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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 universally 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.”