and the oder he's trying to replace.

Authoritarianism eliminates the competitive element of politics while maintaining or expanding sovereign violence. State Communism unifies sovereignty and bureaucracy. Nazism and Italian Fascism moved sovereignty out of the state and on to the leader, but maintained bureaucracy (both for the execution of sovereign violence, but also for some elements of social reproduction). Trumpism follows Neoliberalism in the complete externalization of all bureaucracy not explicitly supporting the execution of sovereign violence. This is more similar to American backed South American dictators or Putin's dictatorship than to Nazism or Italian Fascism.

This change collapses system 5, (Policy, Ultimate Authority, Identity) from a complex set web of mythology and ideological dogma into “whatever happens to come out when Trump speaks.” This ultimately leads to a cascading collapse of the entire metasystem, especially as psychological pressure and age distort Trump's judgment.

System 4 (Adaptation, Forward Planning, Strategy) requires both the context of system 5 and external information. But the fragility inherent to dictators limits what information is allowed to be accepted as “true.” Strategy and forward planning then ignore external information that doesn't match with the dictator's already existing biases and beliefs, leaving them to fit strategy completely within the dictator's ideological frame. When the results of strategic decisions conflict with the dictator's ideological frame, failure becomes a feedback loop. Strategic failures magnify as it becomes impossible to adjust course.

System 3 is simply impossible when system 5 collapses. Systemic regulation is simply the whims of the dictator. “Optimization” then becomes reporting whatever the dictator wishes to hear, without any real ability to optimize.

Nominally democratic governments may use votes and polls to identify high level strategic direction, though lobbying or bribes and mass surveillance tend to be larger drivers of behavior. These governments typically maintain power by manufacturing consent to minimize the schism between the national identity (what people think the metasystem does) and elite objectives (what the metasystem actually does). As these systems collapse, it becomes harder and harder to align the metasystem with those under it's control.

Authoritarianism also causes systemic collapse in the other direction as well. In liberal democracies, courts can act as a counter-power or a break on centralization of power. In order to carry out centralization it becomes necessary to erode those courts.

In the decades prior to Trump, the Executive and the Judicial branches of the US government performed the operations of system 2 (Conflict Resolution, Stability), while the legislative performed systems 3 and 5. System 4 fell partially within the government, but was mostly outsourced to the capitalist market either in the form of lobbying and think tanks. Polling, focus groups, and gave the primary signals of shifts in popular identity, while voting provided other signals. Elites could then use these signals to either allow the US government to align with the popular identity or attempt to use elite controlled media to align the majority of the population towards elite objectives.

It's important here to note that I'm not necessarily talking about formal systems or organizations. Again, metasystems and subsystems don't need to actually be people or groups of people. There does not need to be an Illuminati for this type of control to manifest. This can (and in most cases is) an emergent behavior of the system rather than an intentional behavior or output of an institution.

For Example, elite interests for safety align with private transport. Elite projection limits the options that the masses see as viable. Elites make movies, fund projects, and sell ideas that align with their own interests, believing that everyone wants what they want. People, repeatedly seeing the same things, believe those things to represent their own identities and interests. Thereby elites, without any conscious action or organization, can (and do) manipulate mass identity. (No fluoride required.)

Another way to think about this is in terms of “variety.” Variety, within the context of cybernetics, describes both what a system can produce in terms of different types of outputs and how a system can respond to input (thus the complexity of inputs it can handle).

To use a concrete example, a person taking a test where every question is true or false has a variety of 2 (or one bit, if we're talking about it in terms of “entropy”). This system has sufficient variety, given that all inputs can be mapped to one of the two options. As soon as they can't, things break down. Imagine being asked, “A barber who shaves everyone who doesn't shave themselves, also shaves themselves: True or False.”

So here we'll introduce another word that we'll use later: attenuation. Attenuation is the capacity of a system to absorb a variety of inputs. Returning to our True/False test example, it would be impossible to attenuate the variety of an input that can include paradoxical questions such as the above without additional systemic variety. That is, you couldn't answer that question unless you, say, had another option such as “cannot be answered.” The variety of a system can only attenuate (consume, neutralize, annihilate) the variety of inputs to the degree that the variety overlaps.

Within the context of a government or organization, the more people thinking about a problem, and the closer they are to the problem, the more possible responses they can have. The more distributed a system, the more variety the system can attenuate. The inverse is also true. An oligarchy can only solve problems so long as the solution doesn't threaten their ability to concentrate power and wealth. If the solution to a problem, say, ending a global pandemic, is to take radical action that could collapse the economy, well, then, the problem will instead not be solved. But the fewer who have power, the less variety the system has. When a dictatorship centralizes power, it makes itself more fragile and vulnerable. The more centralized a system, the lower it's attenuation capacity.

As the metasystem collapses, the ability of the operational units to reproduce the system degrade. Assuming no outside forces, the system eventually puts such a load on the population that production collapses, people starve, and eventually there isn't even enough to support the power structure. A more dynamic environment only speeds up such a collapse. Natural disasters lead to mass death with little or no disaster response. Outside enemies seize uncontrolled territory. Internal opposition rises up and overwhelms the regime's forces.

Authoritarianism is naturally weak, naturally inviable. Authoritarianism needs constant input and complex (predictable) politics to avoid collapse. Maintaining control tends to rely on fossil fuel extraction or control of other limited resources in order to prop up the regime. It is, perhaps, not a coincidence that natural gas extraction increased significantly in the lead up to Trump's first election, and continued to increase before his second.

But Trump's variety is especially limited, and becoming more so with mental decay. He responds predictably to every concession with additional demands and to resistance with escalation until he can escalate no more, at which point he claims victory and submits.

Portland's inflatable protests exploit this limitation. It's resistance, so Trump will generally either escalate or submit. If he submits, then he's backed down in the face of some people in silly costumes and he looks weak. If he escalates, then he keeps looking worse as more and more images come out of violence against obviously peaceful protesters. As the level of violence increases, so does the resistance.

But the strategy does still allow violence as a possible response. It is still possible to defeat with sufficient violence, even if that manifests a militant resistance later. The Blackout The System movement proposes the strategy of an economic boycott (and optional strike). While striking is an attributable activity, a boycott is not. There is no way to know who is participating in a boycott unless they say so. Rather, it's only really measurable by its effects. It shows up as decreased sale, but no one knows who would have bought things otherwise. Anyone asked if they're participating in a boycott can simply say, “oh, I chose something cheaper” or “oh, I couldn't afford it.”

Capitalism, as an ideology, necessarily restricts the variety of governments that embrace it. But plausibly deniability (the ability to believably deny one's actions) more generally creates situations that are extremely difficult for authoritarianism to respond to. The Simple Sabotage Manual, written initially by US OSS (which later became the CIA), proposed quite a few plausibly deniable actions that regular Germans could take in order to bring about the collapse of the Nazi regime. Some of these are quite outdated, but the ideas remain relevant for anyone living under authoritarianism.

Aside from variety, there's another restricting factor: relaxation time. Imagine a faucet. Depending on the capacity of the drain, it may be possible to open the tap on the faucet up enough that sink begins to fill even when the drain isn't stopped. When you turn the water off, there's an additional amount of time that the sink takes to drain. If you don't turn off the tap, the sink will eventually overflow. Relaxation time is the capacity to process input. It is the time between a perturbation to the system, and the system returning to homeostasis.

Trump continually exploits a vulnerability related to relaxation time. By committing crimes faster than the system can respond, he's able to simply bypass consequences. He's able to force the system to change state before the system can respond to his crimes. He was, and continues to be, able to do this not because the variety of his actions are greater than the system can absorb, but because he can perturb the system faster than it can relax.

A similar story can be told about the fall of the house of Assad in Syria. The Syrian Civil War had been going for more than a decade. The Assad regime (the official government of Syria before it fell) had been fighting various rebel groups the entire time. Seemingly out of nowhere HTS (one of the rebel factions) defeated this same military in a matter of days before Assad himself fled to Russia. The Nazi Blitzkrieg, Americans taking Iraq, and Ukraine recovering occupied territory after the initial Russian invasion, all of these are examples of overwhelming systems that might have otherwise been able to defend themselves at a lower rate of perturbation.

The Arab Spring saw similar rapid regime collapse, which seems to be starting up again with the recent revolutions in Indonesia, Nepal, and Madagascar. All of these saw the rapid collapse of formerly stable authoritarian regimes. In the next section we'll talk about why dynamic situations can lead to the catastrophic collapse of authoritarian systems, and the ways that communication in hierarchal systems is a factor in this.

However, we can already start to extract elements of a useful strategy to oppose these types of systems:

1. Carry out actions that are outside of the response paradigm of the system.
2. Take actions that further decease the variety available to the system being opposed.
3. Do things faster than the system can respond to them.

To use the terminology of cybernetics, the strategy to collapse a system can be stated as, “create sufficiently complex situations that they surpass the attenuation capacity of the system, and do so at a rate that is faster than the relaxation time of that system.” This is a very technical way to describe how to actually enact the anarchist catch phrase of “be ungovernable.”