Here we must again return to a point discussed in Dawn of Everything. While the sovereign projects the identity of a “super human” or a “God on Earth,” being an authority above all adults and thus a sort of “super adult,” the same sovereign also is restricted. Different cultures place different restrictions. Some say the feet of the sovereign may never touch the ground, and thus must be carried everywhere. The privilege of the sovereign may entitle them to care-taking. Indeed, when one thinks of the European monarchs from which European (and settler colonial) tradition descends, we notice a strange Infantilization: as a child, the sovereign is guarded, groomed, clothed, fed, sometimes even carried, and otherwise attended to their whole waking life. All of the resources of a kingdom are at their disposal, as though they were being raised by the combined work of an entire nation.

They are the authority above adults, but require more care and attention than infants. This is the paradoxical duality of the sovereign, who is both parent and child of a people. The representation inverts the reality, while the reflection happens to their subjects: “children” of the monarch, unable to make their own decisions, under the monarch's care, while actually doing all of the work to keep everything going.

This duality, and inverse duality, bleeds through to our modern concept of privilege.

The “man” under patriarchy (at least “Western” patriarchy) is represented as power and independence. The man needs nothing and thus owes nothing to anyone. The man controls and is not controlled, which is intimately related to independence as dependence can make someone vulnerable to control. The image of “man” projects power and invulnerability. At the same time “man” is a bumbling fool who can't be held accountable for his inability to control his sexual urges. He must be fed and cared for, as though another child. His worst behaviors must be dismissed with phrases such as “boys will be boys” and “locker room talk.” The absurdity of the concept of human “independence” is impossible to understate.

Even if an individual moves to a cabin in the woods and lives a completely self sustained life, they have still been raised and taught. There is still an unpaid debt to a social entity. This is, perhaps, why it is so much more useful to think in terms of obligations than rights. Rights can be claimed and protected with violence alone, but obligations reveal the true interdependence that sustains us. A “man” may assert his rights. Yet, on some level, we all know that the “man” of patriarchy acts as a child who is not mature enough to recognize his obligations.

Similarly, white violence and white fragility reflect the same dichotomy. “The master race” somehow always needs brown folks to make things and perform reproductive labor for them. For those who vocally embrace whiteness, a “safe space” is a joke. DEI shows weakness. Yet, when presented with an honest history adults become children who are incapable of differentiating between criticism and simple facts. They become the ones who must be kept safe. The expectation to be responsible for one's own words and actions, one of the very core definitions of being an adult, is far too much to expect. They must be protected and coddled. Their guilt needs room, needs tending, needs caring. White people cannot simply “grow the fuck up” or, as they may say of slavery that was not actually ever abolished, “fucking get over it.”

And again, interestingly, it is rights that they reference: “Mah Freeze PEACH!” One may find it hard to distinguish between such tantrums and their own child's assertion that anything she doesn't like is “not fair!” No, these assertions fail to recognize the fundamental fabric of actual adult society: those obligations we hold to each other.

While law enforcement is the ultimate representative of sovereign violence, privileges allow a gradated approximation of the sovereign. Those who are “closer” in privilege to the sovereign may, for example, be permitted to carry out violence against those who are father away. The gradation of privilege turns the whole society, except for the least privileged, into a cult that protects the privilege system on behalf of the most privileged.

This is where it becomes important to consider the ideology behind the sovereign ritual. Participation within the sovereign ritual denotes to the participants elements of the sovereign. That is, all agents of the sovereign are, essentially, themselves micro kings or dictators. By carrying out the will of the sovereign, these micro king or dictators can, by extension, act outside of the law.

They also believe themselves to take on the aspect that they believe exist in the sovereign. Through acting on behalf of the sovereign they become the projection of the character of the sovereign. That is, If the sovereign projects the illusion strength, then they believe themselves strong. If the sovereign projects the illusion of sexual potency, they believe themselves to be sexually potent. If the sovereign projects the illusion of wealth, they believe themselves on the verge of wealth.

Yet the ritual can only continue so long as enough people participate in the ritual. The ritual is a collective illusion, a story we build together. Children pretend themselves into all kinds of world. Adults don't stop pretending, we simply forget that we've been pretending the whole time. Though a regime could even take your life, and force you to behave as though you were a believer, nothing on Earth is powerful enough to make you actually believe. That power, the power to believe the illusion, is in you alone.

The game we are choosing to play is one that has been given to us, not one we have chosen, not one we have crafted. Nothing stops us from creating a new game. Nothing stops us from playing something else. Nothing except the limits of our own creativity, and the fear that imposes those limits.

Neoliberalism neatly cleaves the world in two: myth and reason. Myth, in this case, means roughly “a story made up to explain things that is not backed by data.” Liberalism is the basis of a modern society, based in science and reason. It is informed by “natural law” like evolution and capitalist economics. Meanwhile, myth provides the framework for “primitive” societies, like those colonizers carried out a systematic genocide against in order to create the US.

There's a strange justification embedded in that assertion. It evokes a reference to a Social Darwinism still embedded deep in the American psyche, an evolutionary model that obscures a vulnerable complexity, an ideology that justifies genocide. Those primitive others, whose lives were still informed by mythology, could only have ever faced one fate: they must have been destroyed, as reason must conquer ignorance, when they faced an advanced and rational people. How else could things have gone?

Surely within modern “Western” academia, one would only expect to find myth studied as such, and only within the humanities. Surely the Enlightenment tradition, the reason of Europe, cannot itself be woven from myth. Surely we are a rational people, systematically purging myth with the light of science. Yet behold the mythology embedded in the bedrock of capitalism: the myth of currency. Still taught to children in schools and adults in introductory economics classes, even while being widely debunked for generations.

I'm not going to spend much time on the barter myth, because others have already pointed out how laughably absurd it is. Anthropologists have found no evidence for it. Archaeologists have found no evidence for it. Adam Smith literally said he just made it up. Yet, it's still the dominant story told, widely accepted as historical fact, despite there being well studied and supported alternative explanations. Why have we all been taught a story that is clearly not true?

Capitalist economics is largely made of this type of obvious bullshit. The supply demand curve, the central model of economics, assumes rational actors. The simple existence of advertisement is sufficient to prove that this assumption is unreliable at best. Though some value has come out of economics, it can be compared to phrenology: a pseudo-science built around defending racism, that occasionally stumbles on useful ideas (see Phineas Gage for phrenology, or game theory and Ostrom's work on the commons for economics) which will probably, at some point in the future, be integrated into an actual science.

Capitalist economics is the apologetics of the Neoliberal faith. Epicycle after epicycle is added to explain the repeated failures of markets, to excuse the growing incompetence of “the wealth creators,” to hide the inconvenient truth that infinite growth is incompatible with a finite world. The wealthy should be in control because they are wise, they are wise because they became wealthy, they are wise therefore they deserve to be in control. Why is having wealth the biggest predictor of building wealth? The logic of capitalism chases it's tail until we are exhausted. Those who have survived cults may be noticing a familiar feeling.

And this is not for nothing. It's easy to believe that the concept of ownership we have now is somehow universal to all humanity. Yet, not all human languages even have ways to express ownership in the same way. As Etymologynerd pointed out, some languages will grammatically separate mutable and immutable “ownership.” Body parts, parents, inalienable connections are not haphazardly grouped with alienable possessions. Other languages are incapable of producing a grammatically correct sentence to express “ownership” without a workaround. Ownership then, far from being universal, is a cultural creation that happened at some point in time.

As Graeber has pointed out, when we try to understand the origin of the concepts of ownership and control of private property, it becomes very strange indeed. But to dig in to that we need to unpack a few things.

In Dawn of Everything, David Graeber ( et al.), outlines 3 basic forms of domination:

1. control over violence (sovereignty)
2. control over information (bureaucracy)
3. and charismatic competition (politics)

The modern “state,” the book argues, is an illusion. Rather than being a thing itself, it's instead a combination of these three forms of domination. Additionally, these forms of domination, historically, did not necessarily develop together.

The sovereign seems to evolve from cults of personality, wherein said sovereign becomes the ultimate expression of a child in the form of an adult. The sovereign requires constant attention, must be fed and clothed, must be served at all times. Meanwhile, the sovereign is simultaneously a person who is unbounded by all law. The sovereign may be expected to murder or steal, but does so with the permission of the people. But the early sovereign, without a bureaucracy to enforce their will, was only individually unbound by social constraints. Emissaries of the sovereign may well simply be ignored.

By being the sovereign, this individual was released from the law. The properties of sovereignty were transmitted by birth, non-transferable and connected directly to the individual. But other systems of privilege could be disconnected from the individual. Magical items could imbue the one who controlled the item with a set of transferable sovereign-like properties. Ritual masks or musical instruments, for example, may allow an individual to order others around while they are being held or used by the owner. Were such objects to escape the ritual realm, they could give the “owner” permanent ritual powers.

Territorial sovereignty seems to have evolved from personal sovereignty, where the powers of sovereignty are restricted to a space and the person may change. Divine Right of Kings maintained the birth-rite connection between the individual and sovereignty, but this was not universal. Some systems included the possibility for regional sovereignty to be transferred based on competition. A republic is an instance of transfer of sovereignty via competition where the winner of the competition may be decided by votes. But there are also other ways to restrict and transfer sovereignty.

There are magical objects in our society that permit the owner limited sovereign violence within an explicitly constrained space. The deed to a house, in many US states, may permit the owner to murder people who enter the house under certain circumstances. The connection between ancient myth could not be made more explicit than by it's name: The Castle Doctrine. Property allows exceptions to rules that are supposedly otherwise universally applied.

Property also has other magical elements, such as transition of ownership. To own property (such as land or tools), the logic goes, is to then also own all products produced with that property (food grown on land, items manufactured in an owned factory). Marx refuted this, claiming that it was labor, not ownership of the means of production, that actually was the true root of ownership. Unfortunately, he missed the fact that the concepts of “workers” and “ownership” are just completely made up. Ownership is a metaphysical concept with no connection to any natural law. It is a religious assertion. “Das Kaptial” is a grimoire that claims to reveal the true magic of property. Thus the entirety of “Das Kapital” could simply be replaced with the “rationalist” reply of “nah dude, that's all just some made up bullshit” and, by doing so, would become more consistent with anthropological evidence.

[S]acred items are, in many cases, the only important and exclusive forms of property that exist in societies where personal autonomy is taken to be a paramount value, or what we may simply call ‘free societies’. It’s not just relations of command that are strictly confined to sacred contexts, or even occasions when humans impersonate spirits; so too is absolute – or what we would today refer to as ‘private’ – property. In such societies, there turns out to be a profound formal similarity between the notion of private property and the notion of the sacred. Both are, essentially, structures of exclusion.

Much of this is implicit – if never clearly stated or developed – in Émile Durkheim’s classic definition of ‘the sacred’ as that which is ‘set apart’: removed from the world, and placed on a pedestal, at some times literally and at other times figuratively, because of its imperceptible connection with a higher force or being. Durkheim argued that the clearest expression of the sacred was the Polynesian term tabu, meaning ‘not to be touched’. But when we speak of absolute, private property, are we not talking about something very similar – almost identical in fact, in its underlying logic and social effects?

As British legal theorists like to put it, individual property rights are held, notionally at least, ‘against the whole world’. If you own a car, you have the right to prevent anyone in the entire world from entering or using it. (If you think about it, this is the only right you have in your car that’s really absolute. Almost anything else you can do with a car is strictly regulated: where and how you can drive it, park it, and so forth. But you can keep absolutely anyone else in the world from getting inside it.) In this case the object is set apart, fenced about by invisible or visible barriers – not because it is tied to some supernatural being, but because it’s sacred to a specific, living human individual. In other respects, the logic is much the same.

To recognize the close parallels between private property and notions of the sacred is also to recognize what is so historically odd about European social thought. Which is that – quite unlike free societies – we take this absolute, sacred quality in private property as a paradigm for all human rights and freedoms.

-Graeber et. al., Dawn of Everything

The cult of the United States makes many such wild metaphysical assertions, all pinned together by the claim that, because some people under its control are allowed to choose the winner of elite competitions for sovereignty by voting, the system is consensual (ignoring, of course, the massive apparatus of violence needed to maintain this cult). But even this assertion, that the population actually controls the cult via the “democratic process,” is itself easily disproved.

In 2014 Princeton University published a study used data to show that US is an oligarchy, not a democracy. We all know that the desires of the elite are more predictive of what policy will be implemented than are the desires of the population. So we are told that “We The People” are the root of “legitimate authority,” but we all really know, at least on some level, that none of us are actually part of that “We.” Therefore, if we acknowledge what we all know is true, all authority exercised by the government of the United States in our name is, necessarily, illegitimate. One of the most interesting and relevant (to this topic) observations in Dawn of Everything is, in fact, hiding in a footnote and is, actually, a reference to another book:

[…] whenever one group has overwhelming power over another […] both sides tend to end up acting as if they were conspiring to falsify the historical record. That is: there will be an 'official version' of reality – say that plantation owners are benevolent paternal figures who only ever have the best interests of their slaves at heart – which no one, neither masters or slaves, actually believes, and which they are likely to treat as self-evidently ridiculous when 'offstage' and speaking only to each other, but which the dominant group insist subordinates play along with, particularly at anything that might be considered a public event.

Layer on layer of blatant lies, easily disproved with even the most cursory analysis, somehow are still repeated even by those who oppose the current and most authoritarian incarnation of it. Even the most simple and self-apparent facts about, say, how currency operates are poorly understood because even pointing out obvious things is considered “political” and thus becomes taboo. How could such obvious falsehoods wield so much power?

Every day the cult becomes more obvious as it's abuses mount, as it centralizes around a singular sovereign. But we can't let ourselves be distracted from the fact that the cult predates it's current version. Indeed, we should understand the current changes not as “a cult taking over” but as “a cult changing shape.”

Let's look at the transition from the Divine Right of Kings to Liberalism using the Graeber Wengrow domination framework. Prior to Liberalism, a monarch was the seat of sovereignty. That is, the monarch had (sometimes limited) ability to exercise violence. The bureaucracy supported the infrastructure of violence. Competitive politics was not, as far as I'm aware, a major factor in these systems.

The feudal structure was understood as a recursive hierarchy. The king submitted to God, the nobles submitted to the king, lords submitted to their nobles, families of serfs submitted to their lords via the male head of household. Man over woman, noble blood over common blood, god over king, a family of families in submission to the one above it.

You may notice that this model of privilege and power creates a continuum of power. God, being the ultimate power in the universe, delegates all earthly power to the king. The king, the sovereign, is (classically) unbound by any law but rather is the ultimate earthly master of it. The privilege of vassals below decreased with their proximity and service to the sovereign.

The power of the sovereign seems to have come from rituals. It is common to find rituals around the world where individuals may take on temporary absolute or near absolute powers, only to lose them after the ritual is over. It may be, some posit, that this power escaped the temporal restrictions of the ritual to become sovereign cults. The sovereigns of these early cults, those without bureaucracy, were restricted in their ability to express their absolute power to that which could be done with their own bodies.

Pharaohs would work around this by connecting others to themselves. Those who executed their will became part of their families (by name or decree, when not actually being by blood). Early pharaohs, as well as early Chinese emperors, sacrificed members of their court to be buried with them at death. Perhaps the logic to this is connected: the king is the head of this great body, and, if the agents of the king are the limbs, then the whole body must be entombed together.

Through time this mutated. The caste continuums of today are much more complex systems that offers proximity to privilege in exchange for maintaining the order. Participation in the ritual power of the sovereign, perpetuation of the illusion, allows an individual to become an extension of the sovereign. An individual may, based on their proximity, carry out violence against others so long as that violence serves the power of the sovereign. A straight cis white man can enact all sorts of violence against others, can ignore all types of social norms, and can expect police to support him if violence flows in the other direction. Police are essentially above the law in almost all cases.

But this system has been under attack. It has been significantly weakened since the partial success of the Civil Rights Movement. Trump ran on restoring it, perhaps even enhancing it. This is what he meant by “Make America Great Again.” It's what his supporters still mean. His supporters identify with him, because they gain power through him. They were angry that they had become so limited they couldn't even tell racist jokes without consequences. Now they can murder protesters and perhaps even be paid well to participate in ethnic cleansing.

But Trump didn't ever care about his base. He's using them. He wants a different structure.

Capitalism destabilized the monarchy, which had already been reorganizing for a while. Hierarchy is actually far more complex than the perfect model the monarchy wanted to represent. In reality, it's a complicated game of balancing power. Dictators and monarchs are not immune.

Liberalism ultimately brought competitive politics into the foreground and transferred sovereignty to the territory rather than the individual. People, under Feudalism, belonged to the sovereign. Liberalism asserted that people belonged to a territory, and the justification for sovereign violence came though those people. In order to control that violence, a ruling class (defined in the US as white male property owners over 21 years of age) would choose from their own. Over time additional restrictions, such as the electoral college, the Senate, and the 3/5 compromise, decreased the democratic potential of the system. Political parties allowed elites to restrict the pool of acceptable candidates, thereby allowing the oligarchy to retain control even while increasing suffrage.

But capitalism eventually evolved it's own form of competitive politics.

Capitalism, as pointed out in Divine Right of Capital (Marjorie Kelly), took the structure of the monarchy pretty directly into the corporation. Historically, the monarch was the physical manifestation of the state. The corporation itself has legal person-hood, emulating the same structure. Those within the realm of the monarch were functionally property, and so, Marjorie Kelly points out, this leaks through the veil when a corporation is bought or sold. Physical property is listed, but so too is a thing called “good will,” which, she argues (and I think demonstrates quite well in the book), is actually people (employees).

Corporations compete with each other for serfs and vassals, who they use to dominate more of the market and thus to be able to control more people. While we may be more familiar with territorial power, there are several examples of cultures where people were free to choose a ruler from a set of competing nobles within a single territory. Some Pacific Northwest Coastal tribes operated in exactly this way (as discussed at length in Dawn of Everything).

Some Trump supporters have asserted his right to rule comes directly from god. That he is an (imperfect, they admit) instrument of god and therefore has the right to assert his authority as a divine sovereign (following the tradition of such cults). In some ways, Trump does represent an attempt to return to the structure of a feudal hierarchy. He is above the law and the ultimate arbiter of it. He demands loyalty from his subjects. But his form of government emulates the dictatorships that the US has inflicted on Central America.

His rule is predicated on his ability to maintain the total freedom of corporations (and the oligarchs who control them) to do whatever they want. In this hierarchy, Trump is the ultimate authority. His vassals compete with each other for their control over the population, leveraging the wealth they extract to gain his favors. Men are owned by their corporate overlords, and those men, in turn, own their women and children as property. Now, if you think this is somehow an unimaginably radical departure from anything in US history “American values” I'd like to like you to go learn what Johnny Cash's “Sixteen Tons” is about.

Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.

• Ursula K. Le Guin

While Le Guin reminds us what is possible, this quote is not a strategy. But there are tools we can use to derive a strategy to pull the boot off our necks and bring the body behind it to the ground. What is that strategy? 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.” But the myth of the hero, of masculine violence, that we discussed in the previous chapter can lead us to the wrong conclusions about what, exactly, we mean here.

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. It was an unquestionably good action, that brought positive change. 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. Cybernetics gives us a framework to talk precisely about how systems work, the elements that keep a system in power, and the ways in which systemic collapse may happen. 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 (including the collapse of authoritarian regimes). We'll return to “viability” shortly, but now we need to talk about cybernetics so we can contextualize “viability.”

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 lose 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. 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.

The Viable System Model (VSM) is a cybernetic model (a tool for simplifying analysis and abstracting ideas) developed by Staford Beer based on his work redesigning the economy of Chile into an experimental form of socialism (before the coup). “Viable” and “viability” in this context 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 its set of functions. Thus such a system would be 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 its impact on viability. The interactions of different components outside of the control system falls outside of the scope of this model. Therefore, it is critical to understand that this is a powerful tool, but not the only tool needed to predict system viability.

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 variety 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 is 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 (or anotomical) 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 a 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. For 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 tenets or principles. We will again talk about governments and their nations in the following section.

Operations consists of a set of subsystems. 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 will 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. To them, the 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 order 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 plausible 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, and thus changing the system, he's able to simply bypass consequences. 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.

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.

Let's return briefly to the Trump strategy. In order for his “do as many illegal things as possible as fast as possible” strategy to work, some of those illegal things have to change the state of the system to bypass consequences. To be fair, “do illegal things to change the system” was not really his strategy. It's been the strategy of the Republican party at least since Nixon showed it could work. Trump just combined that strategy with Bannon's “Flood the Zone” to create a bureaucratic blitzkrieg which allowed him to destroy the legal framework that would have held him accountable.

But it was specifically the fact that the US legal system responds especially slowly to crimes committed by powerful people that made this possible. One could interpret all of this to mean that a fast enough guerilla army could collapse an authoritarian state. HTS did exactly this in Syria. But other revolutionaries have failed to use similar strategies in industrial nations, resulting in an even more powerful and authoritarian state.

A collapsing system may present special opportunities for more bold or radical actions, given that those actions anticipate or accelerate the collapse in a way that can decrease the capacity of the system to defend itself… assuming that change will succeed. But it can be easy to misjudge this, as may well have been the case with the Urban Guerilla Movement of the 70's and 80's.

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. After that, we'll revisit insurrectionary strategy and the post-regime collapse phase through the lens of the VSM.

Simple Sabotage Field Manual by United States. Office of Strategic Services

Free kindle book and epub digitized and proofread by volunteers.

^{Project Gutenberg}

Kairos (work in progress)

2025-10-23 20:21:26

Cults and Control

Steven Hassan, a cult expert and cult survivor, developed the BITE model of Authoritarian Control to describe how cults take and maintain control. This can help therapists to identify and support those exiting cults, as well as helping cult survivors identify and avoid cults in the future.

BITE stands for Behavior, Information, Thought, and Emotion as categories which cult actions try to control. While, the site notes, some elements are elements of all cults. So we should not expect society that claims to be “free” expressing very many of these.

However, when we take the state and capitalism together as a singular system, the US can actually be pretty dark. We can check a lot of the “behavior” control elements. The most important function of the state is the enforcement of the property rights, that is the metaphysical assertions about where people are allowed to go and objects they're allowed to possess. That's the first two items on the “behavior” list. How d they do this? Kidnapping, beating, torture, separation of families, imprisonment, and murder (19-25 with the exception of 22) are all, essentially, the job of the criminal legal system. Rape, (22) is left as a threat, to be carried out by other prisoners, with the tacit consent or at the request of prison guards.

“Major time spent with group indoctrination and rituals and/or self indoctrination including the Internet” is more commonly know as “school.” “Permission required for major decisions” will be familiar to anyone who has ever applied for a loan to buy a house. And how did they get into a position to buy that house, if not simply born to the right family it's probably because of the use of “rewards and punishments used to modify behaviors, both positive and negative.”

Information control sounds like something that would happen in China or under other authoritarian regimes, and it does. But the fact that 6 companies and merging, all themselves controlled by billionaires, control nearly all media in the US. What is the value of “freedom of the press” if only those aligned with the system can afford to own the presses? But social media has become the democratization of media, which would matter if not for algorithms that shape the conversation to maximize corporate profit and minimize systemic threats.

The use of “cult propaganda” to maintain control has become more blatant of late reactionaries rally around fighting “DEI” and “Critical Race Theory.” School books again claim that slavery wasn't that bad and that the Civil War was about “States Rights.” But even in the most progressive areas, could you imagine a US history text book ever talking about the fact that Nazi race law was adapted from US race law, or that the German expansion across Europe and the holocaust were both drawn from Manifest Destiny and the genocide carried out by the US government against the indigenous population? Could you imagine any school teaching a history of capitalism that included historical critiques, such as those from the Diggers? Could you imagine an American public school throwing out their “History of Western Civilization” courses after acknowledging the reality that “Western Civilization” simply doesn't exist? Imagine what people would say. You know it. “That's Communism.” So we check off 1-3 and 5 from the Information Control list.

Perhaps we should go back to 2.d (Keep members busy so they don’t have time to think and investigate). Do I really need to talk about this, or can you fill it in for yourself?

Systemic control is easier to see, easier to call out, when it's centralized. The true brilliance of this system is the way it's able to embed information control into the fabric of interpersonal interaction. The phrase “don't talk about politics” is itself a political statement. That which serves the interest of the dominant class is implicitly defined as “not political” while any opposition to this order, even pointing out the obvious existence of slavery or genocide, even pointing out the fact that this statement is political is itself defined as “political.” The “political” taboo is a political taboo against calling a thing by it's name.

The interpersonal control starts to wonder it's way into thought-stopping mantras cults often use to control thought. “Anarchism/Communism works on paper, but it doesn't work in the real world.” I have heard this phrase, word for word, without critical analysis, again and again. It's strange that it should be repeated with such close wording, as though character dialog. Yet capitalism, that always produces suffering and inequity, that is rapidly pushing humanity to collapse, somehow “works.”

The belief in alternative systems, such as anarchism, is “childish” or “naive.” It can be acceptable to arrest, torture, or kill someone simply on the assertion that they are anarchists. Questioning the justification for wars is “betraying the memory of the soldiers who died for our freedom.” Fascists harassing people into silence is “free speech” but calling them fascist is “violence.” It's easy to go on, but we have one more category to touch on.

There the two most glaring elements of emotional control within this system are shifting blame and numbing. What better description is there than the function of the myth of upward mobility than to “[m]ake the person feel that problems are always their own fault.” We all recognize who's responsible for predatory lending that blew up the economy in 2008, and yet it's so common to imagine the debt that crushed so many as being the fault of the borrower. If only millennials would stop eating avocado toast, they could afford to move out of their parent's basement. The climate induced flooding, fires, tornados, hurricanes that destroyed your home and bankrupted your insurance company wouldn't have been a problem if only you'd chosen the location for your home more wisely. Speaking of which, what are you doing about your carbon footprint?

Oh, climate change, that infinite source of hopeless and rage. How much more challenging is it when you reject their blame, when you recognize that it's caused by machinery beyond your control? What do you do when it's too much? Perhaps it's what were you doing before you read this. And what would you usually do after you finish reading something like? Was it doom scrolling, gorging on terrible facts so you don't have to deal with the feelings those facts bring up?

Or perhaps you will you hide in reality TV, YouTube, video games? And can you function without medication, or does the reality of the horror randomly incapacitate you? The emotions have gotten so strong, we have to develop ways of stopping them or risk our jobs, our homes, our lives.

You can feel everything you've suppressed, for years, just under the skin, ready to explode. Is it any wonder there are so many mass shootings? Overwhelmed with emotion, with shame and anger, and nowhere to channel it, what else would you expect?

Am I seriously saying that the US is not what it seems, that elites control policy, that media and education control thought, that this free democracy, where we vote for our leaders, is really an authoritarian cult with parallels to Russia and China? Where's your tin foil hat? Next you're gonna tell me that the US literally trained South American death squads who used Nazi terror techniques, or that from 1932 through 1972 the US government performed medical experiments on people. It's all too terrible to believe. Ever hear of Unit 731? No, surely that's not real.

America are the good guys. These all sound like a conspiracy theories. Ever wonder why people believe that crazy shit?

chemical and biological warfare research and development unit of the Imperial Japanese Army (1935-1945)

^{Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)}

In your daily life, you make a number of decisions without thinking much about it. For more complex decisions, you may have a process for decision making, or you may not. But at a certain level of complexity, especially in large hierarchal systems, it becomes critical to have some sort of decision making framework. One of the more common frameworks is the OODA loop.

The OODA loop has 4 phases: Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. Each phase can either feedback an observation, forcing a return to the beginning, or can feed forward information to the next phase. So within the OODA loop there are multiple opportunities to adjust direction. This feedback/adjust mechanism makes OODA decisions agile. However, in some cases, that advantage can become a vulnerability.

If the system can be overwhelmed with information, an organization can become trapped in the “Observe, Orient, Decide” loop without ever making a decision. When organizations that use a decision making system like OODA get stuck in these loops, they can either stay trapped within the loop and be unable to make any official decision, or they can be forced to return to use bad data or intuition. Both of failure cases manifest as “turboparalysis”: the frantic, often conflicting, action without any results.

(Authoritarians are quick to point out that this is why decisions should be made by a strong man. This would ultimately be the same as the OODA failure scenario, but, as we shall see, can be worse.)

Now lets reconsider the OODA loop in the context of the VSM. The VSM recommends maximizing the autonomy of operational units. External observation and planning is a function of the metasystem, specifically systems 3 optimization and regulation) and 4 (adaptation and forward planning). So within an optimally viable organization, according to the VSM, OODA mostly takes place within a tight system 3 and 4 loop, based on observations of the external environment and internal system state, before returning to operational units. It does so at the lowest level of recursion possible. In most cases, this means that the smallest group with the ability to orient and make decisions does executes the loop.

Organizations that maximize autonomy structurally by minimizing hierarchy are, by default, VSM optimal for decision making (if they are otherwise viable). Anarchist disaster response, for example, maximizes the autonomy of individual workers. Information may be shared to support system 3 and 4 within the larger org, but most decisions will stay within the domain of operational units. It is generally only in cases of conflict or observed optimization opportunities that the metasystems would be activated at all.

However, hierarchal organizations tend to centralize decision making. As the hierarchy becomes more strict, the autonomy of operational units decreases. For each level stripped of autonomy in a domain, OODA loop decisions must transition an additional level of (VSM) systemic recursion. Concretely, in an optimal VSM organization each individual is authorized to make any decision that will not endanger the viability of the larger system. Do you buy supplies? You decide, you already have a budget. The budget isn't enough, coordinate with others until you get enough people who agree to get the budget or until you are convinced otherwise. In a hierarchal organization, decisions are centralized. Do you buy supplies? Ask for a budget allocation and give it to your manager. Your manager will relate that request to the regional manager. The regional manager will group this with other requests to present to the mid level finance committed. The finance committee will add it to the planning session for the budget next year, and so on.

The more strict the hierarchy, the more levels of hierarchy a decision must pass through. While it's is bad enough just to go through more people, the other side is that each level of hierarchy decreases the communication bandwidth for the level above. Rather than making decisions locally, the metasystem has to manage communication for each operational unit below. Observations go up the chain. The observational bandwidth decreases at each level, so each step loses information on the way up (or doesn't make it up the chain at all). When observations reach a level authorized to make decisions, those decisions now have to travel back down the chain of command. Decisions can't be detailed and granular but must, necessarily, be general enough to be interpreted at each level back. This adds additional “orient and decide” steps prior to reaching the operational units able to act. Each level of ambiguity adds opportunities to misunderstand or misinterpret the generalized guidance. If guidance is made specific then other problems can arise, such as instructions being inappropriate for a given situation.

Hierarchal organizations may mitigate this problem by creating intelligence units with the specific purpose of gathering information (OODA observing) and processing it in to intelligence (OODA orienting). Systems 3 (optimization) and 4 (adaptation and planning) still take place at higher levels, but this structure decreases the type of data loss described earlier. Downward data loss remains the same. But intelligence units causes a different type of data loss. Intelligence can provide highly detailed information on what intelligence analysts believe to be the most critical areas, but this high focus is at the expense of other areas. So a hierarchal organization can either have highly focused information on a small number of things, or a small amount of information about a lot of things, but never both.

As a situation becomes more dynamic, observation and orientation takes up more bandwidth. There are necessarily more observations and more things for which to orient. The degree to which an organization can manage dynamic situations (natural disasters, asymmetric warfare) is an inverse to both how dynamic the situation is and how hierarchal the organization is. Therefore, anarchist disaster response like Occupy Sandy and MADR (Mutual Aid Disaster Relief) excel in disasters while FEMA collapses. Likewise, guerilla and other asymmetric forces regularly defeat highly organized militaries like that of the US.

As an organization moves even further on the hierarchy scale even more problems arise. Authoritarianism ultimately collapses the entire metasystem into leaders (as described earlier). These leaders are not chosen for their competence but for their ideological adherence and loyalty to the leader. Ideological adherence necessarily creates an observational filter, making some observation and orientation functions impossible. It is not possible for authoritarian governments to be optimally viable, by definition, for multiple reasons. Critical to this section is the fact that they cannot actually observe and plan when those observations and plans may conflict with the beliefs of “Dear Leader.”

As authoritarianism progresses, reported reality must further and further align with the ideological frame of the leader. Thus observed reality of both the environment and the self degrades until it disappears. But even if that didn't happen, solidifying hierarchy decreases the granularity of both internal and external observations.

The more authoritarian a system, the more vulnerable it becomes.

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.” ― Sun Tzu, The Art of War

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Social Ideology of the Motorcar - resilience

The worst thing about cars is that they are luxury goods invented for the pleasure of a very rich minority, and which were never intended for the people.

^{Resilience (Resilience.org)}

Kairos (work in progress)

2025-11-11 14:10:14

The OODA loop and Turboparalysis

In your daily life, you make a number of decisions without thinking much about it. For more complex decisions, you may have a process for decision making, or you may not. But at a certain level of complexity, especially in large hierarchal systems, it becomes critical to have some sort of decision making framework. One of the more common frameworks is the OODA loop.

The OODA loop has 4 phases: Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. Each phase can either feedback an observation, forcing a return to the beginning, or can feed forward information to the next phase. So within the OODA loop there are multiple opportunities to adjust direction. This feedback/adjust mechanism makes OODA decisions agile. However, in some cases, that advantage can become a vulnerability.

If the system can be overwhelmed with information, an organization can become trapped in the “Observe, Orient, Decide” loop without ever making a decision. When organizations that use a decision making system like OODA get stuck in these loops, they can either stay trapped within the loop and be unable to make any official decision, or they can be forced to return to use bad data or intuition. Both of failure cases manifest as “turboparalysis”: the frantic, often conflicting, action without any results.

(Authoritarians are quick to point out that this is why decisions should be made by a strong man. This would ultimately be the same as the OODA failure scenario, but, as we shall see, can be worse.)

Now lets reconsider the OODA loop in the context of the VSM. The VSM recommends maximizing the autonomy of operational units. External observation and planning is a function of the metasystem, specifically systems 3 optimization and regulation) and 4 (adaptation and forward planning). So within an optimally viable organization, according to the VSM, OODA mostly takes place within a tight system 3 and 4 loop, based on observations of the external environment and internal system state, before returning to operational units. It does so at the lowest level of recursion possible. In most cases, this means that the smallest group with the ability to orient and make decisions does executes the loop.

Organizations that maximize autonomy structurally by minimizing hierarchy are, by default, VSM optimal for decision making (if they are otherwise viable). Anarchist disaster response, for example, maximizes the autonomy of individual workers. Information may be shared to support system 3 and 4 within the larger org, but most decisions will stay within the domain of operational units. It is generally only in cases of conflict or observed optimization opportunities that the metasystems would be activated at all.

However, hierarchal organizations tend to centralize decision making. As the hierarchy becomes more strict, the autonomy of operational units decreases. For each level stripped of autonomy in a domain, OODA loop decisions must transition an additional level of (VSM) systemic recursion. Concretely, in an optimal VSM organization each individual is authorized to make any decision that will not endanger the viability of the larger system. Do you buy supplies? You decide, you already have a budget. The budget isn't enough, coordinate with others until you get enough people who agree to get the budget or until you are convinced otherwise. In a hierarchal organization, decisions are centralized. Do you buy supplies? Ask for a budget allocation and give it to your manager. Your manager will relate that request to the regional manager. The regional manager will group this with other requests to present to the mid level finance committed. The finance committee will add it to the planning session for the budget next year, and so on.

The more strict the hierarchy, the more levels of hierarchy a decision must pass through. While it's is bad enough just to go through more people, the other side is that each level of hierarchy decreases the communication bandwidth for the level above. Rather than making decisions locally, the metasystem has to manage communication for each operational unit below. Observations go up the chain. The observational bandwidth decreases at each level, so each step loses information on the way up (or doesn't make it up the chain at all). When observations reach a level authorized to make decisions, those decisions now have to travel back down the chain of command. Decisions can't be detailed and granular but must, necessarily, be general enough to be interpreted at each level back. This adds additional “orient and decide” steps prior to reaching the operational units able to act. Each level of ambiguity adds opportunities to misunderstand or misinterpret the generalized guidance. If guidance is made specific then other problems can arise, such as instructions being inappropriate for a given situation.

Hierarchal organizations may mitigate this problem by creating intelligence units with the specific purpose of gathering information (OODA observing) and processing it in to intelligence (OODA orienting). Systems 3 (optimization) and 4 (adaptation and planning) still take place at higher levels, but this structure decreases the type of data loss described earlier. Downward data loss remains the same. But intelligence units causes a different type of data loss. Intelligence can provide highly detailed information on what intelligence analysts believe to be the most critical areas, but this high focus is at the expense of other areas. So a hierarchal organization can either have highly focused information on a small number of things, or a small amount of information about a lot of things, but never both.

As a situation becomes more dynamic, observation and orientation takes up more bandwidth. There are necessarily more observations and more things for which to orient. The degree to which an organization can manage dynamic situations (natural disasters, asymmetric warfare) is an inverse to both how dynamic the situation is and how hierarchal the organization is. Therefore, anarchist disaster response like Occupy Sandy and MADR (Mutual Aid Disaster Relief) excel in disasters while FEMA collapses. Likewise, guerilla and other asymmetric forces regularly defeat highly organized militaries like that of the US.

As an organization moves even further on the hierarchy scale even more problems arise. Authoritarianism ultimately collapses the entire metasystem into leaders (as described earlier). These leaders are not chosen for their competence but for their ideological adherence and loyalty to the leader. Ideological adherence necessarily creates an observational filter, making some observation and orientation functions impossible. It is not possible for authoritarian governments to be optimally viable, by definition, for multiple reasons. Critical to this section is the fact that they cannot actually observe and plan when those observations and plans may conflict with the beliefs of “Dear Leader.”

As authoritarianism progresses, reported reality must further and further align with the ideological frame of the leader. Thus observed reality of both the environment and the self degrades until it disappears. But even if that didn't happen, solidifying hierarchy decreases the granularity of both internal and external observations.

The more authoritarian a system, the more vulnerable it becomes.

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.” ― Sun Tzu, The Art of War

Observe–orient–decide–act cycle

^{Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)}

Steven Hassan, a cult expert and cult survivor, developed the BITE model of Authoritarian Control to describe how cults take and maintain control. This can help therapists to identify and support those exiting cults, as well as helping cult survivors identify and avoid cults in the future.

BITE stands for Behavior, Information, Thought, and Emotion as categories which cult actions try to control. While, the site notes, some elements are elements of all cults. So we should not expect society that claims to be “free” expressing very many of these.

However, when we take the state and capitalism together as a singular system, the US can actually be pretty dark. We can check a lot of the “behavior” control elements. The most important function of the state is the enforcement of the property rights, that is the metaphysical assertions about where people are allowed to go and objects they're allowed to possess. That's the first two items on the “behavior” list. How d they do this? Kidnapping, beating, torture, separation of families, imprisonment, and murder (19-25 with the exception of 22) are all, essentially, the job of the criminal legal system. Rape, (22) is left as a threat, to be carried out by other prisoners, with the tacit consent or at the request of prison guards.

“Major time spent with group indoctrination and rituals and/or self indoctrination including the Internet” is more commonly know as “school.” “Permission required for major decisions” will be familiar to anyone who has ever applied for a loan to buy a house. And how did they get into a position to buy that house, if not simply born to the right family it's probably because of the use of “rewards and punishments used to modify behaviors, both positive and negative.”

Information control sounds like something that would happen in China or under other authoritarian regimes, and it does. But the fact that 6 companies and merging, all themselves controlled by billionaires, control nearly all media in the US. What is the value of “freedom of the press” if only those aligned with the system can afford to own the presses? But social media has become the democratization of media, which would matter if not for algorithms that shape the conversation to maximize corporate profit and minimize systemic threats.

The use of “cult propaganda” to maintain control has become more blatant of late reactionaries rally around fighting “DEI” and “Critical Race Theory.” School books again claim that slavery wasn't that bad and that the Civil War was about “States Rights.” But even in the most progressive areas, could you imagine a US history text book ever talking about the fact that Nazi race law was adapted from US race law, or that the German expansion across Europe and the holocaust were both drawn from Manifest Destiny and the genocide carried out by the US government against the indigenous population? Could you imagine any school teaching a history of capitalism that included historical critiques, such as those from the Diggers? Could you imagine an American public school throwing out their “History of Western Civilization” courses after acknowledging the reality that “Western Civilization” simply doesn't exist? Imagine what people would say. You know it. “That's Communism.” So we check off 1-3 and 5 from the Information Control list.

Perhaps we should go back to 2.d (Keep members busy so they don’t have time to think and investigate). Do I really need to talk about this, or can you fill it in for yourself?

Systemic control is easier to see, easier to call out, when it's centralized. The true brilliance of this system is the way it's able to embed information control into the fabric of interpersonal interaction. The phrase “don't talk about politics” is itself a political statement. That which serves the interest of the dominant class is implicitly defined as “not political” while any opposition to this order, even pointing out the obvious existence of slavery or genocide, even pointing out the fact that this statement is political is itself defined as “political.” The “political” taboo is a political taboo against calling a thing by it's name.

The interpersonal control starts to wonder it's way into thought-stopping mantras cults often use to control thought. “Anarchism/Communism works on paper, but it doesn't work in the real world.” I have heard this phrase, word for word, without critical analysis, again and again. It's strange that it should be repeated with such close wording, as though character dialog. Yet capitalism, that always produces suffering and inequity, that is rapidly pushing humanity to collapse, somehow “works.”

The belief in alternative systems, such as anarchism, is “childish” or “naive.” It can be acceptable to arrest, torture, or kill someone simply on the assertion that they are anarchists. Questioning the justification for wars is “betraying the memory of the soldiers who died for our freedom.” Fascists harassing people into silence is “free speech” but calling them fascist is “violence.” It's easy to go on, but we have one more category to touch on.

There the two most glaring elements of emotional control within this system are shifting blame and numbing. What better description is there than the function of the myth of upward mobility than to “[m]ake the person feel that problems are always their own fault.” We all recognize who's responsible for predatory lending that blew up the economy in 2008, and yet it's so common to imagine the debt that crushed so many as being the fault of the borrower. If only millennials would stop eating avocado toast, they could afford to move out of their parent's basement. The climate induced flooding, fires, tornados, hurricanes that destroyed your home and bankrupted your insurance company wouldn't have been a problem if only you'd chosen the location for your home more wisely. Speaking of which, what are you doing about your carbon footprint?

Oh, climate change, that infinite source of hopeless and rage. How much more challenging is it when you reject their blame, when you recognize that it's caused by machinery beyond your control? What do you do when it's too much? Perhaps it's what were you doing before you read this. And what would you usually do after you finish reading something like? Was it doom scrolling, gorging on terrible facts so you don't have to deal with the feelings those facts bring up?

Or perhaps you will you hide in reality TV, YouTube, video games? And can you function without medication, or does the reality of the horror randomly incapacitate you? The emotions have gotten so strong, we have to develop ways of stopping them or risk our jobs, our homes, our lives.

You can feel everything you've suppressed, for years, just under the skin, ready to explode. Is it any wonder there are so many mass shootings? Overwhelmed with emotion, with shame and anger, and nowhere to channel it, what else would you expect?

Am I seriously saying that the US is not what it seems, that elites control policy, that media and education control thought, that this free democracy, where we vote for our leaders, is really an authoritarian cult with parallels to Russia and China? Where's your tin foil hat? Next you're gonna tell me that the US literally trained South American death squads who used Nazi terror techniques, or that from 1932 through 1972 the US government performed medical experiments on people. It's all too terrible to believe. Ever hear of Unit 731? No, surely that's not real.

America are the good guys. These all sound like a conspiracy theories. Ever wonder why people believe that crazy shit?

In world of The Matrix, we see a resistance movement already in progress. In the Animatrix we see the system they're trying to escape as it's being built. But we never see the first escape; we see how the system is constructed within the mind and how we can manipulate the rules while inside of it, but we never see how to pivot out of it. For those of us who feel the wrongness of the various hierarchies of the world, itching in our minds, this is the missing piece we're all looking for.

We are trapped, like an inverted Neo, fully aware of the system, fully able to see the code underneath, but unable to escape as it crashes around us… and even if we got out, where would we go? Where is our Zion?

There happens to be a few properties of systems that are useful to know. The first is that no sufficiently complex system of rules can be both consistent and complete. This fact can be applied to legal systems. There will be gaps that miss things which a system wants to prevent, and there will likely be inconsistencies that make some rules impossible to enforce or the enforcement of those rules violate other rules.

The other useful thing to know is that recursion has a tendency to break systems. To understand the shape of a system that supports recursion is to begin to be able to think about strategies that would be useful to break out of that system.

This is a work in progress. You are reading a draft of something, perhaps a zine, being written in real time. As it develops, expect it to change. It will start raw, and hopefully be polished. Sections will be added. Sections will be moved and rewritten. When it is complete, this page will be edited to reflect it's status as complete.

Part of this is a conversation. Feedback, critiques, extensions, may all be added in to the work. But, as you will start to understand as the writing progresses, a finished text is not the ultimate goal. There is something larger that requires your help.

The myth of the hero clouds all of our minds. We look for a savior. We imagine a magnificent other who will liberate us. This storytelling modality dominates mass media. Our minds are imprisoned as much within meta-myth of The Hero's Journey as in the system that infinitely replicates variations of it for popular consumption.

But no one will save us. Not some politician, some revolutionary, some hero. Not you, not me. Only we can save us. Only us, only together.

Imagine now, what would it feel like to be able to drop out of this system? To drop out of capitalism? What would it feel like to escape? Imagine you could just live somewhere, work a few hours a week, and spend the rest of your time being alive. Imagine a place that's separate from “the real world” where everything was radically different.

Some of us have tasted it, organizing with comrades, building shared space. Sometimes we can feel it's embryonic form. I lived on a commune for a while. It was a place where people who couldn't function under capitalism could escape for a while. It had it's share of problems, it wasn't what we want to build, but it showed me what was possible.

The thing that made it all possible was that it was legally a church. There are holes in the code, bugs that cannot be fixed. What can't be patched, the system protects itself by convincing us not to look.

[Special thanks for editing, text suggestions, and feedback to…@CorvidCrone@kolektiva.social@JeanieBurrell@mstdn.social@magnus@venner.network@sidereal@kolektiva.social@tiotasram@kolektiva.social@unchartedworlds@scicomm.xyz@ghouston@mamot.fr

Please let me know if I've missed you, put the wrong name in, added your handle by mistake, or if you'd like your handle to be modified or removed for other reasons. I'm also happy to add in ko-fi or other donation links for editors and contributors.]

The system is dying, consuming itself and everything else to keep going. Even though we all see this plainly, we can't seem to change things because the system keeps adapting. The system is thinking, and it has the ability to out think any individual human. But now we have the tools to build an adaptive system, a genetic algorithm, to move faster than the system can adapt.

Now we return again to where we started. We need to escape capitalism. If we can build the new system inside the shell of the old, then we can pivot out. But what do we do to build such a system? We will see in a bit that the answer somewhat implied by the question.

Let's go back a bit though. We're trapped, this much we know. But can we describe how we're trapped, or what we should do about it? The classic response to such traps, to authoritarian overreach, was to establish some kind of bill or declaration of “rights.” This is a list of supposed restrictions on governmental power. Of course these restrictions are almost always ignored, sometimes without ever being enacted in the first place (such as “Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen” from the French Revolution that was ignored until hundreds of years later).

But, as Graeber and Wengrow pointed out in The Dawn of Everything, a lot of freedoms really just boil down to some variation or incomplete specification of the three fundamental freedoms:

(1) the freedom to move away or relocate from one’s surroundings; (2) the freedom to ignore or disobey commands issued by others; and (3) the freedom to shape entirely new social realities, or shift back and forth between different ones.

None of these freedoms are fully recognized by any existing government, and perhaps they can't be. The very nature of government and national sovereignty necessarily limits these, especially the third. If we invert our perspective, we see that the entirety of the BITE model is basically just a list of ways systems of authoritarian control violate these freedoms.

But if we change our orientation away from individual freedom and constraint and towards systemic constraint, we can actually resolve these freedoms all back to one single constraint. This one constraint determines the difference between a free system and an authoritarian one:

For a system to be free, participation must be optional for all members.

We can immediately see that freedom to move is one type of participation and freedom to disobey is another. A system is a description of relationships, so exiting one system necessarily requires entering another. One can't exit all systems any more than one could create an object that's not made of any sort of matter. A system is defined by its participation, thus to not-participate is to exit. To exit a system is to create or enter another system, thus the third freedom is also contained within this constraint.

It can be hard to believe that one single constraint can really be the difference. What about all those rights. Surely this one single constraint couldn't take an authoritarian system and suddenly make it free, or a system with a large number of rights suddenly authoritarian. Let's illustrate the difference that this one single constraint can make by two examples.

The rules of Simon Says are maximally authoritarian. You must perform any action ordered, with the only restriction that the authority must say “Simon says” first. Were you forced to stay in this system, it would be the most despotic autocracy possible, completely subject to the wills of one person. This is one step away from literal slavery. But it's not. It's a silly game. The difference is that you can leave at any time.

Let's flip this and imagine a room. During a specific period of time you will have absolute control over everything in this room. In this room you have total freedom. This is not even the limited freedom, the coordinated freedom, the compromising freedom of civil society. You could, without consequence, perform any action you wish in this room. You could say anything, destroy or steal any object, order any individual to perform any action, kill any person in the room with you and take anything they own. This is the sovereign freedom, the absolute freedom, of dictators and kings. The only restriction is that you are not allowed to leave the room while you have this freedom. In fact, you really only have this level of freedom because the room is actually empty other than for you. I am, of course, talking about solitary confinement, a form of internationally recognized torture common in US prisons (including against children).

But, surely, if you simply have enough protections, a complete enough bill of rights, you don't really need this constraint. Surely, with the right structure, with the right checks and balances, with the right list it must be possible to preserve freedom without including this one requirement that people be allowed to exit the system.

No, and I can prove it.

1. There will exist actors in a system who will wish to take advantage of others. Evolution drives survival and one strategy for increasing survival in an altruistic society is to become a parasite.
2. Expecting exploitative dynamics, a system needs to have a set of rules to manage exploitation.
   
   1. If the set of rules is static it will lack the requisite variety necessary to manage the infinite possible behavior of humans so the system will fail.
   2. If the system is dynamic then it must have a rule set about how it's own rules are updated. This would make the system recursively defined. If you can change a system from within that same system, then you add to it an enumeration of all known mathematical axioms. Any system that can contain mathematics is at least as complex as mathematics. Any system at least as complex as mathematics is necessarily either incomplete or inconsistent (by Gödel's incompleteness theorems).
      
      1. If the system is incomplete, then constraints can be evaded which then allow a malicious agent to seize control of the system and update the rules for their own benefit.
      2. If constraints are incomplete, then a malicious agent can take advantage of others within the system.

      
      

   
   

3. Therefore, no social system can possibly protect freedom unless there exists a single metasystemic constraint (that the system must be optional) allowing for the system to be abandoned when compromised.

Interestingly enough, Gödel is known to have identified an “inner contradiction” within the US constitution in 1947 (called Gödel's loophole). This contradiction could allow the country to be turned into a dictatorship. Following from the logic we've thus far already explored, there are two such vulnerabilities:

1. The logic of the constraints on the system are defined within the context of the system that is intended to be constrained and all constraints within the system are mutable.
2. Power over the constraint logic enforcement mechanism is within the system, thus the system can fail to or choose not to enforce constraint logic.

The first of these matches closely with the most popular argument that this refers to “Article 5.” Gödel is known to have only explained the issue to Einstein, and the two agreed to not divulge the vulnerability. This is known today as “security through obscurity.” It violates a well established cryptographic principal called “Kerckhoffs's principle,” which was restated by a contemporary of Gödel, Claude Shannon, as “the enemy knows the system.”

Gödel found problems that can't be solved in a field of math called “typographical number theory.” But his theorems were so strong they impacted all of mathematics forever. Not only could “typographical number theory” not solve the problems it set out to solve, Gödel proved that these problems were not possible to solve in any way and under any conditions.

The problems I've described here similarly cannot be fixed. There can exist nothing that operates like a government which can be so constrained as to not become a dictatorship. There are infinitely many ways to write rules that prevent it, and infinitely many ways to circumvent these rules.

Of course neither of those theoretical vulnerabilities matter much anymore, since we watched a proof-by-example exploitation executed in real time. But when the time comes to rebuild, you will be told that the system can be constrained, that it can be fixed, that we can do better. This is a lie. The logical proof of this sitting right on this page. Any system that cannot be abandoned at will is a dictatorship waiting to happen.

But there is good news, and that good news is that same logic works in reverse (though I will leave the formality to someone else and present it as a corollary). Any system with the complexity to handle humans has infinitely many vulnerabilities that allow people to escape from their constraints. Ultimately, all social systems are optional. The question is only the level of work necessary to execute this option.

Oh, you might say, but this just means you have to infinitely abandon systems to retain freedom. Yes, that may be true. But there's an evolutionary advantage to cooperation so there's evolutionary pressure to not be a malicious actor. Thus, a malicious actor being able to compromise the whole system is likely to be a rare event, especially if there are other controls in place. (There are also other ways to mitigate this threat that we'll go in to in another seciton.) Compromising a complex system can be a lot of work, so the first thing a malicious actor would want to do is preserve that work. They would want to lock you in. The most important objective for a malicious actor compromising a system would be to violate that one metasystemic constraint, to make the system mandatory, or all of their work goes out the window as everyone leaves.

And, perhaps, now you understand why borders exist, why fascists are obsessed with maintaining categories like gender, race, ethnicity, etc. This is why even Democrats like Newsom are on board with putting houseless people in concentration camps. And this is why the most important thing anarchists promote is the ability to choose not to be part of any of that.

The implications are interesting enough when we apply this to systems like capitalism or national governments, but there are other very interesting implications when applied to systems like race or gender. Like, as a cis man the only way I can be free to express and explore my own masculinity is if the masculinity I participate in is one which allows anyone the freedom to leave. Then I have an obligation to recognize the validity of nom-masculine trans identity as a necessary component of my own. If I fail to do this, then I trap myself in masculinity and allow the system to control me rather than me to be a free participant in the system.

But if it's OK to escape but not enter, that's it's own restriction that constrains the freedom to leave. It creates a barrier that keeps people in by the fear that they cannot return. So in order for me to be free in my cis masculine identity, I must accept non-masculine trans identities as they are and accept detransitioning as also valid.

But I also need to accept trans-masc identities because restricting entry to my masculinity means non-consensually constraining other identities. If every group imposes an exclusion against others coming in, that, by default, makes it impossible to leave every other group. This is just a description of how national borders work to trap people within systems, even if a nation itself allows people to “freely” leave.

So then, a free masculinity is one which recognizes all configurations of trans identities as valid and welcomes, if not celebrates, people who transition as affirmations of the freedom of their own identity (even for those who never feel a reason to exercise that same freedom).

But you don't need to accept the trap of authoritarian masculinity on logic alone, the proof is right there in male influencers like Andrew Tate and their followers. These dipshits get so obsessed with gatekeeping they don't realize that the gates they're tending keep them in, that the more walls they put up to protect their privilege, the smaller their identity can be. They huddle in tiny pens, terrified of crossing imaginary bounds that they imposed on themselves.

They have built their own torture chambers and locked themselves inside, and for what? They turn themselves into dragons, hoarding what they see as valuable while repressing every emotion including joy. And if they let themselves experience joy, they would, perhaps, realize that all these privileges are inconsistent with it. They might, perhaps, recognize that they have built up these privileges so they don't have to admit that their suffering and fear are not, in fact, admirable. They might have to face the fact that they have lived lives that are deeply pathetic, might have to face the fact that only empathy can give one access to deep satisfaction, might have to face the fact that they have lived their whole lives on a treadmill, going nowhere.

But I assume that they won't ever do that, because to do so would force them to face the enormity of the emotional debt, the pain and suffering they have inflicted on the world, and those are big feelings. It's far easier to hide in a hole, forever alone, making up silly rules to keep everyone inside scared and keep everyone outside from seeing in.

Well kept borders on any system trap everyone, those on the inside and on the out. Then we must add a corollary to our constraint:

A free system can only be kept free if one can freely leave; the freedom of a system is defendant on the existence of other free systems.

Or, to adapt an MLK quote:

Un-freedom anywhere is a threat to freedom everywhere.

The most irritating type of white person may look at this and say, “oh, so then why can't I be <not white>?” Except that the critique of transratial identities has never been “that's not allowed” and has always been “this person didn't do the work.” If that person did the work, they would understand that the question doesn't make sense based on how race is constructed. That person might understand that race, especially whiteness, is more fluid than they at first understood. They might realize that whiteness is often chosen at the exclusion of other racialized identities. They would, perhaps, realize that to actually align with any racialized identity, they would first have to understand the boot of whiteness on their neck, have to recognize the need to destroy this oppressive identity for their own future liberation. The best, perhaps only, way to do this would be to use the privilege afforded by that identity to destroy it, and in doing so would either destroy their own privilege or destroy the system of privilege. The must either become themselves completely ratialized or destroy the system of race itself such being “transracial” wouldn't really make sense anymore.

But that most annoying of white person would, of course, not do any such work. Nevertheless, one hopes that they may recognize the paradox that they are trapped by their white identity, forced forever by it to do the work of maintaining it. And such is true for all privileged identities, where privilege is only maintained through restrictions where these restrictions ultimately become walls that imprison both the privileged and the marginalized in a mutually reinforcing hell that can only be escaped by destroying the system of privilege itself.

Let's go back to the “fuzzing” metaphor. The point of security testing is to find ways to intentionally violate system constraints in ways that threaten the viability of the system. Tests are often prioritized by how great of a threat they are to viability. Being able to delete a patient record in a medical system is extremely bad, but not nearly as bad as being able to expose all those patient records or modify them. There are occasionally single, critical, vulnerabilities that allow an attacker to completely compromise the system.

And there we have it. The most important constraint an authoritarian system has is the constraint against leaving. The most important thing about an authoritarian system is that it absolutely, under all conditions, MUST be mandatory. To violate this constraint is to fundamentally break the control of the system.

Now we return to our earlier question, but restated a little differently: what is the fitness function we use to evolve a system that can find and exploit a vulnerability in an authoritarian system so that we can escape? The fitness function now presents itself:

Maximize the number of people you can help escape from the dominant system, and keep them out of the dominant system, while these people are still able to leave your system.

This doesn't exactly give us a clear solution, but it does restate the problem in a useful way. Oh, but there are three things we need to do. We need a fitness function, we need a recombination (“breeding” is the technical term, but I'm going to try to avoid that) function, and we need an initial population. We have one of these. Next we'll talk about the other two.

alleged flaw in the Constitution of the United States

^{Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)}

Kairos (work in progress)

2025-10-23 20:07:04

Through the Looking Glass, Without a Pill

In world of The Matrix, we see a resistance movement already in progress. In the Animatrix we see the system they're trying to escape as it's being built. But we never see the first escape; we see how the system is constructed within the mind and how we can manipulate the rules while inside of it, but we never see how to pivot out of it. For those of us who feel the wrongness of the various hierarchies of the world, itching in our minds, this is the missing piece we're all looking for.

We are trapped, like an inverted Neo, fully aware of the system, fully able to see the code underneath, but unable to escape as it crashes around us… and even if we got out, where would we go? Where is our Zion?

There happens to be a few properties of systems that are useful to know. The first is that no sufficiently complex system of rules can be both consistent and complete. This fact can be applied to legal systems. There will be gaps that miss things which a system wants to prevent, and there will likely be inconsistencies that make some rules impossible to enforce or the enforcement of those rules violate other rules.

The other useful thing to know is that recursion has a tendency to break systems. To understand the shape of a system that supports recursion is to begin to be able to think about strategies that would be useful to break out of that system.

This is a work in progress. You are reading a draft of something, perhaps a zine, being written in real time. As it develops, expect it to change. It will start raw, and hopefully be polished. Sections will be added. Sections will be moved and rewritten. When it is complete, this page will be edited to reflect it's status as complete.

Part of this is a conversation. Feedback, critiques, extensions, may all be added in to the work. But, as you will start to understand as the writing progresses, a finished text is not the ultimate goal. There is something larger that requires your help.

The myth of the hero clouds all of our minds. We look for a savior. We imagine a magnificent other who will liberate us. This storytelling modality dominates mass media. Our minds are imprisoned as much within meta-myth of The Hero's Journey as in the system that infinitely replicates variations of it for popular consumption.

But no one will save us. Not some politician, some revolutionary, some hero. Not you, not me. Only we can save us. Only us, only together.

Imagine now, what would it feel like to be able to drop out of this system? To drop out of capitalism? What would it feel like to escape? Imagine you could just live somewhere, work a few hours a week, and spend the rest of your time being alive. Imagine a place that's separate from “the real world” where everything was radically different.

Some of us have tasted it, organizing with comrades, building shared space. Sometimes we can feel it's embryonic form. I lived on a commune for a while. It was a place where people who couldn't function under capitalism could escape for a while. It had it's share of problems, it wasn't what we want to build, but it showed me what was possible.

The thing that made it all possible was that it was legally a church. There are holes in the code, bugs that cannot be fixed. What can't be patched, the system protects itself by convincing us not to look.

[Special thanks for editing, text suggestions, and feedback to…@CorvidCrone@kolektiva.social@JeanieBurrell@mstdn.social@magnus@venner.network@sidereal@kolektiva.social@tiotasram@kolektiva.social@unchartedworlds@scicomm.xyz@ghouston@mamot.fr

Please let me know if I've missed you, put the wrong name in, added your handle by mistake, or if you'd like your handle to be modified or removed for other reasons. I'm also happy to add in ko-fi or other donation links for editors and contributors.]

Let's return briefly to the central problem of government commons management (at least as a monolithic systems). We're going to restate it a bit differently here so that we can walk through a way to mitigate it. Let's start by returning to the basic forms of domination as outlined in Dawn of Everything:

1. control over violence (sovereignty)
2. control over information (bureaucracy)
3. and charismatic competition (politics)

Government as a commons manager aligns with the second form of domination. Any organization that manages the commons has the power to restrict the commons. In order to keep such an entity from doing that, there may be restrictions placed on the organization. But whomever maintains and enforces the list of those restrictions could simply take over the system and bend it to their will, So there must be restrictions placed on the oversight group. This continues infinitely, thus there can be no real oversight. This is not a new problem, it was stated a thousand years ago as “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” (Who will watch the watchmen?) But it dates back almost 400 years earlier still to concepts brought up by Plato in some of the earliest political writings.

Although this question points to the root cause of oppression and authoritarian collapse multiple times through history, it's largely ignored, suppressed, or treated as a curiosity. It is considered unanswerable, and thus rejected before consideration. In the previous section we solved this problem by inverting authority. This gave us the option to leave any system, which could then collapse it, if required. But it would be better if we could find a solution that doesn't risk systemic collapse.

Fortunately, there are additional steps we can take to mitigate the risk of facilitating coordination turning into a system of domination. In computer security, we think about the concept of “attack surface.” In essence, the more stuff a program can do, the more things can go wrong. The more complex a system, the harder it is to implement in a safe way. To reduce risk, we recommend minimizing the specific things any given application can do. We can, then, chain together small applications to make a larger application.

Rather than having to understand the whole system all at once, we can analyze each component as an individual piece, with specific focus interfaces. The more we can simplify interfaces, the fewer scenarios we need to analyze to determine the security of an application. An application that can do everything has an infinite attack surface and thus can never be secured. An application that can only do one very specific thing may be possible to not only secure, but to mathematically prove that security.

This is roughly the reason behind the concept of “microservices.” These are small and reusable systems that can be more easily understood than a large complex system. We can leverage a similar concept. In fact, this isn't even a new idea. It predates computers entirely.

The majority of the Netherlands is below sea level. Over the course of hundreds of years, the Dutch have reclaimed land from the sea and kept it dry using a series of pumps and dikes. Very early on people realized that water management was far too important to entrust in “normal” government. Political incompetence could wipe out entire towns. So, almost a thousand years ago, they created a distributed micro-bureaucracy with the sole purpose of managing water.

Because this micro-bureaucracy is extremely limited in scope, because it only exists to managed one shared resource, it can't really be leveraged for other power. But since it's outside of the normal government, it also can't be held hostage for other political projects (as Republicans hold SNAP and Social Security hostage to achieve their goals in US politics).

In the last section, we introduced a structure that included 4 such micro-bureaucracies:

• the dispensaryto provide consumable goods,
• the library, to provide access to shared durable goods,
• the works committee, to build, (own,) and maintain infrastructure such as housing, and
• the services committee, to identify and provide services, such as child care, for its members.

Using to the VSM (that we discussed earlier), these micro-bureaucracies would all be operational units of the social organizations (affinity groups, collectives, clusters, and federations) that we described in the last section. These organizations would themselves be systems with their own metasystemic functions (and the ability to autonomously create subsystems), while interactions between these systems would be managed at by metasystemic functionality at the level of the social organization.

Let's first talk through these micro-bureaucracies in a bit more detail, then talk through systemic interactions. Remember that these are only suggestions. Nothing that follows is to be taken dogmatically. These are based on my own organizing experience, historical research, and other sources. All of these have been filtered through my own perception. This list may not be complete. It divisions may be wrong for your situation. There may be any number of reasons these are not optimal. They should be considered a starting point for anyone who doesn't already have a better idea.

There can be no perfect recipe for every situation. You will always be the ultimate authority on what is best for you. Take what follows for what it's worth.

The Dispensary

A dispensary provides consumable goods. It can start simply as a shared pantry, stocked with the products of guerrilla gardening or food preservation by canning or pickling. It can be foraging, processing, storing, and sharing horse chestnuts for soap and acorns for flour to make acorn grits and bread. It can be as easy as shared bulk purchases from restaurant supply or warehouse store, or as crust-punk as rotating dumpster run shifts. It could even start as small regular potluck or shared dinners. It could simply be an agreement between members to volunteer with a local chapter of Food Not Bombs on a rotating basis.

As your network grows, so can the dispensary system. A federation of four or five covens could start a coop for themselves. A federation of 20 may even be able to open a storefront.

As much as people would like to live their daily lives without inflicting suffering on ourselves and others, capitalism cannot seem to provide for the needs of people without committing atrocities. From sweatshops to toxic byproducts, union busting death squads, unnecessary packaging, micro-plastics, and landfills full of fast fashion, simple participation is a minefield of harm.

One reason many of us wish to escape is so that we can live our lives without inflicting suffering on others. Since no similar objective can exist within capitalist markets, operating a collectively owned dispensary as a coop style business for non-members offers a harm-reduction opportunity that capitalist markets cannot fulfill. We can do what the market cannot: offer products that people can buy without having blood on their hands.

Taking notes from the successes and failures of the Russian revolution, a group of anarchists (including Nestor Makhno, a Ukrainian anarchist militant who was critical in defeating the Tzar's army and who later also fought the Red Army) wrote a document titled “Organizational Platform of the Libertarian Communists.” This document came to be known as “The Platform.” It remains one of the most important first-hand revolutionary documents, outlining a clear revolutionary plan. The Platform identifies the problems of production and consumption as core to the success of a revolution:

Without doubt, from the first day of the revolution, the farms will not provide all the products vital to the life of the population. At the same time, peasants have an abundance which the towns lack.

Within the capitalist system, production, acquisition, transportation, and distribution (logistics) are all handled by markets. As we move away from this system, the dispensary system (perhaps with the support of the services committee) will need to address production and transportation logistics. Starting within the capitalist market provides a low-risk proving ground from which we can iterate and improve. If a social organization can operate a business within capitalism while planning beyond it, there's a good chance it will be able to transcend its capitalist roots.

The technology that made the short supply chain-based capitalism, which dominates the world today, also makes capitalism itself irrelevant. By attacking this problem as a swarm, we will come up with multiple competing solutions. Good solutions will merge or replace bad ones and the best solutions will spread across the federation. Like the open source software movement, we may, and probably will, end up with multiple systems. This is not a problem as long as those systems can interoperate with each other.

The Library

A library is a shared set of objects, often (but not always) located in a specific repository. Americans are most familiar with municipal library systems where the objects are books and occasionally other media. The simplest library for us to build is a tool library. A library consists of inventory and a way to track that inventory.

The simplest library can be ma e up of tools owned by members and a simple spreadsheet to track them. A library could create a shared bank account for purchasing new tools for the library. Libraries will also maintain objects that belong to the collective.

While give-away or free-stores exist and do work in some situations (they are not uncommon in the Netherlands), these can be exclusionary in the US context. They can be seen as “charity” or “for people less fortunate” rather than a shared resource. While a library can choose to operate in exactly the same way as a free-store (not tracking what comes in or goes out), the conceptual framework of a library is more aligned with American sensibilities (outside of existing punk and anarchist spaces).

A library also doesn't need to be specific to a given organization. This is something that can be organized first outside of a social organization, or something that could be managed by a social organization but have open membership. There's no reason not to have a tool library shared with your neighbors, even if they don't share your politics. There's no reason not to share a media library with your friends (you probably already share books).

If you're wanting to convince people that things could be better, there is no argument more powerful than proof.

The Works Committee

Works Committee is responsible for identifying, acquiring or producing, and managing infrastructure needed for the operation of the organization and the lives of its members. The mechanism by which it does this is up to the social organization. Management of infrastructure such as vehicles or housing may be handed off to the library system once acquired.

The Works Committee is responsible for organizing work parties to maintain infrastructure. One easy example is a garden party where organization members design and implement a garden either on property they own or via guerrilla gardening. The Works Committee would then be responsible for regular maintenance, harvest, and delivery of goods (harvest, processing, etc) in coordination with the dispensary.

In most cities horse chestnuts (buckeyes) trees are common in parks. The nuts contain chemicals that can be used as soap. Four of these crushed and thrown in a sock can be used in place of commercial detergent. In the fall, these nuts are easy to collect from sidewalks and parks.In the spring and summer, their leaves can be picked and processed into hand soap. Many other soap producing plants are common, and invasive in much of the US, such as English ivy. A works committee could organize foraging and processing parties to make things for the dispensary.

The Services Committee

The two most critical permanent purposes of Services Committees are to coordinate leadership of regular meetings, either by a specific appointed member or by rotating ordination, and to organize collective defense. There may also be a third critical service if the social organization is also a legal entity: accounting. The committee must ensure taxes are filed on time and correctly, that any shared expenses are paid, and that all money has been accounted for.

Beyond these, the Services Committee identifies the needs and capabilities of its members to provide services. The Services Committee should operate on the principal “From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs.”

The most important goal of any entity that wishes to continue to exist is reproduction of itself. Therefore, the most important objective of the organization must be supporting the reproductive labor of the collective, especially supporting members with children.

For organizations with children, rotating childcare eases the burden on families, making the organization more stable, and setting an example for members too young to start their own organizations. Some members may have technical skills and can provide tech support or automation of tedious tasks performed by others. Those with mechanical skills may be able to repair objects for The Library.

Within an urban area, municipal services take care of many things that rural people have to take care of themselves. Trash collection and disposal may make sense for a rural organization where it wouldn't be imagined by an urban coven outside of a disaster.

As an affinity group grows to a collective or federation, new services will become available. At each coordination level, it becomes more and more important to provide a mechanism to discover capabilities and protect people with specific skills from being overburdened.

A Services Committee of a large enough federation could provide much more complex services that further free it from the constraints of capitalism. Insurance pools, banking via credit unions, and other services can all be organized by a Services Committee of a big enough federation.

As with the Dispensary, services may also be externalized to offer things unavailable under capitalism. A services committee may decide to take on organizing protests, gatherings, or other events where other community organizations are not taking on the task. The Services Committee may also identify external organizations that organization members can coordinate with to fulfill organizational objectives and fill operational gaps.

Systemic Interactions

Each of these operational units, these micro-bureaucracies, exist to fulfill specific objectives that align with the greater objective of the organization. In cybernetic terms, the (system 5) identity of each of the above organizations aligns with the (system 5) identity of the social organization.

As described in each section, these systems have a lot of interaction opportunities. But they can also conflict. There is a set amount of time that members have, so it's important to keep some kind of shared calendar to make sure actions of one don't conflict with others. There may be shared money, which could be claimed by one or another group, so they also may need to keep a shared budget.

The very most basic mechanism to support this type of coordination is a regular (perhaps weekly) meeting. Each operation unit gives a brief report on what they've done, a high level status of anything worth noting (low inventory, some blockers, etc), and any requests they have (money, time, etc). This must be kept short. Humans tend to lose focus after 90 minutes, so meetings over that tend to rapidly lose productivity. Most things should be handled locally, so there shouldn't be a lot to report. Anything beyond a high level report back must be something that requires action. Including the action as part of a request can make sure everyone understands what's being asked.

In the next section we will describe the metasystem in greater detail, including some recommended meeting outlines and structures.

Organisational Platform of the Libertarian Communists

Dielo Truda (Workers’ Cause) Organisational Platform of the Libertarian Communists 1926 First published France 1926. First Irish edition published by the...

^{The Anarchist Library}

Kairos (work in progress)

2025-11-17 12:11:49

A Fitness Function for Liberation

The system is dying, consuming itself and everything else to keep going. Even though we all see this plainly, we can't seem to change things because the system keeps adapting. The system is thinking, and it has the ability to out think any individual human. But now we have the tools to build an adaptive system, a genetic algorithm, to move faster than the system can adapt.

Now we return again to where we started. We need to escape capitalism. If we can build the new system inside the shell of the old, then we can pivot out. But what do we do to build such a system? We will see in a bit that the answer somewhat implied by the question.

Let's go back a bit though. We're trapped, this much we know. But can we describe how we're trapped, or what we should do about it? The classic response to such traps, to authoritarian overreach, was to establish some kind of bill or declaration of “rights.” This is a list of supposed restrictions on governmental power. Of course these restrictions are almost always ignored, sometimes without ever being enacted in the first place (such as “Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen” from the French Revolution that was ignored until hundreds of years later).

But, as Graeber and Wengrow pointed out in The Dawn of Everything, a lot of freedoms really just boil down to some variation or incomplete specification of the three fundamental freedoms:

(1) the freedom to move away or relocate from one’s surroundings; (2) the freedom to ignore or disobey commands issued by others; and (3) the freedom to shape entirely new social realities, or shift back and forth between different ones.

None of these freedoms are fully recognized by any existing government, and perhaps they can't be. The very nature of government and national sovereignty necessarily limits these, especially the third. If we invert our perspective, we see that the entirety of the BITE model is basically just a list of ways systems of authoritarian control violate these freedoms.

But if we change our orientation away from individual freedom and constraint and towards systemic constraint, we can actually resolve these freedoms all back to one single constraint. This one constraint determines the difference between a free system and an authoritarian one:

For a system to be free, participation must be optional for all members.

We can immediately see that freedom to move is one type of participation and freedom to disobey is another. A system is a description of relationships, so exiting one system necessarily requires entering another. One can't exit all systems any more than one could create an object that's not made of any sort of matter. A system is defined by its participation, thus to not-participate is to exit. To exit a system is to create or enter another system, thus the third freedom is also contained within this constraint.

It can be hard to believe that one single constraint can really be the difference. What about all those rights. Surely this one single constraint couldn't take an authoritarian system and suddenly make it free, or a system with a large number of rights suddenly authoritarian. Let's illustrate the difference that this one single constraint can make by two examples.

The rules of Simon Says are maximally authoritarian. You must perform any action ordered, with the only restriction that the authority must say “Simon says” first. Were you forced to stay in this system, it would be the most despotic autocracy possible, completely subject to the wills of one person. This is one step away from literal slavery. But it's not. It's a silly game. The difference is that you can leave at any time.

Let's flip this and imagine a room. During a specific period of time you will have absolute control over everything in this room. In this room you have total freedom. This is not even the limited freedom, the coordinated freedom, the compromising freedom of civil society. You could, without consequence, perform any action you wish in this room. You could say anything, destroy or steal any object, order any individual to perform any action, kill any person in the room with you and take anything they own. This is the sovereign freedom, the absolute freedom, of dictators and kings. The only restriction is that you are not allowed to leave the room while you have this freedom. In fact, you really only have this level of freedom because the room is actually empty other than for you. I am, of course, talking about solitary confinement, a form of internationally recognized torture common in US prisons (including against children).

But, surely, if you simply have enough protections, a complete enough bill of rights, you don't really need this constraint. Surely, with the right structure, with the right checks and balances, with the right list it must be possible to preserve freedom without including this one requirement that people be allowed to exit the system.

No, and I can prove it.

1. There will exist actors in a system who will wish to take advantage of others. Evolution drives survival and one strategy for increasing survival in an altruistic society is to become a parasite.
2. Expecting exploitative dynamics, a system needs to have a set of rules to manage exploitation.
   
   1. If the set of rules is static it will lack the requisite variety necessary to manage the infinite possible behavior of humans so the system will fail.
   2. If the system is dynamic then it must have a rule set about how it's own rules are updated. This would make the system recursively defined. If you can change a system from within that same system, then you add to it an enumeration of all known mathematical axioms. Any system that can contain mathematics is at least as complex as mathematics. Any system at least as complex as mathematics is necessarily either incomplete or inconsistent (by Gödel's incompleteness theorems).
      
      1. If the system is incomplete, then constraints can be evaded which then allow a malicious agent to seize control of the system and update the rules for their own benefit.
      2. If constraints are incomplete, then a malicious agent can take advantage of others within the system.

      
      

   
   

3. Therefore, no social system can possibly protect freedom unless there exists a single metasystemic constraint (that the system must be optional) allowing for the system to be abandoned when compromised.

Interestingly enough, Gödel is known to have identified an “inner contradiction” within the US constitution in 1947 (called Gödel's loophole). This contradiction could allow the country to be turned into a dictatorship. Following from the logic we've thus far already explored, there are two such vulnerabilities:

1. The logic of the constraints on the system are defined within the context of the system that is intended to be constrained and all constraints within the system are mutable.
2. Power over the constraint logic enforcement mechanism is within the system, thus the system can fail to or choose not to enforce constraint logic.

The first of these matches closely with the most popular argument that this refers to “Article 5.” Gödel is known to have only explained the issue to Einstein, and the two agreed to not divulge the vulnerability. This is known today as “security through obscurity.” It violates a well established cryptographic principal called “Kerckhoffs's principle,” which was restated by a contemporary of Gödel, Claude Shannon, as “the enemy knows the system.”

Gödel found problems that can't be solved in a field of math called “typographical number theory.” But his theorems were so strong they impacted all of mathematics forever. Not only could “typographical number theory” not solve the problems it set out to solve, Gödel proved that these problems were not possible to solve in any way and under any conditions.

The problems I've described here similarly cannot be fixed. There can exist nothing that operates like a government which can be so constrained as to not become a dictatorship. There are infinitely many ways to write rules that prevent it, and infinitely many ways to circumvent these rules.

Of course neither of those theoretical vulnerabilities matter much anymore, since we watched a proof-by-example exploitation executed in real time. But when the time comes to rebuild, you will be told that the system can be constrained, that it can be fixed, that we can do better. This is a lie. The logical proof of this sitting right on this page. Any system that cannot be abandoned at will is a dictatorship waiting to happen.

But there is good news, and that good news is that same logic works in reverse (though I will leave the formality to someone else and present it as a corollary). Any system with the complexity to handle humans has infinitely many vulnerabilities that allow people to escape from their constraints. Ultimately, all social systems are optional. The question is only the level of work necessary to execute this option.

Oh, you might say, but this just means you have to infinitely abandon systems to retain freedom. Yes, that may be true. But there's an evolutionary advantage to cooperation so there's evolutionary pressure to not be a malicious actor. Thus, a malicious actor being able to compromise the whole system is likely to be a rare event, especially if there are other controls in place. (There are also other ways to mitigate this threat that we'll go in to in another seciton.) Compromising a complex system can be a lot of work, so the first thing a malicious actor would want to do is preserve that work. They would want to lock you in. The most important objective for a malicious actor compromising a system would be to violate that one metasystemic constraint, to make the system mandatory, or all of their work goes out the window as everyone leaves.

And, perhaps, now you understand why borders exist, why fascists are obsessed with maintaining categories like gender, race, ethnicity, etc. This is why even Democrats like Newsom are on board with putting houseless people in concentration camps. And this is why the most important thing anarchists promote is the ability to choose not to be part of any of that.

The implications are interesting enough when we apply this to systems like capitalism or national governments, but there are other very interesting implications when applied to systems like race or gender. Like, as a cis man the only way I can be free to express and explore my own masculinity is if the masculinity I participate in is one which allows anyone the freedom to leave. Then I have an obligation to recognize the validity of nom-masculine trans identity as a necessary component of my own. If I fail to do this, then I trap myself in masculinity and allow the system to control me rather than me to be a free participant in the system.

But if it's OK to escape but not enter, that's it's own restriction that constrains the freedom to leave. It creates a barrier that keeps people in by the fear that they cannot return. So in order for me to be free in my cis masculine identity, I must accept non-masculine trans identities as they are and accept detransitioning as also valid.

But I also need to accept trans-masc identities because restricting entry to my masculinity means non-consensually constraining other identities. If every group imposes an exclusion against others coming in, that, by default, makes it impossible to leave every other group. This is just a description of how national borders work to trap people within systems, even if a nation itself allows people to “freely” leave.

So then, a free masculinity is one which recognizes all configurations of trans identities as valid and welcomes, if not celebrates, people who transition as affirmations of the freedom of their own identity (even for those who never feel a reason to exercise that same freedom).

But you don't need to accept the trap of authoritarian masculinity on logic alone, the proof is right there in male influencers like Andrew Tate and their followers. These dipshits get so obsessed with gatekeeping they don't realize that the gates they're tending keep them in, that the more walls they put up to protect their privilege, the smaller their identity can be. They huddle in tiny pens, terrified of crossing imaginary bounds that they imposed on themselves.

They have built their own torture chambers and locked themselves inside, and for what? They turn themselves into dragons, hoarding what they see as valuable while repressing every emotion including joy. And if they let themselves experience joy, they would, perhaps, realize that all these privileges are inconsistent with it. They might, perhaps, recognize that they have built up these privileges so they don't have to admit that their suffering and fear are not, in fact, admirable. They might have to face the fact that they have lived lives that are deeply pathetic, might have to face the fact that only empathy can give one access to deep satisfaction, might have to face the fact that they have lived their whole lives on a treadmill, going nowhere.

But I assume that they won't ever do that, because to do so would force them to face the enormity of the emotional debt, the pain and suffering they have inflicted on the world, and those are big feelings. It's far easier to hide in a hole, forever alone, making up silly rules to keep everyone inside scared and keep everyone outside from seeing in.

Well kept borders on any system trap everyone, those on the inside and on the out. Then we must add a corollary to our constraint:

A free system can only be kept free if one can freely leave; the freedom of a system is defendant on the existence of other free systems.

Or, to adapt an MLK quote:

Un-freedom anywhere is a threat to freedom everywhere.

The most irritating type of white person may look at this and say, “oh, so then why can't I be <not white>?” Except that the critique of transratial identities has never been “that's not allowed” and has always been “this person didn't do the work.” If that person did the work, they would understand that the question doesn't make sense based on how race is constructed. That person might understand that race, especially whiteness, is more fluid than they at first understood. They might realize that whiteness is often chosen at the exclusion of other racialized identities. They would, perhaps, realize that to actually align with any racialized identity, they would first have to understand the boot of whiteness on their neck, have to recognize the need to destroy this oppressive identity for their own future liberation. The best, perhaps only, way to do this would be to use the privilege afforded by that identity to destroy it, and in doing so would either destroy their own privilege or destroy the system of privilege. The must either become themselves completely ratialized or destroy the system of race itself such being “transracial” wouldn't really make sense anymore.

But that most annoying of white person would, of course, not do any such work. Nevertheless, one hopes that they may recognize the paradox that they are trapped by their white identity, forced forever by it to do the work of maintaining it. And such is true for all privileged identities, where privilege is only maintained through restrictions where these restrictions ultimately become walls that imprison both the privileged and the marginalized in a mutually reinforcing hell that can only be escaped by destroying the system of privilege itself.

Let's go back to the “fuzzing” metaphor. The point of security testing is to find ways to intentionally violate system constraints in ways that threaten the viability of the system. Tests are often prioritized by how great of a threat they are to viability. Being able to delete a patient record in a medical system is extremely bad, but not nearly as bad as being able to expose all those patient records or modify them. There are occasionally single, critical, vulnerabilities that allow an attacker to completely compromise the system.

And there we have it. The most important constraint an authoritarian system has is the constraint against leaving. The most important thing about an authoritarian system is that it absolutely, under all conditions, MUST be mandatory. To violate this constraint is to fundamentally break the control of the system.

Now we return to our earlier question, but restated a little differently: what is the fitness function we use to evolve a system that can find and exploit a vulnerability in an authoritarian system so that we can escape? The fitness function now presents itself:

Maximize the number of people you can help escape from the dominant system, and keep them out of the dominant system, while these people are still able to leave your system.

This doesn't exactly give us a clear solution, but it does restate the problem in a useful way. Oh, but there are three things we need to do. We need a fitness function, we need a recombination (“breeding” is the technical term, but I'm going to try to avoid that) function, and we need an initial population. We have one of these. Next we'll talk about the other two.

alleged flaw in the Constitution of the United States

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