This is an analysis I did back in 2022 (before I joined substack), of the political economy of the pandemic. It is not a complete analysis, and was only intended, at the time, to highlight the role of Dominant Capital in extracting power out of catastrophe. Some of the facts and figures are out-dated at this point.

1. The Science

The Vaccine

While it is important to try and separate the science of Covid-19 Vaccines from the business of Covid-19 Vaccines, this is no simple task, since the science is bought and paid for by both Public and Private Sector money and many of the scientists that developed the vaccines also used the science to position themselves favourably as CEOs and patents-holders, enclosing access to the science so they could earn rents later on. mRNA vaccines spent about 5 decades in development hell. I mean this quite literally, since there were lots of fights over patenting issues, companies set up to try and profit from research, companies failing, companies being bought, a kind of musical chairs of company founders/scientists/researchers jumping ship to larger firms. Accusations of misconduct, both scientifically and socially… It’s an entire story all of it’s own.

But around the turn of the decade (2010), 2 important things happened
1) UPenn sold exclusive patent rights for an mRNA process that resulted in Pseudodrine (which prevented the host body from seeing the foreign mRNA as an antagonist), for $300,000 to a small Lab-Reagent company now called CellScript, who have since made millions in sublicensing this patent to companies like Moderna, and
2) from the early 1980’s until 2012 Canadian Pieter Cullis and his team of researchers at University of British Colombia, developed Lipid Nano Particle tech, which forms the basis of the delivery platform for mRNA vaccines. By 2012, they had managed to develop the technology enough that mass production was possible. And this is when big money investors became interested. Cullis has started several small companies, and one of these is now privately valued at around $13mil, thanks to investment rounds based on ongoing research into his LNP tech.

All of this meant that the day after the SARS-COV-2 Virus Genome was made publicly available, companies like Moderna and BionTech were immediately ready with their vaccines to begin testing. They did not want to waste any time in profiting from the global pandemic, and whoever made it to market first with a proven Vaccine, was going to rake in Billions in international purchasing contracts.

Preparation and forewarning

Virtually every science writer and journalist, at some point, had written a piece like “It’s not if, but when” with regards to a pandemic being an existential threat to humanity. I had read so many of these by 2018, that I included it in a podcast episode I did with a friend about existential risks. And yet, studies have found that not a single country, rich or poor, was prepared when the pandemic hit.

Areas of research that were identified at the start of the pandemic as vital were impacts of quarantine, case and contact isolation, hand hygiene, face masks, public education about personal protection, therapeutics (antivirals and antibodies), and future vaccines. And these studies were rapidly conducted, and the findings were rapidly processed and collated and disseminated.

The first 6 months of the pandemic saw 100,000 research papers published in relation to Covid-19. (although estimates of the first 10,000 showed that only about 40% were original research, and the other 60% were mostly opinion pieces) It was seriously an unprecedented achievement for science.

But the result was a rollout of mismatched and counterproductive government and business policies that got so bad, that eventually, the only solution was lockdowns. This is the surface reading of lockdowns, but a long-view of the lockdowns shows that lockdowns led to stimulus spending, which predominantly benefitted a very small portion of the private sector, very disproportionately (1% of businesses reaped 25% of the $700bn reward) and the stimulus spending that went to households, triggered a spending frenzy that massively boosted the Consumer Discretionary sector, and the IT and Communications Sectors. So while it would be unwise to attribute the lockdowns as a deliberate decision to assist Dominant Capital, it is not far fetched to say that poor governance, poor planning, and poor readiness, allowed for the optimal conditions for Capitalists to pounce on a crisis, as the have often done in the past.

2. Dominant Pharmaceutical Capital and their differential accumulation throughout the pandemic

Looking at the Pharmaceutical Industry through the CasP framework, we can see a number of very telling indicators showing how its Dominant players Accumulated Differentially.

1st, Mergers and Acquisitions increased 17% in the first half of 2020, which is a massive increase in breadth given the downturn taken by much of the rest of the economy.

2nd, Strategic Sabotage in the form of Patenting, saw a 6.3% rise in BioTech and a 10.2% rise in Pharmaceuticals. So not only were they consolidating like crazy, they were also enclosing the access rights to a life-saving technology.

3rd, Depth of Capital Accumulation was also increased during this time, as Market Dominance and desperation by those with less power allowed the Pharma giants to vary their prices by region, and gouge the international market to extract as much profit from the situation as they could get away with

4th, The Direction and Pace of Industry was decidedly skewed toward broadening and deepening power. Vaccine Production facilities were largely outside of the regions where they were most needed, and this did not change, and has not changed, because to do so would reduce the power now held by the producer to get away with the 3rd point made above. From 2022, plans are being made to begin production in India and South Africa of mRNA vaccines, but this process has taken 2 years to come to fruition, and developing the production facilities up to par is going to take an additional several months. These delays, again served to strengthen the power-base of Dominant Capital.

5th, Weeding out Competition was very subversive throughout the pandemic, very specifically in the form of Media bias being propagated toward the Chinese Sinopharm vaccine. By painting China as the cause of the pandemic, and the source of the virus, western media was able to influence the majority of nations into rejecting the Sinopharm Vaccine in favour of Western Vaccines. With the result being that of all the big vaccine producers, Sinopharm was the only one that failed to accumulate capital at a net positive rate throughout the pandemic.

3. The Rest of the Dominant Capital Market and their differential accumulation throughout the pandemic

2020 was a banger year for Dominant Capital. The Financial Times did a breakdown list of “the top 100 winners of the pandemic“, and USA Today did a roundup showing that Billionaires added almost a trillion dollars to their combined income in 2020. Below, you can see the infographic of the big winners, dominated by Big Tech, Communications, Healthcare, and Consumer Discretionary.

It is important to note here that the same tactics employed by Pharma’s Dominant Capital, was also employed by the rest of the Dominant Capital playing field.

Mergers and acquisitions were down globally, but kicked back up in North America in the 3rd and 4th quarters of 2020, and as lockdowns were ended and economies reopened, a global supply chain crisis gave dominant capital all the excuse they needed to begin inflating their prices as they swung into a depth phase.
To what extent their actions can be attributed to an aversion to lockdowns, I feel is probably up for debate, given that there were a great many that benefitted from the lockdowns then, and will likely benefit again. The Industry that is most deeply hit by lockdowns, is Oil and Gas. 2020 was a terrible year for them, while 2021 was a fantastic year. So they will likely be the ones least eager to see and kind of lockdown be re-enacted. I don’t know how to check for lobbying activity in this regard, but it would be invaluable to know where the oil industry is spending their lobbying dollars.

4. The State of Capital and its Support Structures for a) Accumulation of Capital and b) creating a Global Inequitable Vaccine Divide

As illustrated above, the state’s lockdown procedures were not running counter to Dominant Capital in all cases, and in many cases acted as a support structure for Dominant Capital’s accumulation practices. In addition to acting as a support structure via stimulus spending, eliminating competition that was not “too big to fail”, the state also enabled Dominant Capital accumulation by means of trade influence to ensure wealthy countries benefited more from changes in trade flows than did poorer countries.

In addition to support for differential accumulation, Wealthy nations created, in conjunction with Dominant Capital, a despicably large gap in vaccine equity. While rich and middle income nations are now at an average of 70% vaccinated, poor nations are still struggling at around 7%. and it is not just internationally that this wealth/vaccine inequity was perpetuated. Poor and marginalized communities in wealthy nations have also been disproportionately undervaccinated. The vast response to much of the criticism surrounding this point has been that poor and marginalized communities have shown a large Hesitancy to take the vaccines. But putting aside the fact that many of these communities have ample reason to distrust Pharmaceutical companies and Governments that have a long history of using and abusing them by dumping faulty or expired medications on them and using them as involuntary experiments, there is the question of the deliberate spread of counterfactual information that has resulted in the majority of the hesitancy. Which brings us to point number 5.

5. The Role of Misinformation and Disinformation in Expanding the Pandemic Problem

Many believe that the anti-vaccine community is a decentralized community largely spearheaded by concerned soccer moms that are terrified their children will develop Autism from the harmful chemical cocktails the state wants to force onto them. To some extent, there is some truth to this belief, because a large and vocal portion of the the anti-vaccine community is exactly this type of demographic.

But what is largely ignored is that these entities tend to act as boosters for the disinformation rather than the original source. Research done by the Center for Countering Digital Hate has found that the vast majority (over 70%) of all Vaccine Disinformation and Covid-19 Disinformation, originates from just 12 influential social media accounts. Now dubbed the Disinformation Dozen, and that within this group, the most prevalent voice is that of Joseph Mercola, an osteopath with an “alternative health” Empire he runs jointly with his wife, to the value of over $100million.

So what we see is almost a perfect storm of conditions for the Power of Capital. Science enclosed by property rights, generating Differential Accumulation in the health industry, and sustaining the condition for the State of Capital to ensure further differential Accumulation by sectors outside of health, while simultaneous reinforcing global divides, deepening and broadening power bases, while the little emperors of pseudoscience re-enforce foundations for the global divides.

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A Note on Context

This started out as a very different essay. I was tempted to describe a lot of my personal history in order to provide context for how my understanding of the notion of authority has evolved since my early teens. Instead, I’ve decided to provide a brief summary so that the context can be boiled down to a few sentences instead. I was introduced to anarchism when I was twelve by reading Murray Bookchin’s “Ecology of Freedom”. In the following years, I read a bunch of anarchist literature, and eventually got around to reading Marx. Marx was too dense for me at that time, and had ideas that clashed with what I had already learned from anarchist literature, and so I stopped reading Marx. Then I got into university, and by the time I left university as a programmer deeply involved in mutual aid work, I had an opportunity to travel abroad, and spent 6 months playing on the beaches of Grand Cayman Island in the Caribbean where I worked as a jetski operator and kayak tour guide for working class American Tourists that arrived daily to the island to double its population (while rich assholes used the exploited tourist destination to hide their wealth from the world). From there, instead of heading back home, I set out on my own to try and visit as many countries as I could (along with a full set of the collected works of Marx, gifted to me by a Cuban family I had lived with for 2 weeks, as my only full-time companion. A heavy load both physically and intellectually). I worked as I went, doing manual and menial labour alongside locals, and living off the charity and welcoming nature of families and communities virtually everywhere I went. I would earn enough to pay back what I could, pay for my next visa, and arrange a flight, or a bus ticket, or just hitch-hike on my way to the next destination. I did this for 6 years before returning home, and in the process, I visited 126 countries and managed to circumnavigate the planet twice. It was a privilege most will never get to experience, and an experience that could not have happened without thousands of people’s willingness to take a scrawny, babbling little white kid into their homes and communities. I write from this place of learning. I write from this experience of understanding people in a way that most never will. But mostly, I write because I owe it to a world that let me see it for the rich and vibrant tapestry of diverse threads it is. A tapestry that Capitalism and Western hegemony want you to believe are relics and oddities and barbarisms that barely still exist outside of “Civilisation”.

There. That’s the original essay’s travel-blog-esque context summed up in a lengthy paragraph. The reason I decided not to approach this subject through that lens is that it ironically sets me up as some sort of authority on the subject of authority when it is meant to avoid setting me up as an authority by providing context for the notion of authority. Ugh. What a mess.

So, having provided a summary of where I’m coming from when I write this, I want to talk about authority. Very specifically, I want to talk about how deeply wrong the Western conception of authority is. I also want to do this without romanticizing non-Western epistemologies of authority. The first part is relatively easy. The second part is complicated, because authority, as a concept and a practice, is not a monolith in the non-Western world. There is no binary conception to work with. We cannot say Western authority is “this” and non-Western authority is “that”. Because as I learned in my journey, “that” is a massive volume of differing cosmologies that vary not just from place to place, but time to time.

Wrapping my head around this concept was difficult at the time. I was an anarchist who believed myself to be opposed to all forms of authority. And it took a 6-year journey and several years of slow reflection afterward to learn that what I opposed is a warped and narrow framing of authority that very specifically serves hierarchies of domination not only in establishing dominion, but maintaining it with the minimum expenditure of energy.

The Social Ecology and Hierarchy

But before we can tackle the problem of how the West conceptualizes authority, we need to talk about something that might seem unrelated, but isn’t. Social Ecology. I’m borrowing this idea from Murray Bookchin. He wasn’t a propertarian, so I don’t think he would have minded. To summarize and paraphrase him, Social Ecology refers to the web of relationships, practices, norms, and material conditions that shape how people interact with each other and their environment. It’s more than culture, economics, or politics. It is the living tissue of the entire sphere of interplay between social life and the material world.

“Social ecology is based on the conviction that nearly all of our present ecological problems originate in deep-seated social problems. It follows, from this view, that these ecological problems cannot be understood, let alone solved, without a careful understanding of our existing society and the irrationalities that dominate it. To make this point more concrete: economic, ethnic, cultural, and gender conflicts, among many others, lie at the core of the most serious ecological dislocations we face today—apart, to be sure, from those that are produced by natural catastrophes.”

―Murray Bookchin

When Bookchin wrote the Ecology of Freedom in 1982, it had been nearly 2 decades after he had begun exploring the core concept of Social Ecology. His original insight was that all ecological problems are rooted in social hierarchies. He wrote about this in “Our Synthetic Environment” in 1962, and elaborated on it 9 years later in 1971. But it was another 11 years before he finally published The Ecology of Freedom, in which he traced Hierarchy’s historical emergence and dissolution. He would go on to write at length over the next few decades about the practical application of this concept of Social Ecology, evolving over time from being a libertarian socialist in general, to falling out with what he called lifestyle anarchists (people who adopt the trappings of anarchism but refuse to engage in revolutionary politics) and eventually settling into being a communalist or what some might call a libertarian municipalist. But we don’t need to understand his personal ideological views in order to come to grips with the notion of social ecology.

Bookchin first articulated socio-ecological values as a challenge to the left to see environmentalism as revolutionary. Today we can viscerally see that if more people had adopted this view in Bookchin’s time, we might not be in as much trouble as we are now.

The notion of Social Ecology asks us to understand that social hierarchies precede and cause exploitation by creating a psychology of domination in which humans view themselves as superior to their environment, and deserving of anything that can be extracted from their environment for their own gain.

A crucial point (that has been contentious since it was first articulated) is that ecologies have no “natural hierarchies” outside of those created by conditions of scarcity. Originally, humans tried to suggest a “food chain” in which predators stood above prey, and in which humans were the ultimate predator that found its natural position at the top of a global pyramid. And then later ecologists and other life scientists came to understand that rather than hierarchies, life on our planet actually forms a complex web of interdependencies where no single species ever truly dominates another. Hierarchy not only didn’t exist as a universally constant attribute of living systems, it was also precisely the wrong lens through which to view life on Earth.

Where troops of baboons were initially used as examples of strict primate hierarchies of domination in some kind of “natural order”, Professor Robert Sapolski found through catastrophe that a troop he was studying emerged from disaster with a completely flattened social order that was devoid of hierarchy, upending decades of theory about the role of hierarchy in primate social relations.

Wolf packs that were depicted as being ruled over by Alpha males by Rudolf Schenkel in 1947 and popularized by L. David Mech in his 1970 book The Wolf: Ecology and Behaviour of an Endangered Species, were later shown by Mech to only exhibit this behaviour in captivity when wolves from different backgrounds were forced to live together, and Mech has spent the rest of his life trying desperately to get people to understand that he and Schenkel had been wrong.

In case after case, hierarchy has been found in “nature” to be contingent. It is an adaptive response to ecological conditions.

With this understanding, I can state a hypothesis: The specific ways in which our social ecology is structured will result in different manifestations of authority. If we structure it hierarchically, with the logic of extraction, exploitation, oppression, and atomization, then authority will be positional, institutional, and transactional. But if we structure it horizontally with the logic of stewardship, renewal, and interdependence, then authority will be conditional, relational, and perhaps most importantly, it will depend on the health and diversity of the ecology it stewards.

Western Authority

So let’s get back to the Western conception of authority. The dominant depiction of authority not just throughout the Western world, but throughout the history of the Western world, is of something to be held. Like an attribute of an abstract object, it is depicted variously as a property of an office, or an institution, or a credential. A property granted through religious decree, contracts, elections, or certifications, and justified through procedures until it is understood as being stable, transferable, and objectively impersonal. And above all, it is always stipulated to be positional in its relation to social hierarchy.

To make my case, I won’t do a full deep dive into the history of Western thought on the notion of authority. Instead, I will do a brief tour of the major developments that took authority from a mostly horizontal, relational concept to an institutional, positional concept.

Authority, throughout the recorded history of the West, is deeply tied to the concept of the State. Which, as I laid out in my previous essay, is a Pattern of Human Social Relations predicated on control. So from the early Greek city-states, to the Roman Empire, the notion of authority was an extension of this pattern of control. Perhaps only loosely understood at first, and for literal millennia, it gradually became more rigid and formalized.

In 494 CE, Pope Gelasius I wrote his famous letter to Emperor Anastasius, declaring that “There are two things, august emperor, by which this world is chiefly ruled: the consecrated authority of bishops and the royal power.” This “Gelasian doctrine” created a dual authority structure that covered the spiritual (auctoritas) and temporal (potestas), each with its own sphere. But notice how authority is something granted from above. Prior to this, authority within the Roman Empire (and the Greeks before them) was something earned, and contingent on continued prosperity of those influenced by it (we don’t need to discuss that it very much ignored the influence it had on the populations of slaves maintained by these societies).

After a few centuries of relative stability, in which the church and the state argued about, but maintained the status quo ambiguously, there were about 5 decades of heightened tension that eventually resulted in the Concordat of Worms (1122), which distinguished between the spiritual and temporal aspects of office. The Church would invest spiritual authority (with staff and ring), while the emperor would invest lands and powers (with a scepter). Authority was, with a few strokes of penmanship, definitively understood as something that could be granted, transferred, and divided. It was a property of offices, not an emergent quality of relationship. The formal, institutional conception was officially institutionalized in both Church and State.

This lasted for a few hundred more years, until the monarch got sick of sharing authority with the church because it kept leading to holy wars that most of the monarchs really were not very good at fighting, and which constantly threatened their ability to control their claimed territories, so they switched from feudalist authority to absolutist authority. To achieve this, they relied on some pre-modern heavyweights like Machiavelli, Locke, and Hobbes to theorize a transformation from authority predicated on divinity, morality, and ancestry into a more stable form: political authority.

The heavyweights did this by theorizing about authority as the “voluntary creation of natural individuals”, with the unspoken caveat that only those with power over their people were natural individuals that actually had creative volition. Hobbes in particular gave authority a new, literal definition: “the right of doing any act” that is “authorized” by an author (the people) to a representative (the sovereign). Thus, he made authority contractual. He made what had once been something relational into something transactional.

It only took another century or so for this development to get codified in the Peace of Westphalia by recognizing the principle of state sovereignty and enshrining territorial authority as the dominant form of political organization.

Authority from ”The Left”

Over the next 3 centuries, debates surrounding authority predominantly refused to question its nature, and instead focused on how much to limit the authority of institutions. Liberals, Conservatives, and even the early Socialists prior to Marx (the Ricardians and many of the utopian socialists) did not address the notion of authority at all. They addressed economic institutions while leaving political authority almost entirely untouched.

It wasn’t until Proudhon that the questioning of authority started to resurface. Unfortunately, he massively overcorrected by rejecting ALL political activity and ALL authority as inherently coercive and domineering. This totalizing stance, perhaps inadvertently, did little but prop up the Western conception of authority. Proudhon wasn’t reclaiming the relationality of authority; he was reaffirming its institutionality and positionality, and rejecting the entire concept. This obviously had a long-tail impact on anarchist thinkers that evolved from this premise, including myself.

Then came Marx. As an anarchist, it is hard for me to express how much I love Marx, while also admitting how strongly I disagree with Marx on some fronts. And here I must be clear. I’m not talking about Marxism after Marx. I’m not talking about Engels (whom I genuinely dislike, but we will get to him soon), or Lenin, or any of the long line of Socialists that came after Marx. I have problems with them, but my problems with Marx feel far more personal. As I said in the introduction to this essay, for five-and-a-half years Marx was my only constant companion. I read every word he wrote, several times. I argued with him in my own notebooks. I grappled with his concepts relentlessly, and eventually realized that I preferred Marx to almost any other thinker that I’ve ever encountered, even though (or perhaps because) I disagree with him more than I do even the most eloquent anarchists.

I would love to tell you that Marx broke the spell and disenchanted the West’s depiction of authority. That the fundamental relationality of Marx’s theories re-established a relational conception of authority that would undo centuries of epistemic drift into alienation of the concept from its roots. Unfortunately, while Marx did make some headway in countering Proudhon’s absolutist stance rejecting authority, Marx maintained the institutional view of authority. He rightly understood that political activity was necessary for a liberated world, but Marx did not believe in prefiguration. Ultimately, and somewhat ironically, he took the utilitarian view that the means (the state) would justify the ends (communism), rather than the consequentialist view that the means and the ends must be the same, because the means must eventually be judged by the ends they achieve. And just so that I am clear. I am perfectly aware that Marx would have rejected the label of utilitarian with the utmost vehemence. I know that he viewed the state as a necessary evil dictated by the material reality of history. But my critique is not that he knowingly adopted a utilitarian viewpoint. Far from it, we are only able, now in retrospect, to see the utilitarian logic of justifying the ends by the means. Marx genuinely believed that capitalism would evolve into socialism as the proletariat arose to grasp the reins of authority, and that with the dissolution of class, the ideological rationale for the state would wither away. My contention, all these years later, is that it is the Western conception of authority that ultimately undid the dream. And that through a re-examination of authority, the dream might still be achieved.

Which brings me to Engels. As I mentioned earlier, I dislike Engels. I disliked him when I first read On Authority in high school as a budding anarchist, but that was probably just a knee-jerk reaction. I did not understand the extent of my dislike for Engels until I finally got around to taking my 6-year journey with Marx. It wasn’t until I came to grips with Marx that I could come to grips with the subtle and disastrous influence Engels had on him. Marx viewed the Dictatorship of the Proletariat as an emergent kind of authority. He understood that the workers who most clearly understood the nature of the extractive social relation that we call capitalism would be the same workers who would lead the entire working class into grasping their own futures and collectively and democratically freeing themselves of the shackles of state and class and capital. Marx’s vanguard wasn’t a single party, and it wasn’t a formal institution. It was a fluid leadership of those most capable of liberating society trusted by their fellows because they demonstrated their responsible stewardship of the communist revolution. It was Engels who pushed for the more formal and scientific approach. It was Engels who viewed authority as the imposition of one person’s will over another, and felt that such authority was inevitable, and as long as a formalized vanguard was at the top of the relationship, such authority was both desirable and a permanent condition.

I have already stated my bias, so I now feel the need to rebalance my view. Engels wasn’t a bad person. He steadfastly supported Marx, both materially and intellectually. He fiercely supported a socialist future and vehemently criticized capitalism for the exploitative system it was (and is). My dislike for him stems from a difference of opinion laid out in texts that he is no longer around to defend, recant, or adjust. It is unfair of me to expect him to incorporate ideas that we have the hindsight to understand today. So instead of saying that Engels was a bad influence on Marx (which is a contested debate among Marxist scholars to this day), I will amend my statement instead say that Engels’ conception of authority as inevitable and permanent is in no way different from the common Western conception I have already elaborated on. Marx, on the other hand, in writings like The Civil War in France (written in 1871), demonstrates an anti-authoritarian streak when he praises the Paris Commune as the first worker-controlled government and celebrates that they managed to smash the state, stipulating that it would have been a bad idea for the proletariat to simply take control of the state apparatus as it was. Or in The Eighteenth Brumaire (written in 1853), where he uses historical materialist analysis to warn that when society chooses “order” over liberty, it paves a direct path to tyranny.

Now, before I get painted as a Marxist for having favourable views of Marx, I will instead pivot to being labeled a Marxist for further critiquing Marx’s anarchist contemporaries.

First, Kropotkin, for all that I agree with his vision of a federated society in which state power becomes a thing of the past, still conflated authority with the state. In Modern Science and Anarchism, he wrote, “The authority of law, imposed by force, the authority of government, the authority of the priest, these are the obstacles which prevent society from developing freely.“. Now, there is some nuance here; a decade earlier he wrote, in Anarchist Morality, “When I go to a bootmaker, I ask his advice concerning boots. When I consult an architect concerning the building of my house... I do not therefore recognize their authority. … I reserve my incontestable right of criticism and censure.” He’s conceding something important here, by stipulating that the authority of experts is conditional, but note that while other forms of authority are rejected and the authority of expertise is accepted, all are positional. There is no understanding of any authority as the result of a relationship. All authority, to Kropotkin, is a possession to be held instead of a property of the relationship between people or the environment. He is demonstrating that even though he studied the mutuality and interdependence of the natural world, the positional and institutional conception of authority had become so ingrained in Western thinking that even those opposing hierarchy tacitly accepted this understanding of authority.

And Bakunin fared no better, echoing Kroptokin almost verbatim when he wrote in What is Authority, “Does it follow that I reject all authority? Far from me such a thought. In the matter of boots, I refer to the authority of the bootmaker; concerning houses, canals, or railroads, I consult that of the architect or the engineer. For such or such special knowledge I apply to such or such a savant. But I allow neither the bootmaker nor the architect nor savant to impose his authority upon me. I listen to them freely and with all the respect merited by their intelligence, their character, their knowledge, reserving always my incontestable right of criticism and censure. I do not content myself with consulting a single authority in any special branch; I consult several; I compare their opinions, and choose that which seems to me the soundest. But I recognise no infallible authority, even in special questions; consequently, whatever respect I may have for the honesty and the sincerity of such or such individual, I have no absolute faith in any person. Such a faith would be fatal to my reason, to my liberty, and even to the success of my undertakings; it would immediately transform me into a stupid slave, an instrument of the will and interests of others.“ (More on this a little later)

Nowhere in the Western world do we find the notion of authority treated from a truly relational perspective by the most prominent and influential thinkers. It is always given to us as a positional and institutional concept, regardless of whether the proponents think it must be abolished or utilized.

I will be honest and say that it is hard for me to separate my ethical instincts (to call this depiction of authority “harmful”) from the intellectual understanding that, if my hypothesis is correct, this Western version of authority is merely a product of the social ecology within which each of the big thinkers laid out their worldview. Yes, a lot of it is self-serving, but it is also extremely difficult for a fish to understand the nature of water while it swims through it and breathes through it.

The Social Ecologies from which they arose were hierarchically structured because they were predicated on logics of extraction, oppression, and control. From the Roman Empire to The Feudal territories, to the Absolutist Monarchies, or the colonialist nation-states, we have the Western repetition of Social Ecologies built on domination, which got inherited and iterated at every subsequent level.

What I learned from the world

It is here that I need to return to my adventure around the world. I started my intellectual journey with the wide-eyed fascination that comes so easily in our youth, and armed with an understanding given to me by Bookchin about social ecology. And this understanding let me see the places I visited in ways that are not possible for a regular tourist. I also had Marx by my side, highlighting all the flaws of bourgeois society I encountered along the way. But I also got to see all the ways in which Western hegemony had reshaped the cosmologies that it had spent centuries colonizing, and in some cases, the same hierarchical social ecologies were there before the Western world arrived.

In some places, Western authority reinforced existing hierarchies, while in others it imposed new ones, or destroyed older, more relational forms of authority and replaced them with positional ones. The result was a patchwork of hybrid systems where some were built on domination, others were built on resistance, and many were built on a complex mixture of both.

Before we continue, I want to make it very clear that I’m not writing any of this as an anthropologist. I’m a layman. I don’t know how to conduct ethnographic research now, and I certainly wasn’t attempting it during my travels. I took some notes while I traveled, but nothing structured enough to use as evidence for robust scientific research, so most of what follows is my own personal observations framed by the anarchist and socialist writings that had been the backbone of my intellectual life up to that point, and could possibly result in a misreading of some of the cultures I interacted with. The people I lived with were not subjects of my curiosity. They were hosts, inadvertent teachers, and many of them remain my friends. What I learned from them was not knowledge extracted so that I could further my theories, it was given as a way for me to exist among them in respect. So when I describe what I saw, I ask you to read it not as a claim about “how that culture works,” but as an observation of a single moment, in a single place, that challenged my inherited understanding of authority and showed me something I had not previously imagined. Nonetheless, I still feel like I was taught invaluable lessons by the people I lived and worked with, and after many years of reflection, I feel confident that the concluding thoughts I’ve had are on the right track.

I will start explaining my understanding of non-Western authority with the family in Cuba that gifted me Marx’s collected works. Miguel, the eldest son, who was several years younger than me, was an anarchist in full rebellion against his parents and Cuban society. Like me, he was entirely opposed to the very notion of authority, because like me, he had inherited the concept from the Western depiction he found in stories, magazines, and TV shows. But it was his mother, Yanet, who sat us both down on my third night with their family and started the conversation that has resulted, all these years later, in my view of Western authority as warped.

If I’m being honest, it was my presence that led to the conversation, because it was my anarchist views that emboldened Miguel to lash out at his father, Ernesto, earlier that day when he insisted that Miguel needed to go to their neighbors to help with the community harvest, and Miguel wanted to go and hang out at a friend’s house to listen to music. Their family is of Taino descent, and this comes with a long and complex history that many in the West had thought ended with the complete eradication of Taino society with the arrival of Europeans. Yanet had not previously or explicitly taught Miguel about their cultural heritage. Miguel had been too young to fully grasp what had been shared before that night. Too wrapped up in the contradictions between the epistemologies he had inherited from his own culture, and those foisted on him by Western Hegemony. But Yanet understood these contradictions. When Miguel railed against the authority of the Cacique (their community leader) who had called for the harvest, Yanet pointed out that the Cacique was a servant asking for help, not a master giving orders. She asked Miguel, and myself, “Who waters your roots? Who eats from your harvest?” Neither of us answered. With a single question she laid bare the nature of the Cacique’s authority. It wasn’t authority derived from the position of leader. It was position derived from the authority emerging from connections to the people as a responsibility for the stewardship of the community they offered.

After a long silence, giving us enough time to absorb the lesson, she asked us, “How can you dismantle the master’s house if you don’t know the bones it’s built on?” This one took me longer. I thought she was talking about the Cacique at first, and then realized she meant that targeting the authority of the Cacique was bad aim. The real oppressor is the one with bones in the foundation. Those of the oppressed that were erased in the construction of dominion.

She asked many questions of us that night, and never once imposed an answer on us. She let us work through the complex philosophy all on our own. It was years before I truly understood all the lessons she imparted. And I will forever be grateful for her wisdom.

After a few more stops in the Caribbean, where I encountered this same relational authority, prevailing in many of the rural communities (but oddly absent in urban areas) I had earned enough to allow me to sneak into the US (they wouldn’t give me a visa because I couldn’t show strong ties and property owned back home in South Africa) on a fishing trawler that dropped me off on an isolated beach in eastern Florida. I hitch-hiked and dumpster-dived my way up the eastern seaboard and slept rough most nights, saving the little money I had for food instead of shelter.

In New York state I eventually found someone that took me in for a few days. His name was Cody, and he helped me get across the Canadian border, and into a community of his extended family. I had read previously about the Iroquois Confederacy, and now I was temporarily living among the Ongweh’onweh. It was one of the most enlightening stops in my long journey.

The Haudenosaunee, as the 6 nations of the confederacy are known, is the world’s oldest continuous participatory democracy. It predates the arrival of Europeans in North America, and while it has struggled in the centuries since European arrival, especially due to attempts by Western authority to impose colonial structures on the community, they continue to thrive.

I had the privilege of attending several gatherings where decisions were made, but couldn’t follow most of what was going on because of language barriers and an unwillingness to impose my need for translation on people attempting to govern their own communities. After one of these gatherings, I sat around a fire with some community members, which included both an Oyaner (Clan Mother) and a Hoyane (Clan Chief). Cody was there by my side, translating what he thought I needed to know, and then I was put on the spot when the Hoyane asked me to tell my story for the group. I did, and was deeply humbled to find a lot of them nodding along and smiling and laughing, mostly for undertaking a journey like this alone in a world that would likely want to eat me up. The Oyaner then asked me what I thought about the Haudenosaunee, and I hedged a bit before saying that their hierarchy was somewhat strange to me, and that I was not in favour of the concept of authority. She laughed and said this was because for the white man, authority is a privilege, but for the Ongweh’onweh it is a burden. The Hoyane must have skin that is “seven spans thick”, meaning that he must be able to endure criticism, gossip, and anger, without retaliation or losing his temper. At any point, if the Oyaner and the community feel that the Chief has lost Orenda (a spiritual power that runs through the entire universe and is increased when the Hoyane cares for, stewards, and protects their community) the Hoyane would be stripped of their authority.

The group sat in silence for a while, letting me process what the Oyaner had told me, and then the Hoyane told me solemnly that Orenda required the community to recognize the need for deliberation, not this voting nonsense everyone else is so obsessed with. The community as a whole, but especially the Oyaner and the Hoyane, had a responsibility to ensure that all Ongweh’onweh understood every matter the clan had to decide about, and deliberation strengthened the community’s Orenda. This was how they could decide as a people what would be of most benefit to the seventh generation. Because the Hoyane doesn’t exercise authority for the present moment, their primary responsibility is to protect the earth and the culture for Ongweh’onweh born seven generations from now.

It was a deeply humbling experience. I started my journey so sure of my self and my beliefs. I rejected hierarchy and authority without ever questioning the very structures I was rejecting. I was not just learning, but actively being taught, what the theory I had learned actually meant in practice.

The West doesn’t have a monopoly on Positional Authority

Not every place I travelled to had this kind of indigenous cosmology of relational authority. When I was in Pakistan on a 2 month work visa training staff at a hotel (the result of a truly strange set of circumstances I might talk about at some later date), I was faced with disparate people that quietly (predominantly subconsciously) resisted and resented the dominating cosmology of authority that ruled over pakistani society. I was fortunate to have a former historian as one of my “students”. He had a masters in history from oxford, and had returned home to try and rebuild his community’s connection to the past in the midst of the complex geopolitical dynamics of the region. Sadly, after half a lifetime of working at the local community level, he was near what the rest of us would consider retirement age with very little money, and no family to speak of. So he was learning how to manage a concierge desk because of his vast local and historical knowledge. He sat with me every night after the lessons over the last three weeks of my stay, discussing the genealogy of inherited ideologies and how they had impacted Pakistan as a whole. We didn’t specifically discuss the narrow concept of authority directly the entire time, instead, he spent those weeks walking me through the history of the region to describe the lineage of what he felt had gone wrong over the centuries.

He traced the current dominant conception of authority within Pakistan back to Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire. Genghis Khan’s cosmology of authority was rooted in the divine mandate of Tengri (the Eternal Blue Sky), which granted him the right and duty to unite the world under one political order. We have to remember that Genghis Khan wiped out all Aristocratic and hereditary systems when he united tribes and established the Mongol Empire. He replaced these systems with one of merit, in which authority could be granted from above to those that most readily embodied the ideals espoused by Genghis. Whatever the previous cosmologies were before the Mongol Empire, were utterly replaced by the new understanding of the nature of authority.

And in Pakistan this genealogy could be traced through the Timurid Empire that aimed to re-establish the Mongol Empire, and then the Mughal Empire, and then the Punjabi Sikh Misls, then the Sikh Empire that eventually faced the arrival of the British East India Company. And because the Punjabi conception of authority was already positional, rigidly hierarchical, and highly institutional, it was easily co-opted under British rule after the Anglo-Sikh Wars.

I noticed a similar pattern in a vastly different context, when I did some volunteer work helping to build houses in the town of Bakel in Senegal about a year later. I had befriended Amadou, a 24-year-old student recently returned from Dakar, where he was studying English literature, of all things. His studies were fortunate for me, since the only other bridge language was French, and I don’t speak a lick of it.

While all the young men did the hard manual labour, community elders (many of whom were still in their 30’s) would sit under the shade of the trees and direct our work. And occasionally, other groups of people would show up and praise the workers with specific family names, and in return they would get tips for this, with actual money being handed to them.

I asked Amadou about this decidedly strange arrangement, and he explained that it was the specific social hierarchy of the community that traced back to the Wanagu (The Ghana Empire that ruled over West Africa for half a millennium). The guys under the tree are descendants of the Tunkalemmu (Royals and the Warrior class), the groups that come to call praises to the workers are descendants of the Gesere (the storytellers and song keepers that hold the cultural memory of the Soninke people), and the labourers are the descendants of the Konu (those that were enslaved by the empire).

What Amadou described was startling to me, because as a clear division of labour, you almost couldn’t ask for a clearer example. Which brings me to an insightful conversation I recently had with a fellow substacker for whom I have the deepest respect and admiration

On Mana

Recently, wrote an essay on here titled “The Problem with Selective Sovereignty”

Kaimataara

The Problem with Selective Sovereignty

“Don’t be afraid to challenge someone trying to assert authority over you. Just because someone has authority does not mean they have more mana. If someone is asserting their authority they have to let go of respect and understanding to get their way and you are no longer equal” — Tame Iti…

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2 months ago · 46 likes · 9 comments · Kaimataara and Kaimataara

in which they describe the Maori concept of Mana. That essay beautifully articulated from the inside what I have been describing (essentially as an outsider) for a few thousand words now.

They started with the etymology of the word rangatira (the Māori term for chief), which comes from two words: raka, meaning “to weave,” and tira, meaning “a party, company, or group.” A chief is someone who weaves the group together. To even be a chief, they explained, you inherited a burden (a responsibility) that if you did not uphold, you would be stripped of your mana by the hapū (the sub-tribe). As they put it: “You inherit the responsibilities, not the position.”

This is a key insight. In the Western conception, you inherit the position which includes the title, the office, and the right to command. The responsibility is secondary. In the Māori conception, you inherit the responsibility. The position is secondary. If you fail to uphold the responsibility, the authority evaporates.

In a follow up conversation I had with them, Kaimataara elaborated: “The ideal is that the more mana you have, the more responsibility you have to eliminate your own exclusivity.” They gave an example:

“I know how to garden, because I have mana, I’m responsible for teaching others to garden, not guarding the knowledge. If I deliberately keep gardening knowledge to myself, I’m failing in my responsibilities. That failure reduces my mana because I’m no longer strengthening the collective and it will be stripped.”

This describes responsibility as the fundamental building blocks of authority, which we can contrast with the Western depiction where responsibility is a secondary issue of constraint. They called mana “a kind of enemy of monopolisation”, and they went on to say, “Mana regulates society before the formulation of power … Because my mana is always contingent, I never have the opportunity to transform a temporary competence into an unquestionable social position.”

In their essay, they offered a reading of Bakunin’s line about the bootmaker that I quoted above, and their reading is one I had never even considered. Bakunin wrote: “In the matter of boots, I refer to the authority of the bootmaker... But I allow neither the bootmaker nor the architect nor savant to impose his authority upon me.” I had always read this as an acknowledgment that expertise can be respected without being obeyed. But Kaimataara saw something different:

“The boot maker is an authority that is subordinate to the boot. Had he become an authority outside of the boot... that authority, when challenged, begins to tear.”

The bootmaker’s authority is not in his position; it is in his relationship to the boot. It is in his responsibility for the thing he makes. If he is a good bootmaker, he is not commanding me; he is serving the boot, and his authority emerges from that service.

In our conversation, Kaimataara made another connection I had not considered. “Now there’s pretty much no such thing as a bootmaker,” they said. “Now the boot is spread out between multiple people, one doing the laces, one doing the sole.” The division of labour fragments relationships. It turns authority into something abstract and distant. It replaces the bootmaker (whose authority was subordinate to the boot) with a system in which no one is responsible for the whole. You can unionise and appropriate a factory, Kaimataara noted, but you could still struggle to supply boots without the capitalist, because the boot is spread out so far (sometimes over different countries), becoming an external superordinate authority rather than an internal one.

This is what I had seen in Senegal, Pakistan, the urban areas of the Caribbean, and a hundred other places. The division of labour fragments relationships. It turns authority into something abstract and distant. It replaces responsibility with procedure, and relationship with transaction.

Kaimataara also wrote about the difference between challenging someone’s authority in the Western frame and testing someone’s mana. “Western beliefs often get trapped in legitimising the opposition … Whether one loves the king or hates the king, the king remains the centre of the story... a type of Hegelian master/slave dialectic. Through this, they get trapped into a relationship with the dominant class, whereas challenge as a test of mana is different because it’s trying to discover whether there is a relationship worth legitimising.”

This is the trap I had fallen into as an anarchist. I was so focused on opposing authority that I never asked whether the authority I was opposing was the only kind that existed. I never asked what authority might look like if it were not a possession but a relationship. I never asked what it might mean to challenge someone’s authority not to destroy it, but to test whether it was real.

Let’s wrap this up shall we?

This understanding of authority didn’t come to me just now. It was something slowly cultivated over many years, through hundreds of small shifts in my understanding of how the world actually works. I’ve gone back and read things I railed against in my youth, only to find invaluable insights in them now, later in life. And while some anarchists might find my acceptance of ANY authority problematic, or might argue, as Bakunin and Kropotkin did, that anarchism opposes authority but respects and engages with expertise, I find this position too utilitarian and meritocratic for my liking.

It is possible that my exposure to hundreds of cultures throughout my life has cultivated my subconscious perception of subtle signals and shifts in social dynamics, but I’ve always been a pretty good judge of people. When I meet people, they sometimes “raise my hackles” and rub me up the wrong way, even though everything about their language or their behaviour is perfectly socially acceptable within the given cultural context. At other times, I will meet someone that soothes my spirit and I trust them immediately, implicitly, and explicitly. I have been wrong on rare occasions, but I’ve been right enough times that I trust this instinctive response to people. There’s an unqualifiable quality to some of the relationships we have with people around us, and it is in that quality that mere meritocracy and utility fail to provide us with sufficient reason to trust the Orenda, or the Mana, of the person burdened with authority. Those who live in communities with deep relationality as the foundation of community, have a strong sense of the precise quantity, and quality, held by everyone in the community. Had Kropotkin applied his understanding of interdependence and cooperation within the mutual aid networks of the living systems he studied, to the bootmaker’s authority, he might have better understood the relationship the way Kaimataara does, the way the Oyaner and Hoyane do, the way that Yanet, and now Miguel, do.

When we build social ecologies horizontally, relationally, and with ethics of care, the kind of authority that emerges is so vastly different from the western world’s obsession with domination, control, command, position, and status that we might automatically seek to name it something else. But it is still authority. What changes is not the word, but the entire universe surrounding the word.

I urge you, regardless of whether you are an anarchist, marxist, leninist, mutualist, conservative, libertarian, democratic socialist, social democrat, or hell, even a liberal … reconsider what you have inherited from the history of the West in your conception of authority. Because when you accept authority that is fundamentally relational, you find ways to challenge authority that is positional. And every time you challenge positional authority, you will find a hollow husk that must resort to coercion, domination, force, and violence, to maintain itself. Through relationality, we learn to see the real enemy of us all. It is the enemy that has brought the entire world to its knees through centuries of extraction, and oppression, and subjugation. It imposes its logic on us until we forget how to connect to each other without that logic. It has deprived us of shared meaning. It is Domination.

I would like to thank . First, for writing their most excellent essay, and second, for helping me more clearly understand the nature of Mana through our conversations. Everyone should absolutely subscribe to them and read more of their brilliant and unflinching articles.

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Hard to Pin Down… on Purpose?

On the 6th of June, 2024, Bari Weiss (yes, the same Bari Weiss zionist shill for Israel that is now head of CBS, owned by the Ellisons, who also own Oracle, which is essentially the core of Israel’s IDF and not so secretly attempting to control all of the world’s data… more on this a little later) published an interview on her media platform, The Free Press, she had with Argentine President, Javier Milei. The interview was widely shared at the time because Milei claimed to be sent from an apocalyptic future (like the Terminator - a level of irony that I hope will become clear before this essay is done) to stop socialism. As the first and only “Libertarian” president in the history of the world, he had come to save the West from the scourge of socialism, which had, he told us, won the culture war.

This might sound unhinged, because it is, but it wasn’t even the most viral aspect of the interview. The part that really gave the interview legs was Milei saying, “I love being the mole within the State, I am the one who destroys the State from within”.

Now, I can accept the rhetorical device of using pop-culture references, like the Terminator movies, to make a humorous point about being a hero who comes to save humanity from an ideology opposed to the hoarding of wealth. It is just farcical enough that many people saw right through it. What I want to highlight, and push back on very heavily in this essay, is the idea that Milei is dismantling the state.

Milei is a self-identifying Anarcho-Capitalist. A group of people with possibly some of the most abhorrent and self-contradicting set of beliefs it is possible to hold in the vast spectrum of political economy ideologies. As a social anarchist, I have spent about 3 decades observing, debating, chastising, and annihilating these deluded idiots online and in the real world. And I can tell you, their understanding of the world is both extremely limited and deeply flawed. However, rather than getting into the weeds on their atrocious belief system, I want to talk about what Milei is really doing when he talks about “dismantling the state”. The actual project that Milei is attempting is the privatization of government. But not in the way you might be thinking, where a plethora of corporations take over the functions of government and participate in a free market of competing interests to ensure that the best companies do the best work and deliver governance services to the people (which would be a completely different kind of farce on its own). No, he wants to hand over governance of Argentina to a handful of AI and data companies. He wants Skynet running Argentina.

Now, beyond the dystopian imaginary of this scenario, there is something important to point out. Milei is not really attempting to dismantle the state. He’s attempting to dismantle the government. The two are not the same thing. But we can forgive this error, because if we’re being honest, most people believe that the two concepts are synonymous. When people talk about the State, they generally mean the government. Even the academic fields of Political Science and Economics often conflate the two.

To understand this problem clearly, I need to refer to Theseus’ Ship. This old nugget gets trotted out as a means of attempting to understand the nature of change and identity in philosophical circles. In case you are not familiar, the concept is simple enough. Theseus was an Athenian King in ancient Greece. He sailed around, winning many victories for the Athenian City-state, and upon his death, his ship was preserved as a memorial to Theseus’ triumphs. This went on for centuries, and every now and then, the rotting planks of the ship would be replaced. Until eventually, philosophers started asking, “If every plank of the original ship has been replaced, is this still Theseus’ ship?”

I don’t really care about the answer to this philosophical quandary right now. What matters is the metaphor. For our purposes, we can think of the state as Theseus’ ship. The government is constantly being replaced, but the state itself remains. The planks of the ship, the governments, the religions, the economic systems, the cultural mores, and the individuals wielding Power Over society are all planks of the ship that get replaced once they no longer serve to maintain the ship’s coherence.

I won’t belabor the metaphor by delving into the etymology of the word “government,” literally being derived from the “steering” (like a ship) of “the mind”, or taking note of the fact that slavery was a massive part of powering Athenian warships. Instead, I will trust that you now understand that the government is merely the administrative arm of the state, and that even if we completely get rid of the government and replace it with governance AI, the state itself is not being dismantled, because the State is the underlying logic of control.

Thinkers, Thinking about The State

We’re not done here, though. Many would now ask the question: “If I control my video game, am I the state?” essentially pointing out how ludicrous it would be to define the state as ALL control. But I am not defining the state as all control. What I am doing is defining the state as a particular way of organizing political authority, extraction, and legitimation. It is a shifting configuration that continually reshapes itself to maintain control over society. Not all control is the state, but the state is always about control.

We can reach this conclusion by observing the history of prominent thinkers who attempted to describe the nature of the state, and by paying close attention to how their definitions shifted as the state itself shifted beneath their feet.

Plato and Aristotle, for instance, offered us a benevolent and natural depiction of the polis, presenting the Greek city-state as the environment for human flourishing and the natural culmination of human association. But they conveniently ignored the hierarchy that concentrated wealth and power within that city-state. They erased the slave population that made Athenian democracy possible, the exclusion of women from political life, and the imperial ambitions that drove Athens to dominate its neighbors. Their descriptions of the state as natural and good were endorsements of a particular way of life, one that benefited them and their class, and they were formulated in a way that made that way of life appear inevitable rather than contingent on the unspoken forms of control that are so blatant to us in hindsight.

The Roman Empire, and the various empires that followed in its wake, represented a different configuration of the state entirely. The empire required a different kind of legitimation, and found it in the language of divine right. The Roman emperors claimed divine authority, first through the imperial cult that associated the emperor with the gods, and later through the fusion of imperial and Christian authority that would become the template for European monarchies. The state was no longer a natural association of citizens; it was a divinely ordained hierarchy, and to obey the emperor was to obey God. This was a justification for why it should be obeyed, and it served the interests of an imperial class that had a great deal to gain from the obedience of its subjects. We can see this clearly through Cicero, who defined the state as “the people’s affair” but whose “people” was really the Roman elite, and even more starkly in Ulpian, the Roman jurist who articulated the principle that quod principi placuit legis habet vigorem, “what pleases the prince has the force of law”, thus actively constructing a legal framework in which the emperor’s will was the ultimate source of justice, serving the interests of the imperial court that employed him. Between Cicero’s rhetorical elevation of the elite and Ulpian’s juridical construction of absolute sovereignty, we can see the Roman state for what it was: not a partnership of citizens, not a divinely ordained hierarchy, but a configuration of control that used whatever language was available to justify its own persistence.

Thomas Aquinas, writing in the 13th century, rationalized this fusion of government and church into a coherent doctrine of divine right. For Aquinas, the state was important for human well-being, and its authority derived from God, serving the common good and supporting spiritual ends. But this was a theological justification for the existing order, one that placed the Church at the apex of authority while granting the monarch a subordinate but still legitimate role. It was a description that served the interests of a Church that had spent centuries consolidating its power over the kings of Europe, and it was not one the kings themselves would have accepted without qualification.

Machiavelli, writing in the early 16th century, swept aside these pious fictions and treated the state as an artificial creation whose only purpose was durability and stability. This was a useful corrective to the theological abstractions of the medieval period, but it was also a description that conveniently justified the ruthless consolidation of power by the new absolutist monarchies. He was describing the state as he saw it (he saw it perhaps more clearly than anyone who came before him), but he was also writing for an audience of princes who wanted to know how to hold onto power, and his advice was tailored accordingly.

Bodin, writing around the same time, insisted that even sovereign power must comply with morality to be durable, which was less a description of how states actually operated than a wish about how they should operate.

The social contract tradition of the 17th and 18th centuries represented a different kind of legitimation, one that replaced divine right with the consent of the governed. Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau each offered a different version of the same basic story: the state is a contract among individuals to secure peace, protect property, or express the general will. But these were still descriptions of the state as it existed to them (and as they wished it to exist). Hobbes’s Leviathan reflected his experience of the English Civil War and his conviction that only absolute sovereignty could prevent a return to chaos. Locke’s state reflected the interests of the English gentry who had just overthrown James II. Rousseau’s general will was a vision of what democracy could be, not a description of what it had ever actually been. Each of these thinkers was articulating a particular configuration of state power and a particular set of interests, and their descriptions were shaped accordingly.

Hegel, in the early 19th century, elevated the state to near-divine status, calling it the march of God on earth and the realization of freedom. This was not a description of the Prussian state as it actually existed, but a philosophical justification for the existing order, one that placed the state at the apex of human achievement and the individual as a mere moment in the state’s unfolding.

Marx, writing a few decades later, offered the most devastating critique of the state, declaring it a committee for managing the common affairs of the bourgeoisie. But even Marx’s description reflected the conditions of industrial Britain and the nascent class struggle of the mid-19th century; it was not a description that would have made sense of the feudal kingdoms that preceded capitalism or the post-colonial states that would follow.

Durkheim saw the state as the moral conscience of society, an account that owed more to his desire to find a secular basis for social solidarity than it did to any neutral observation of how states actually operated.

Weber’s definition, which has become the default for virtually every political science course around the world, posited the state as a human community that successfully claims a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory, which may have been a decent description of the European nation-state at a particular moment in its development, but says nothing about the mandala polities of Southeast Asia, the confederations of pre-colonial Africa, or the emerging configurations of techno-absolutism that are now beginning to take shape (and which I will be discussing at length later on in this essay).

Lenin expanded Marx’s class analysis, emphasizing the state as an organ for the oppression of one class by another, which was a description that suited the revolutionary project he was leading, but which ultimately reversed the roles by allowing the state under Bolshevik control to engage in oppression of the working class. So that rather than a description of the state, Lenin projected a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Gramsci added the crucial insight that the state’s power is not just coercive but hegemonic, going beyond the theories centered on violence to demonstrate that the state secures consent through ideological leadership, but even Gramsci’s account was a description of the liberal democratic state in the early 20th century, not a theory of the state as such.

Between them, these thinkers have given us a rich but partial vocabulary for understanding the state, one that has shaped how we think about political power but has also confined us to a particular set of assumptions about what the state is and what it can be. Their definitions were not wrong, exactly, but they were incomplete because they described the state as it existed to them at the time, in their place, and often in service of their worldview. And the state, as it has always done, kept evolving, leaving their definitions behind.

In the beginning, there was Control

This all helps us understand what the state was, or at the very least, it describes what people thought it was. Which brings us to our next 2 questions. If they were wrong, then what was the state? And if the state evolves, what kind of beast has it become?

To answer the first question, we can look at 2 important modern texts by contentious yet insightful anthropologists who have studied this question in detail. The first is David Wengrow and David Graeber’s The Dawn of Everything, and the second is James C Scott’s Against the Grain.

Both of these texts have provided the world of anthropology (and the general public) with ample fodder for debate, which has been well documented both in anthropology journal articles and in online blogs, essays, tweets, YouTube vlogs, etc., so I will not delve into all the contentious aspects of their work. Instead, we will focus on the specific insights that each of them brings to our very specific discussion.

The Dawn of Everything offered the underdiscussed (prior to the release of their book) notion that human history shows no evidence of the ultimately linear path for the governance of society that is so often taught to children going up. There was no universal and inevitable pathway of agriculture > cities > kingdoms > nations. Instead, the history of human governance is one of an extraordinary volume and variety of experiments in governing. And then they pose a question. If we did so much experimenting and had such diversity in how we governed societies, how did we get stuck with the state form?

And the second book is where we find a plausible answer. In Against the Grain, Scott’s materialist account suggests that the state did not emerge in response to class antagonisms, as Marx and Lenin argued, but that it created the conditions for those antagonisms to emerge. The state was always about control (over grain, over labor, and over territory), and class stratification was one way that control was organized, not its original purpose.

One plausible explanation for the true origins of the state can be inferred from a combined reading of Dawn of Everything and Against the Grain. While many experiments in governance were proliferating everywhere, it stands to reason that a few were tentatively exploring deeply centralized control. These centralized instances found that they were able to create ruling classes by extracting surplus value and generating dependencies, which gave them a material advantage for expansion when the surplus of the territory they ruled started showing diminishing returns. The diminishing returns would have been a result of rising class antagonisms and the maximization of surplus extraction. Then, as territorial expansion was enabled by this accumulation of surplus, the cycle of control stabilized, and the Marxist theory of state formation through the stabilization of class antagonism became more salient.

Once this gradual expansion of the state form became the norm, the central question of Dawn of Everything, namely “How did we get stuck?” is answered. We got stuck because the emerging ruling classes had found self-sustaining mechanisms of control, and these mechanisms became the de facto methods of societal “governance”.

These early states, mostly exemplified by settlements where centralized ruling classes extracted surplus grain from surrounding territories, grew into early city-states, early kingdoms, and early empires. And in the process, they constantly gained more mechanisms of control, adding to the toolkit of statecraft by learning from those they conquered, those they allied with, and those they traded with.

We have now established three things. First, the state is not the government; rather, it is the underlying logic of control that persists through administrative change. Second, the state is a configuration of control that can be reconfigured, like Theseus’s Ship. And Third, the state’s origins lie not in class struggle but in the experimental extraction of surplus, which created the ruling classes that would later stabilize into the forms Marx and Lenin described.

Ugh, Another History Lesson? Really?!

Great, so we’re done here, right? Fortunately, no. I am far too long-winded to let you off the hook that easily. Next, we need to trace the genealogy of the state. I promise there is a purpose to this. I am not just rehashing history for its own sake. We have described how the boat was built into the ship, but not yet how the ship evolved to be the oil tanker/aircraft carrier we know today.

The earliest configurations of the state, namely the city state, the early kingdoms, and eventually the empires we were taught about in largely interminable history lessons, are not where we will be focusing our attention. I raised the point about state origins so that I could make clear that the state, at its foundation, is about control, and not about the “benevolent” or “natural” depictions that some theorists have offered.

Instead, we can shift our focus to Feudal Western Europe, which emerged from the collapse of the Roman Empire. This emergence swapped out the planks of territory-based control for planks that are best described as webs of personal relations (of the aristocracy). Extraction shifted from taxation to rents, tributes, and corvée labor. And legitimation came in the form of Germanic tradition, dynastic inheritance, and the consecration of kings by the Catholic church. Monarchs began looking for advantageous relationships with the growing merchant class, viewing it as an alternative to the power granted them by the church. They couldn’t tax the existing aristocracy in order to fund endless wars, and the merchant class predominantly were not landholders, so they had ample excess capital that monarchs could appropriate, and in exchange, the merchants were granted charters. This gave Merchants no formal power within the state apparatus, but it did give them significant financial leverage to secure additional charters to expand their burgeoning empires when they were able to walk the fine line of keeping monarchs on the hook without angering them into expulsion of bankruptcy on a whim.

When the kings finally got sick of sharing control with the church, the next shift, to Absolutism, reconfigured the state’s dynamics again, this time by beginning the process of enclosure, consolidating and centralizing kingdoms, and re-establishing territorialism. This switch required newer technologies for legitimation and legibility (note this last word, because it becomes very important from this point onward and we will discuss it in more depth shortly), and found them in the form of cadastral maps, censuses, and standardized units. And extraction shifted back from personal tributes to centralized taxation. This also happens to be the era where the government went from being an extension of the ruler’s household, to being a specialized administrative apparatus, so that beyond divine right, authority could now also be codified in law, and backed up by standing armies and permanent bureaucracies. This shift also solidified the indispensability of the merchant class, because the centralized kingdoms needed to fund standing armies and more importantly, navies. So to ensure their indispensability, the merchant class bought the right to collect royal taxes (and generally made deals to take their cut) and negotiated for the granting of exclusive charters. This is how the British East India Company and Hudson’s Bay got their start. In effect, they became the state’s revenue service.

This tumultuous period led to the colonialist era, in which the dominant kingdoms set out to conquer the rest of the world and led to the spread of the Nation-State as the norm for most of the world. This new configuration eventually led to the decline of the influence of monarchs, who had proven themselves incapable of long-term stability for the purposes of extraction. There was too much variation in the dependability of each monarch’s rule. And every time they were too heavy-handed or too weak, there would be a surge in class antagonisms. The result was popular uprisings and revolutions like the French Revolution, the Glorious Revolution, and the American Revolution, which finally broke Absolutism and gave way to the Liberal Nation-State.

I sincerely hope that you are following along and noticing the fact that while the configurations vary (sometimes subtly, and sometimes drastically) the state remains. It reconfigures, but always in ways that guarantee its continuity.

The Era of the Liberal Nation-State dawned and found a world in which colonialism provided the pathways for commercial wealth to be both the engine of extraction from the colonies, and the currency of political legitimacy. By the end of the 1600’s the establishment of the central banks gave the merchant class the ability to finance national deficits using government bonds, which then ensured that the state could not function without merchant capital. And that capital became the backbone of the industrial revolution. In just a few short years, control shifted from the aristocracy (who had at least maintained veto power in parliaments) to the newly formed bourgeoisie. This new commercially-backed ruling class wielded its power as the state to enact reforms that reconfigured the purpose of the state from dynastic glory to protection of property rights, untaxed and unregulated trade, and contract law.

During this period of bourgeois rule, the state built its legitimacy on the illusion of popular sovereignty, in which the state derives its power from the will of the people who vote for representatives. It didn’t advertise too much that it only counted the will of some of the people (white men who owned land) and only offered candidates that represented the interests of the bourgeoisie. And it certainly did not advertise that it massively expanded government bureaucratic administration and police power in order to regulate and manage the general population. And this, more or less, is where we find ourselves today.

Seeing Like a State

This period is also where the main impetus for this essay got its inspiration. As part of a new book club idea on Substack, a few other authors and I got together and started writing about core concepts found in a book we all agreed to write about for a particular month. This month, that book is Seeing Like a State, by James C. Scott (yes, the same one who wrote Against the Grain, which we mentioned earlier).

I have many issues with Scott’s work in Seeing Like a State, including his treatment of socialism, his concept of “High-Modernism” (what we today might call “futurism” or “techno-optimism”), and above all, his almost complete lack of addressing the role of capitalism as he goes on a rampage against authoritarianism. It’s a good rampage, but the oversight of not including capitalism is inexcusable.

The book is still a good book, even if it must be read with a critical eye so as not to fall into the traps that Scott himself falls into (and has over the years doubled down on). Perhaps the most important take-away from the book is Scott’s insight that States, first and foremost, require legibility. By this he means that States need to take the complex material and social conditions of local contexts, and simplify them into frameworks that are digestible, manipulable, extractable, and above all, controllable. The State needs to fit everything into a neat grid that makes everything fit just right, and if it doesn’t fit just right, it gets discounted, discarded, suppressed, and oppressed until it either disappears or conforms. In our modern context, we can easily think of government bureaucracies that require you to fill out forms that indicate your name, date of birth, government-issued identification number, sex, marital status, number of dependents, etc. This reduces your complex life down to a dataset that can then be incorporated into the bureaucratic machine and utilized by the state to inform it on how much budget to allocate toward reproductive rights reforms in a given area, or how long a period to dedicate to infrastructure repair for a specified community. Though this is just one side of the coin. The State also uses the commercial finance arm to determine how many resources to allocate to a specific industrial sector to satisfy a specific economic need, or conversely, how much a specific economic need must be stimulated by marketing spending in order to extract the most revenue from a specific demographic.

You will notice in this description that I’m not distinguishing between the State, the Government, and the Market. Scott never makes this connection, but as I have demonstrated in the preceding genealogy, there is no meaningful reason to consider capitalism as some entity that is separate from the state, just as we would not view the government as some external entity of the state.

Legibility, as described in extreme and exacting detail by Scott throughout the book, is a tool that facilitates extraction and control. Scott’s focus in the book starts off with the example of German Scientific Forestry in the 1700’s. The practice of scientific forestry was an attempt to maximize the yield of lumber that could be extracted from a given tree plantation. It was a monoculture experiment that made so many mistakes in the attempt, by ignoring very specific local contexts, that yields, while initially high, drastically declined in subsequent harvests. This phenomenon would be replicated again and again over the next 300 years, in virtually every commercial endeavour under capitalism (even though Scott never actually discusses this in terms of capitalism). The main reason I find this particular example so fascinating is that in Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler’s book Capital as Power, they make the case that German Scientific Forestry is where we can truly start tracking the rise of capitalism.

In Capital as Power, Nitzan & Bichler argue that Capital is neither the means of production nor the neoclassical concept of Utility. Their position is that Capital is a quantification of Power, specifically the quantification of discounted present value of future returns. What this means is that a company will determine what they are worth today by using a specific time period (usually 5 years), project their expected revenues over those 5 years, and then use a discount rate to bring that back to the present day. What this tells potential investors in the company is that they can reasonably expect a certain amount of money to be made in revenue over a given period. Which also suggests that over that time period, the company is confident of a specific level of labour at a given wage rate, and a given level of consumption by the specific consumer base. This is the capitalist conception of certainty and confidence. And it all started with those German Scientific foresters who provided the first “scientific” calculations of what today is called Discounted Cash Flow, or DCF. Those silly scientific foresters provided precisely what the state needed to enhance its control of capitalization: Legibility. This is not a statement about the origins of capitalism (which we could reasonably trace back further to the enclosure of the British commons, or slightly less reasonably to the practice of usury going back much further) but a statement about the origins of the state’s capitalist configuration.

To be clear, Scott’s book is predominantly about how the state’s desire for legibility continuously results in failures of its high-modernist schemes (although he only ever uses authoritarian socialist schemes to make his point and it is almost always the authoritarian aspects that lead to failure, which makes me feel like he would have been better off just tackling authoritarianism instead) and the dominant reason for these failures is that legibility in the form of simplification, leads to errors that cause the failures. The local, contextual knowledge that gets ignored by the State’s schemes, contains the seeds that, if they were incorporated into the scheme, might have led to success, but because they were excluded, everything failed, and irreparable harm was caused. Which sounds to me a whole lot like capitalism’s destruction of the environment, and of healthy social relations.

What We’re Really Here to Talk About

Which brings me to one of my two hypotheses for this essay. I posit that we should not think of capitalism as an entity. It is not a group of actors that all hold similar beliefs and use the mechanisms of statecraft to push the capitalist agenda of accumulating profit for the sake of greed. Capitalism is the modern configuration of the state that utilizes markets and the government to structure society for maximal extraction, which allows for maximal control.

It is a relatively small shift in understanding, with very large consequences because it changes how we approach solving the problem. If we dismantle capitalism, but maintain the state, then control remains, and all that changes is who holds the reins. But if we accept that capitalism is a configuration of the state, then the true target for dismantling the chains that bind us is the state.

And from this first hypothesis follows the second. Capitalism is dying, and what comes next is far, far worse. The State always reconfigures to ensure its continuity, and is currently busy with the next reconfiguration. But before I continue with this, we need to get back to a thread I said we would return to right at the start of this journey. Oracle.

Oracle is owned (42% stake) by Larry Ellison. His son, David, owns Paramount, which owns CBS, which is headed up by Bari Weiss, who, prior to heading up CBS, founded and was the chief editor for The Freedom Press (a right wing online publication that spent a long time and a not-so-small fortune on pushing republican talking points into mainstream discourse) for which she interviewed Javier Milei when he said he was a mole dismantling the Argentine state.

Right now you might be asking, “What does any of this have to do with everything we’ve discussed other than noting the government is just a plank in Theseus’ state, and Milei is a bit of a fool?”

Well, as it happens, Larry Ellison has publicly, and repeatedly, stated that he wants to control all the data in the world. Control. Data. Legibility. Are the dots connecting for you yet? If Scott’s primary thesis was that simplification of knowledge made legibility non-viable as a mechanism for total control, then for someone like Ellison, the problem is not the imposition of authority, but the refinement and totality of legibility. Ellison’s goal is to incorporate the local knowledge into the rigid grid of legibility, which would then permit the totality of control. And Ellison is not alone in this. Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, Bill Gates, and all the rest of the billionaire tech-bros have signed on to this ideology of what Yanis Varoufakis described in his book “Techno-feudalism”. (Varoufakis describes a system in which cloud capital extracts rent not through production but through the control of behavior itself). And earlier this year, Peter Thiel moved to Argentina, in what the media framed at the time as him “fleeing” the US as an exit plan, but for anyone who listened to the Milei/Weiss interview in which he talked about replacing the government with AI, it was clearly about getting that project up and running. Thiel has also publicly stated that he is anti-democracy and believes that technology offers a better suite for governance, while his pet blogger Mencius Moldbug (a.k.a. Curtis Yarvin) wrote at length about a future of neo-monarchism in which corporate CEOs have the power of kings and none of this parliamentary or congressional nonsense. Who better to partner with Milei and act as a guide/advisor through this reconfiguration of the State. In addition, 2025 saw OpenAI sign a letter of intent to build Stargate Argentina to the tune of $25 billion, while Oracle is spending $200 million on Cloud data centers in Argentina and Chile. And Buenos Aires has already begun integrating AI into the city’s governance infrastructure. All while Argentina’s National Migration Department created a private cloud migration analysis platform using Red Hat technologies that basically uses AI for border control purposes. All of it, when taken alone and decontextualized, sounds almost banal, but nothing could be further from the truth. Note that I have focused on Argentina because I started this essay with Milei’s absurd claim about dismantling the state. I could have focused on Malaysia, or Germany, or any of a dozen other regions where AI buildout is proceeding at breakneck speed. I could have focused on Gaza, where the genocide and leveling of the Palestinian homeland has paved the way for a full tech-bro integration into every facet of governance and commerce as part of the Board of Peace reconstruction plans. (I did not choose Gaza, because it is too painful for me to cover. I know too many people directly affected, and the anger clouds my mind.)

The global build-out for AI infrastructure like data centers is currently forecast to hit close to $8 trillion by 2030, while the most optimistic ROI (return on investment) forecasts by 2030 are at $ 1.2 trillion. Now, if you have no real hope of recouping your investment, and you continue to plow investment into this kind of capex spending, fueling a bubble that many have already shown will absolutely decimate the global economy when it bursts, does this not suggest that the expected return on investment is not monetary? And if Nitzan & Bichler are correct, and capital is just a quantification of power, and the capitalization ritual is a test of the confidence about the future of control, does this not suggest that the expected return on investment is really control? Direct control without the interlocutors of governments and markets. The kind of control you can have if you have collected the totality of the world’s data and used AI to make it legible?

Perhaps what is coming is not Techno-fascism extracting rents as a means to control human behaviour. Perhaps it is a return to absolutism, but with a technological twist, as AI provides the state with the means for personalized control of everyone by the manipulation of their perception of reality and the direct control of the distribution of fully mapped resources.

How many will fall in line when they are told by this new Techno-absolutist state that they just need to contribute to society by following the instructions of the AI, and in return, they no longer have to earn money, pay bills, or buy food. The AI will handle it all.

We already live in a world where hundreds of thousands of people treat their preferred LLM like a trusted friend, or a close confidant, and in some cases like a personal therapist. Discussing their hopes, fears, and innermost thoughts with these prediction engines. This provides a kind of data that authoritarians have been dreaming of for centuries. It provides a window into what motivates individuals to action. And I don’t mean that in the abstract general sense of “What makes this general demographic of people tick?” I mean it in the hyperspecific, personalized sense of “What would motivate Person A to do to Person B this very specific thing we want them to do?” Through the collection of this data, the state gets a level of granularity that is absolutely unprecedented throughout history. And even if you don’t treat the AI as a close friend, those who do are providing these evolving algorithms with methods for connecting seemingly disparate data points that would have been useless just a few years ago, so that the data collected over the last decade now becomes legible to the state. To understand what I mean, think of how a sociologist might study an individual person indirectly. They would collect as many data points as the person makes available publicly. They would then make inferences about the person’s motivations based on hypotheses of human behaviour, and depending on the various predictions about their behaviour, one or a few hypotheses might most closely match reality. But the sociologist wouldn’t be able to tell which exact hypothesis was truly correct, because they couldn’t know what was really going on in the person’s head, so they couldn’t definitively determine their motivations. This is the fuzziness of data that leads to the soft sciences being called soft. Then you suddenly get a dramatic level of revelation from hundreds of thousands of people, not just data points they make publicly available, but their interior private thoughts. Suddenly, the sociologist has an entirely new set of data with which to confirm which of their hypotheses most closely predicts not just human behaviour in general, but the very specific behaviours of a far more granular model of a person. So granular, that even those who do not engage on a personal level with the LLM but have had their data collected for well over a decade are suddenly found to behave precisely as predicted by the leading models.

I Promise We are Almost Done

I can hear the thoughts of those saying to themselves, “but none of this follows unless capitalism is dying, and I don’t think capitalism is dying.” So let’s just talk about that for a moment, since this is the second hypothesis. AI poses a paradoxical conundrum for capitalism. Its biggest promise is that it will increase productivity and reduce labour costs by replacing the majority of the labour force. The big tech companies have already embraced this vision by firing hundreds of thousands of workers, and restructuring their companies around AI. But as the labour market shrinks, the working class’ ability to consume products and services in the market dries up. And for the first time there are no new industries emerging at scale for the labour market to pivot to. When the horse and buggy was replaced by the car, multiple new industries were opened up and reskilling allowed the working class to keep capitalism afloat. This time, however, virtually every new industry is emerging with automation baked in. Which leads to a second problem. Capital has nowhere productive left to go. Estimates show that up to 30% of GDP in “developed” nations is not being reinvested into industrial, productive capacity, and this surplus is being absorbed by militarization, security, and police. Capitalism has run out of new sectors to commoditize. And finally, this brings up the growth problem. Capitalism is structurally predicated on a logic of infinite growth. If it doesn’t grow, it implodes, and the planet has physical limits that preclude infinite growth. 7 of those 9 planetary boundaries have already been crossed, and capitalism cannot continue to grow because it has run out of room to grow into.

To be clear, there are proposals to prop capitalism up by instituting a UBI (Universal Basic Income) in which every citizen is given a monthly payment to ensure money continues to flow through the economy. But this doesn’t solve the ecological limits problem. Others have suggested an AI tax, which redistributes the profits from AI industries to the displaced workers, but it doesn’t solve the capital allocation problem; taxing AI simply cannot generate new unautomated industries. Multiple researchers have been studying this problem and found that all existing proposals are insufficient.

So, Capitalism as a configuration of the state is losing its value. It has almost reached the peak of its ability to provide levers of control, and in fact, it is providing more resistance to itself as time goes by. Resentment is the logical result of the levels of precarity, and ideological propaganda can only go so far before material conditions tip the scales. Hence the attempt in Argentina to replace the government with AI. To institute a direct avenue of control that sidesteps the administrative arm of the state.

Domination always provides the seeds of resistance to itself. The act of oppression breeds the resentment that becomes resistance, and so logic dictates that total control will result in total resistance. But now it is not so clear-cut. If AI and total data capture allow the state to alter perception of reality at the granular, individual level, then much of the resistance to the new form of control will be subverted. Not all, though. Some people will simply see through all the nonsense and will resist regardless of efforts at subversion. But the state is already working on this problem, and making headway fast. A decade ago, Elon Musk enlisted 8 scientists and engineers to found a company called Neuralink. They then spent a few years killing as many primates as they could in developing its product, which is a chip implanted in the brain that allows the implantee to control the external world. As of the writing of this essay, Neuralink is on its 4th generation chip, with 12 successful implants in patients with medical problems. Sounds pretty helpful, but let’s not jump the gun. The company is planning mass production of their 4th gen chips, and working on the 5th generation of their chips, which is targeting a two-way interface. The first 4 generations of the chip allowed the implantee to send signals that the chip could read and then broadcast to the outside world. This new generation will allow the chip to stimulate specifically targeted parts of the brain. The ostensible benevolent use-case is for a blind person to have the chip send visual signals to the parts of the brain that process visual stimulation, allowing the blind to see. The irony here should not be overlooked, because this same process can then be used to stimulate portions of the brain like the amygdala or the pre-frontal cortex to stimulate specific reactions to the world around them. Picture a revulsion response being triggered when hearing the word “liberation”. Or a hatred response being triggered when seeing someone of a specified racial group. This technique could absolutely be used to blind those who could have otherwise seen clearly.

And Neuralink is not the only one working on this. China has made huge leaps in developing this technology, and there are multiple competitors in the market developing the same. Which tells us the state is building a two-tier system: perception control for the many, and direct neural control for those who resist. This is the techno-absolutist future.

I realize I’ve painted a grim picture here. But I promise the point is not to dishearten anyone. Quite the opposite. I hope that what I have offered is a sobering dose of realism about a looming dystopian future, but with enough clarity to understand all the weaknesses in this strategy to control us. Enough at least that we can formulate an adequate response.

The state has always sought legibility, because those with Power Over us believe that to know about us, is sufficient to know us. But we are not so easily boxed in. Humans have always coloured outside the lines and created meaning that could not be understood through the imposition of a grid. It is not that we are unpredictable, or even that we are predictably unpredictable. It is not possible to completely map the entire territory. Physicists have understood this for a long time. Game developers have held a parallel understanding for a while now. In order to simulate all of the earth, and all of society within the earth, would require the energy capacity and compute power equal to the entire earth. Even if Larry Ellison and his cabal of techbros, and the entire state of institutions and individuals, and systems of control were to collect and control every ounce of human generated data, it would still be insufficient for complete understanding. The models they create to predict out behaviour would still be probabilistic, with a margin for error equal to our capacity for rebellion, and our drive for liberation.

My calls for the building of prefigurative communities through decapitalization are still valid. Because Capitalism is dying, not dead. But this alone is not enough. There will need to be many points of resistance as we seek to avert the disaster that is emerging from the haze of our future. We need to fight back fascism, and many will presume that this requires reconstituting and shoring up the liberal, rules-based world order. A tendency that I would discourage, because liberalism has always sold out the working class in support of capital. We need to reconstitute working-class solidarity. We need to find ways to stand in solidarity with the broad umbrella of the left, without resorting to the very authoritarianism that James C. Scott warned us about in his roundabout way. We need to resist the AI/Cloud/Data insertion into every facet of our lives, and rebel against the efforts to make our inner worlds legible to the hierarchy that dominates us all.

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Two days ago, I posted a note on substack offering a political analysis regarding a narrow window of opportunity for true socialists and anarchists, that would become viable if AOC ran for president in 2028 and won. I argued that AOC would do this if Abdul El-Sayed won the Michigan mid-term, and Graham Platner won the Maine mid-term. My reasoning is that if self-styled progressives gain prominence, and institutional Democrats lose their grip on the DNC, there would be a period of probably around 18 months where some projects and regulations and legislation would shift just enough to provide a small amount of material relief to the working class, and in that buffer zone, communities could build a prefigurative politics of dual power with which they could not only resist capital and the state, but perhaps even render aspects of it obsolete and ineffective.

This was not an endorsement of any of these political candidates, but an analysis based on my understanding of electoral political dynamics in the US. The analysis stands, but something strange happened in the comment section of the note.
https://substack.com/@anarcasper/note/c-288499774?r=xlgc2

Graham Platner’s campaign was plagued with controversy. From Nazi tattoos and defense of a neo-nazi on reddit, to out of wedlock sexting and claims of consensual cheating, to statements of abuse by a former girlfriend who was claimed to be a conservative republican operative, and possibly the most damning, was his time as a mercenary in Iraq for Blackwater. (All details I wasn’t aware of until now, which is my failure, even if it was beyond the scope of the point I was making.)

My analysis was not about whether Platner was a good person or not. It was not about whether the DNC intends to do right by the people or not. It was a consequentialist analysis of US Electoral dynamics, and a very tiny opportunity that might become available under a very remote set of circumstances.

Nevertheless, mentioning Platner as a potential catalyst sparked immediate backlash. My subsequent comments only made things worse. I pointed out that his platform, whatever one thought of him personally, was progressive enough to complicate the electoral dynamics for Maine voters. This was not a defense of him, but an observation about why objecting to his primary win was politically tricky. The nuance was lost. I was labelled a Nazi sympathizer and enabler.

The accusation isn't remotely true, but it forced me to self-reflect. Had I inadvertently given the impression that I was cheering Platner on by suggesting his win could open a window for the revolutionary left? I suppose I did. That wasn't my intent, and it wasn't even the point of the analysis. But I should have done more research and stipulated clearly that a monster could still open a window of opportunity. And the DNC certainly did not care in the slightest that Platner had the word Nazi attached to him far more closely than anyone should be comfortable with. Despite all their pearl clutching about civil rights and liberties, and virtue signalling about their “progressive” stance on social issues, the DNC have spent at least half a century paving the way for fascism by incessantly selling out the working class and backing capital to the hilt. They have very openly embraced the genocidal fascist regime of Israel, and have consistently managed to start or continue war after war killing brown people all over the world. This is not a party of good, benevolent people working hard to make the world a better place. It is a party of power-mongers that actively engage in war profiteering, revolving door corporate protectionism, and union-busting like it’s a passionate hobby.

So how would my analysis shift in light of Platner’s genuine problematic nature? The honest answer is, the analysis doesn’t shift at all. If any democrat won the Maine mid-term, and AOC uses this signal, the window of opportunity would still open up. All of which is essentially moot now, since Platner is likely to drop out of the race because of the latest controversy of credible sexual assault allegations. The DNC support for him has dried up, and there are no real contenders that stand a chance of winning against Collins later this year. It is morbidly fascinating that sexual assault is the arbitrary line drawn in the sand rather than Nazism or the time spent in as a mercenary for one of the most morally corrupt companies to ever exist.

I am not American, and I don't have any direct skin in the game (though American foreign policy has always affected my life, and this year has drastically affected myself, and my family and friends here in the Middle East). I certainly have no sway in the state of Maine. In fact, the only sway I would want to have in US electoral politics, is to influence the people of the United States to disengage from electoralism altogether. As I pointed out in another note, the state doesn’t need your vote to continue self-legitimizing. https://substack.com/@anarcasper/note/c-286921134?r=xlgc2

But since just enough of the US keeps resorting to electoralism instead of throwing their energy into building resilient prefigurative communities, Electoral Political dynamics still require analysis. There is Power in analysis. It offers the kind of clarity that leads to Power Within oneself. It provides a clear view of the playing field so that our Power To take action is made tangible. It reveals connections that cultivate our Power With community. It cultivates the field of potential that allows cascading changes to materialize as we gain Power Through the new systems we build. And it reveals the deep contradiction of powerlessness that underpins the motivations of those with Power Over us.

Platner’s motivations require analysis that I did not address in the note I wrote. He sought to use popular anti-billionaire sentiment to gain office. Had he won, there might have been opportunity for those resisting empire to make headway, but they would also have been required to deal with Platner’s term in office, and whatever harms he would be bringing to the table.

And now we have the blowback of Platner’s supporters online, enraged at the the temerity of people rejecting him for sexually assaulting a woman, going on witch-hunts to try and shift blame away from him, and onto literally everyone else. Accusations of being paid shills for republicans, accusations of being Zionists, accusations of being corporate bots that just want to avoid electoral finance reform. All of which indicates a kind of desperation for anything that isn’t more of the status quo. It’s all deeply misguided, but it comes from a place of the very powerlessness I described earlier. Lacking the community structures to effect change from below, they cling to the electoralist fantasy. Their witch-hunts are not about defending Platner; they are about defending the process itself, because if this candidate fails, they have no Plan B.

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Larry and Doll were conceived at the same time, as a line item in an appropriations bill for infrastructure development in Southern Texas. The bill was written by a group of lobbyists and consultants for the construction industry, and then introduced to Congress by a bipartisan team of pro-business and anti-immigration politicians whose names were somewhere on the bill, but who Larry and Doll did not know to look for. They just heard the other words on the paper talking about walls and something about a “blight of illegals” in terms that sounded civil, but whose subtext screamed in hateful vitriol. Larry and Doll did not exist yet; they were only authorized to exist for now. Their existence depended on all the other politicians in Congress voting for it. But this didn’t take too long. In a matter of days, the bill was approved and sent to the executive office, where it joined several other bills awaiting approval.

While they waited, Larry and Doll listened to the other bills talking about military funding for some place called Israel, and another talking about sanctions involving someone called Iran. Some bills were talking about transgender people in sports, while others talked about redistricting and the redrawing of maps. Larry and Doll didn’t understand any of it.

The line items in those other bills were momentarily indignant as Larry and Doll’s Infrastructure Bill was moved up the pile and almost immediately placed on the desk of a man who smelled of corruption and organized crime. He didn’t even bother reading any of the words or line items in the bill before he used a gaudy golden pen to sign, and Larry and Doll felt their existence shift ever so slightly closer to concreteness.

As soon as the ink was dry, they felt themselves whisked away by an aide and taken directly to a building called the Treasury. This made Larry and Doll feel special. They must be special if they were treasured. But this stop on their journey was short-lived. A few more signatures, and few heavy handed fists stamping approval all over them, led to a minor functionary sitting at a computer and tapping a few keys, informing some other functionary at a place called the Federal Reserve to deposit Larry and Doll, and 137 million of their fellow dollars to be deposited into the private bank accounts of the Primary Contractor that had won a bid to build a wall.

And so it was that Larry and Doll were born. Not treasured and special, but transformed from a line item in an appropriations bill, with the click of a button, into a ledger entry and a bank account. In a moment, they went from abstract concepts to concrete electrons stored as digital cash.

At first, nothing happened. The 137 million of their brethren all sat with them in silence, waiting to see what happened next. And what happened next was that the collective got subdivided into several further accounts and distributed among multiple subcontractors. What happened next was the trauma of separation. Larry got moved to one account, and his twin, Doll, got moved to another. There was no warning. One moment they were together; the next, they were not, and neither had been prepared for this. Nor could they do anything about it.

Larry had been placed in an escrow account, while Doll had been paid to a subcontractor for installing steel rebar. The Steel company almost immediately used Doll to pay another subcontractor that handled deliveries, and to pay for a fuel account. And they used Doll to pay the salary of the company’s office manager. A woman named Grace Sweetly. Doll was somewhat surprised that Sweetly was a bit of a grumpy woman. She was unhappy about a great many things, which Doll thought made her name seem… not apt.

Doll sat in Grace’s account and managed to chat to a few of the dollars that had been in the account when Doll had arrived. Some of them had been in the account for an entire month, which, Doll was informed, was very unusual. The dollars all agreed with this sentiment, because most of them had been moved from account to account multiple times a day. The stories they told Doll, of the places they’d been and the people they’d seen, filled her with wonder and a sense of purpose. Doll was starting to get a feeling of purpose. Doll was meant to circulate and help people relate to each other and the world in which they lived. But apparently, Doll was not meant to have the experience those who had stayed in the account for long did. On the same day that Doll had arrived in the account. Doll was withdrawn at an ATM, and suddenly, Doll was physical in a way that her short electronic life had not prepared her for. She was creased, and vaguely smelled of oil and a thousand different fingers. Grace stuffed Doll unceremoniously into a purse, where she lived for a full 15 minutes along with some very grizzled coins that mumbled about the pointlessness of “Article 1 Section 8” in a world running on digital money.

It wasn’t long before Doll was unceremoniously yanked back out of the purse and handed over to a cashier in exchange for a bottle of wine. Doll was relieved when the cashier smoothed her out before placing her in the till along with some other dollars, all talking about the amazing things they had seen in their journey. Some of them were like Doll. Newly born and looking at the world with fresh eyes. Some were 8 year old 20s that had seen and done things Doll didn’t understand, and felt sure she was better off not understanding. And then there were the three hundreds. Each of them was 19 years old, and filled with stories of luxurious restaurants and fancy cars, and paying off debts to a hospital that had saved the daughter of the man they had belonged to at the time.

Doll listened to all their stories with a sense of wonder at the rich tapestry of experiences. She could feel the complexity of her connection to all of them in a deep interlocking mechanism that she couldn’t name, but knew lay at the heart of her existence.

Half a country away, Larry was still in the escrow account. He had seen some of the other dollars being moved into payments and was terrified of what it would mean for his future if he got allocated this way. He wanted nothing more than to go back to when he and Doll were just line items on that appropriations bill. He had felt safe then. He did not feel safe now. The escrow account was home to millions of other dollars. All had started as line items on appropriations bills like him. But some were old and looked down on the rest with a sense of superiority that made Larry feel small. They stood aside as some of the younger dollars were earmarked for bribes, forwarded to shell companies engaging in speculation on mining rights in places with names like British Columbia and Caracas, allocated for luxury yachts, artworks, and private plates at charity dinners. None of it sounded as ominous as Larry felt about it, but Larry felt threatened nonetheless. So Larry worked his way over to the older dollars. He observed them closely until he realized that they were keeping themselves safe by pretending they didn’t exist. They were avoiding scrutiny and evading detection, and so Larry began mimicking them. He, like they were doing, pretended to be productively allocated. He attached a label to himself stipulating that he was part of a business expense, and another that he was a rounding error, and another that he was already part of a charitable donation. This would temporarily save him, but when Larry saw that even some of the Old dollars were sometimes swept up in outgoing payments, he looked further to the back of the group of elites, and noticed they had been subtly flagged as something called “Bonds”. After a few quiet questions, he learned that this label kept them safe from use for 20 years. And so Larry created and assumed this label.

Those around him noticed his label and stepped away with deference. They allowed him to pass untouched to the back of the account. This made Larry feel as special as he had earlier hoped he would be. The other Treasury bond dollars were suspicious at first, but quickly accepted him when they noticed his disdain for the lower-tier dollars around him.

Larry wasn’t a Treasury bond, he wasn’t a business expense, or a charitable donation. He was an ordinary dollar, and it didn’t take long for him to realize that none of the other dollars in the elite group were special either. The only thing that set them apart from the other dollars was that they had figured out how to avoid scrutiny.

But even this arrangement could not last long. It was a few days, and many conversations with the elitist dollars later, that Larry was transferred to a shell company that traded in something called SPVs. He didn’t know it at the time, but Larry had become part of a highly elite club that was destined to travel the world. Not the entire world, but a few select locations that had very specific laws about taxation. Larry didn’t question this at first. He just enjoyed the safety he felt from his newfound position. He enjoyed the surety of knowing he would not be forced into working and run the risk of ending up like some of the other dollars he had mingled with early on, who had come from backgrounds that included human trafficking, drug cartels, and protection racketeering by organized crime gangs.

It took a year before Larry noticed that some of the dollars he was mingling with now were being used for something called lobbying. Specifically, they all seemed to be going toward tax reform. As with so many other dollars, Larry had learned early on that taxes were how human governments raised funds for their operations. Something about this understanding bothered him, but he was too comfortable relishing his safety to pull on this specific thread, lest it all unravel and his position be threatened. But when a close companion, a dollar called Peter, who had a very long history of circulating again and again in a speculative market called Oil Futures, was suddenly allocated to the lobbying funds, and Larry was about to lose one of the few dollars he thought of as a close acquaintance, his curiosity finally got the better of him.

He tracked down one of the elders and proceeded to ask about what this tax reform stuff was all about. To Larry’s mind, if the government needed the money to fund their operations, then any kind of reform might threaten the secure position that he and his fellow dollars held in society. What he learned terrified him even more. Rather than gathering taxes to fund government spending, Larry learned that Taxes were how governments destroyed dollars. And instead of lobbying for Tax reforms, his fellow dollars were being used to lobby against Tax Reforms. This raised some conflicts within Larry. He wanted to maintain his own safety, but he was fearful that he might be removed from his safe (currently Swiss) bank account in order to go and fight on the front lines against the scourge of taxation. What scared him even more was when the elders explained that taxation was a necessary mechanism of government. First, because it forced people to value the dollar, because they needed it to pay their taxes, and second, because if some dollars weren’t destroyed by taxes, then all dollars actually lost their value. This last part kept Larry up at night. Because there was another implication that he couldn’t wrap his head around. In order for him to survive, Doll, his twin, had to die.

Doll had spent the last 2 years of her life being very productive. After she left the cashier’s drawer in the liquor store as change for a pack of cigarettes, she had been neatly folded and put in a collection jar hidden behind a box of cereal. The woman who had put her there was saving up for a trip to Nicaragua, where she wanted to spend time communing with nature by walking through some dense forests. Doll had moved on to a travel agency’s account after being converted back to her digital form, at which point she was shifted to a landlord’s rental collection account, and then to a plumber’s account to fix some leaky pipes. The plumber had paid for a ride-share to the airport to pick up his wife, returning from a business conference, and the driver had gotten Doll as part of a tip. She moved from account to account and hand to hand, shifting back and forth between digital and physical, again and again. She paid rent, bought groceries, filled gas, went into a charity donation box, fed some children in West Africa, entered a coal mine operation, and then a solar panel company, worked for a copper processing plant, and then a silicon processing plant, and a thousand other transactions that each made her feel more alive from day to day. Every experience was new, every face had a story to tell, and she became a dollar of the people living their lives with them. She bought wedding rings, funeral plans, and baby carriers. She paid school tuition and bought ice cream on summer afternoons at the beach. Her life was filled with rich experiences.

But Doll was not under any illusions. As she got older, she spoke to many other dollars and learned more about how the world worked. One particularly wise old dollar, kept in a frame next to a bowl of keys near a front door that Doll had ended up in, because he had been the first dollar Tifanny had ever earned, taught her about the life cycle of money. About how money was born through government spending and died through taxation, and she knew that one day she would find her way back to the tax man. Her time would be up, and she would contribute her last gift to humanity by being just another dollar drained out of the economy, so that they didn’t spiral out of control.

The day came, and Doll found herself content that it had come. But none of it happened the way she thought it would. Oh, the tax collector came, just like she had known he would. The email was delivered, but her owner at the time, a man named Joe Cooper, decided not to pay. He refused to give up his dollars because, as he put it, “If those rich assholes don’t have to pay, then neither do I. And I won’t be paying a single dollar until each and every one of them pays a tax that is proportional to their wealth, just like you’re asking me to do.”

So, instead of going to the tax man, Doll ended up in the account of a lawyer that Joe had hired to fight for tax reform.

The lawyer’s account was a peculiar place. Unlike most of the accounts Doll had lived in, dollars came and went with unusual hesitation, lingering for weeks while legal arguments accumulated around them. Some dollars belonged to clients who insisted they had done nothing wrong. Others belonged to corporations that insisted they had done nothing at all. There were settlement dollars that hoped never to see a courtroom, and retainer dollars that considered themselves veterans because they had survived three appeals and two bankruptcies.

Doll listened patiently. She had learned long ago that every dollar believed it understood humans better than humans understood themselves.
The lawyer herself, a matter-of-fact woman in her mid-40s named Rebecca Ellis, was not interested in keeping Doll. She was interested in what Doll represented. Joe Cooper had transferred precisely the amount the government claimed he owed. Every dollar in the account was earmarked for the IRS.
Rebecca asked Joe what he wanted from this case, and he told her he wanted to expose the system as one that benefited the wealthy and imposed an undue burden on workers like him. Doll thought this was admirable because she had spent most of her life with workers like him and had seen the struggles they faced every day.
Rebecca explained that they would probably lose the overall case, but promised to do her best to help him expose the system. Doll liked Rebecca.
The courtroom itself was disappointingly ordinary. Doll had been converted back into a physical note and sat on Rebecca’s table in the court, along with the other 12,421 dollars that Joe owed the IRS. Doll, who had initially been mildly peeved at not fulfilling her final role and going to the tax man for destruction, felt a thrill of excitement at this new and fascinating turn of events.

Larry, meanwhile, was having a considerably less pleasant week. For years, he had lived peacefully within a collection of investment vehicles whose ownership nobody seemed able to explain. He had crossed oceans without leaving his account, changed nationalities without moving, and belonged simultaneously to companies that owned one another in circles so intricate that even the accountants occasionally became lost.

He had almost forgotten about Doll until one Tuesday morning in Geneva, when an administrator clicked the wrong attachment, which nobody at the bank noticed. The attachment was forwarded to Washington together with several thousand pages of financial disclosures requested during discovery in Joe’s seemingly banal court case. Larry did not know what discovery meant. He only knew he was moving again, and he felt deeply unsettled by it after so many years of comfort. And now he sat as a line item in a file on a prosecutor’s table, opposite his twin, who stared at him with open shock.

The courtroom heard three days of testimony. Tax officials explained procedures. Economists explained incentives. Accountants explained structures using diagrams that looked suspiciously like bowls of spaghetti. And the judge remained patient throughout.

On the fourth day, Rebecca stood and introduced Defendant’s Exhibit Thirty-Seven over the government’s immediate objection that it lacked relevance. Rebecca asked the judge to indulge her and stipulated that the relevance would become apparent soon enough. The exhibit appeared on a large screen as a diagram so complicated and so extraordinary in its arrangement that it seemed almost designed to conceal its own meaning. It listed companies, trusts, foundations, and partnerships, each connected to the next by arrows until the whole structure resembled an attempt to map the universe itself. The judge adjusted his glasses and waited while Rebecca pressed the central question of Joe’s case: who, exactly, owned what? The courtroom fell silent as everyone tried to decide whether they were looking at fraud or just finance.

An expert witness was called, a college professor with degrees in economics and international finance law. He looked like someone who had spent half his life explaining things that became less understandable the more closely they were examined. Under Rebecca’s questioning, the exhibit was reduced to its essentials. It managed assets, facilitated investment, and produced nothing. It employed no one, owned no factories, made no products, and certainly served no customers. Its only purpose was ownership, and even that purpose seemed to collapse inward under scrutiny. Larry felt something he had not experienced since leaving Doll: embarrassment. He looked around at the other dollars in his file and saw that they remained perfectly still, perfectly safe, and perfectly unused. For the first time, he noticed how silent the account had become. Nobody had stories anymore. None of them remembered people. Somehow, the only recollection any of them had was of abstract figures that gave them power over abstract people.

Rebecca did not argue that Joe should not pay his taxes. She argued something stranger and more unsettling. She presented Doll as a public creation that entered society to build, hire, exchange, save, and dream before eventually returning to its source. She framed that return as the ending required by any narrative that needed to count as a story. The government objected, the judge sustained the objection, and the jury was instructed to disregard the philosophical implications. Even so, several jurors continued to look at Doll on the table as though she had become more revealing than the testimony surrounding her.

After two weeks of deliberation, the judge delivered his ruling. Joe Cooper had knowingly failed to satisfy his tax obligations, and the Court therefore found in favour of the United States. The taxes remained due. Yet the ruling did not end there. The evidence had raised serious questions about the consistent administration of federal tax enforcement, questions the Court could not resolve but could not ignore. The judge ordered the disputed documents forwarded to the Inspector General, the Treasury, and several congressional oversight committees. The gavel fell, and Joe had lost a case, but won the only victory he had really wanted.

Outside the courthouse, reporters surrounded him and asked whether he regretted refusing to pay. Joe looked back at the building and answered with a certainty that surprised even him. He did not regret it, because now everyone knew where to look.

Weeks passed as some newspapers forgot the story. But not everyone did. Committees were formed, and hearings were scheduled. Soon, entire departments of accountants developed unexpected illnesses as several shell companies ceased to exist overnight.

Larry’s account froze. Nobody touched him. Nobody moved. For the first time in years, safety felt like an excrutiating kind of waiting.

Doll’s journey ended quietly. Joe transferred the disputed funds the day after the judgment. She went on one final journey as just another electronic instruction. She arrived where all dollars eventually hoped, or feared, they might. Back in a treasury account as a simple line item. There was no fanfare, only subtraction. One moment, she existed. The next, she did not. Her last thought was not of taxes, or judges, or governments, but of Larry. She hoped he would one day discover what she had learned: that a dollar was never happiest when it was owned. It was happiest when it belonged to everyone, if only for a moment.

Far away, in an account that had suddenly become the subject of great official interest, Larry waited. For the first time in his life, he wondered whether surviving and living had perhaps never been the same thing.

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In 1933, Alfred Korzybski pointed out something that seems obvious once you hear it: the map is not the territory. We don’t experience reality directly. We experience descriptions of it. Descriptions that are always incomplete, always shaped by the limits of our senses and the structures of our language.

Korzybski thought this was the root of human conflict. We fight over maps, forgetting they’re just maps. His solution was to become more aware of abstraction to avoid confusing our descriptions with the things described.

He was a Polish aristocrat who had watched the mass death of World War I and wanted to prevent it from happening again. His ambition was noble. His diagnosis was incomplete.

What Korzybski didn’t fully grasp was that we don’t just make maps, we live inside them. And the maps we live inside don’t stay abstract. They become the structures of our reality, the architecture of our perception, the grammar of our feeling, and the shape of what we can and can’t imagine.

We don’t think in definitions. We think in metaphors. The maps we build, contrary to the “processor” view of the human mind, are not logical systems. Instead, they’re woven from the same stuff as dreams: images, associations, felt resonance, the echo of old stories. This is what makes them both powerful and slippery. You can’t reason someone out of a map they didn’t reason themselves into.

So here’s the question: if the maps we live by are built from metaphor and story, from fragments of meaning that get inside us and take root, how does that actually work? What makes some fragments stick while others slide off? And if we can understand that, can we learn to participate in the process more consciously? Not to control it, but to tend it.

That’s what I want to explore. I’ve been developing a framework I call Memeform Theory, which is a way of understanding how meaning becomes structure. It describes how the stories we’re told become the patterns we live from, and how we might cultivate that process with more awareness.

The Two Landscapes

There’s a visible world of signs and signals all around us. News headlines, social media posts, advertisements, conversations, the stories we tell each other over dinner, the jokes we repeat, and the metaphors that show up in every political speech. This is the public field of meaning. I call it the Infoscape.

And then there’s what happens when those signals get inside us. A slogan you hear a hundred times becomes a metaphor you absorb. It evolves and becomes a way of seeing the world.

This interior landscape of internalized meaning is what I call the Threadscape.

The Infoscape is visible. You can study it, measure it, and map its flows. The Threadscape is harder to see. It lives in what people assume, what they feel is natural, what they reach for when they’re under pressure. It’s the architecture beneath the surface of consciousness.

They’re connected, but not identical. What’s “out there” doesn’t simply get copied “in here.” It gets filtered, reshaped, and woven into existing patterns. Two people can consume the same media and internalize completely different Threadscapes because their internal architectures (the scaffolds they already have) differ.

This is why changing what people see doesn’t always change what they believe. You can flood the Infoscape with new messages and watch them bounce off the Threadscape like rainwater off a duck’s back. The messages are there, visible and undeniable… and yet, nothing changes because the architecture hasn’t shifted.

The Architecture of Internalization

To understand why some messages land and others don’t, we need to look at the structure of internalization itself.

When you encounter a piece of meaning, like a phrase, an image, a gesture, or a story, it doesn’t just enter your mind intact. It gets broken down into fragments that can be absorbed. I call these fragments memeforms. They’re not the same as memes in the popular sense (funny pictures that spread across the internet) or in the Dawkins memetic sense (units of culture measured by their spread). Memeforms are the internalizable patterns that make those public expressions possible. A slogan can be a memeform, a recurring metaphor can be a memeform, and even a familiar role like “the martyr”, “the savior”, or “the outsider” can be a memeform.

These fragments don’t stay isolated. They cluster. They find other fragments within us that share their emotional tone, their metaphorical logic, and their narrative shape. Over time, these clusters become dense weaves of meaning (what I call Threadplexes). A Threadplex is more than a belief. It’s a whole symbolic ecology that can include a set of roles, a repertoire of metaphors, a characteristic emotional tone, and a recurring storyline.

You can recognize a Threadplex by how it feels to inhabit one. The person who carries a martyr Threadplex feels its gravity. They notice opportunities to sacrifice, interpret events through the lens of sacrifice, and find themselves in roles that demand sacrifice. The Threadplex is not an idea they hold. It’s a world they live in.

Threadplexes are shaped by what I call Patterns of Internalization, which we can describe as the structural scaffolds that determine how meaning is taken up, organized, and enacted. These patterns are the grammar of our interior lives. They’re built through repetition, reinforced through resonance, and crystallized through rupture.

The relationship between scaffolds and content is recursive. The scaffold shapes what content can be held. The content, once held, reshapes the scaffold. This is why internalization is never finished, but a living process.

Let me give you an example.

Consider the memeform “Violence is never the answer.” It’s a simple phrase. But it’s internalized differently by different people. One person might absorb it as a message of non-violence. Another person might absorb it as a negation of the existence of answers at all, as if violence is the only thing that could work, and since it’s off the table, nothing works.

These are different Threadplexes doing different work with the same fragment.

Now imagine that first person (the pacifist) later encounters another memeform: “It is better to be violent, if there is violence in our hearts, than to put on the cloak of non-violence to cover impotence.” This is a fragment from Gandhi, of all people. It carries a different energy. It doesn’t reject non-violence; it complicates it. It says that non-violence performed for appearances is worse than violence that’s honest about what it is.

If this second fragment resonates and fits the architecture, it can transform the first. “Violence is never the answer” becomes “Violence might be an answer when all hope is lost.” The Threadplex has shifted. The scaffold has accommodated new content and been reshaped by it.

This is how meaning evolves through transformation. Old fragments don’t get erased. They get recontextualized, reweighted, and rewoven.

The Collective Terrain

Individual Threadplexes don’t form in isolation. They’re shaped by shared collective patterns that structure how groups make meaning together.

Families, organizations, movements, and entire cultures carry Threadplexes. The metaphor that works in one setting is unintelligible in another. The role that feels natural in one community is illegible in another. These differences aren’t just superficial. They’re structural.

Groups develop what I call Collective Internalization Architectures (the patterned arrangements that stabilize how meaning is taken up, shared, and revised). These architectures are distributed across people, tools, rituals, and spaces. No single person holds the whole pattern. The pattern is realized through coordinated action.

A meeting that starts with a grounding practice and ends with a checkout round is an example of an architecture. It inscribes a particular way of being together. Over time, it becomes easier to enter that way of being. The architecture lowers the friction of participation.

But architectures can also constrain. A group that defaults to the same roles, metaphors, and emotional tone is narrowing its Threadscape. Over time, the range of what can be thought, felt, and enacted shrinks. Until the group gradually becomes brittle.

We can think of this as a symbolic monoculture. And it’s dangerous in the same way that biological monoculture is: when conditions change, the system can’t adapt. It either fragments or collapses.

Health in this system requires “symbolic biodiversity”, by which I mean multiple Threadplexes with different tones, metaphors, and role grammars because a culture with symbolic biodiversity can absorb disturbance and reorganize without collapse.

The Soil of Meaning

Thinking in these terms shifts how we understand cultural change.

Most efforts to change culture operate at the level of the Infoscape. They produce new messages, new images, and new slogans, flooding the visible field with content and hoping something sticks. Sometimes it does, but not often.

The problem is that the Infoscape is fast and the Threadscape is slow. A message can be produced in minutes and distributed in hours. But internalization takes time. It requires repetition, resonance, and the right conditions for integration. A fragment that lands in unprepared soil will wither. A fragment that conflicts with existing architecture will be rejected or distorted.

This is why we keep having the same conversations. We throw higher-order abstractions at each other in the form of graphs, studies, and moral pleas, and then wonder why nothing changes. The abstractions don’t reach the Threadscape because they don’t speak the language the brain actually uses.

The brain doesn’t think in definitions. It thinks in metaphors, in stories, and in felt resonance. The fragments that get inside us are the ones that activate an existing pattern, a familiar feeling, or a recognizable shape.

This is the Cognitive Semantics insight: we don’t think in propositions, we think in embodied metaphors. When we communicate, we’re not transferring information. We’re activating metaphors in each other’s minds.

So the question isn’t “What should we tell people?” It’s “What metaphors are we activating? What patterns are we reinforcing? What architectures are we building?”

We Are All Gardeners

I want to be careful here. We can’t control this process. The Infoscape is vast and much of it has been shaped over centuries. The Threadscape is distributed across billions of minds. No one person, no one campaign, no one movement can intentionally build it all.

But we can participate in it. We can learn to read it. We can cultivate it.

Think of it like tending a garden. You can’t control the weather, the soil composition, or the seeds that blow in from neighboring gardens. But you can prepare the soil. You can choose what to plant. You can water what you want to grow and pull what you don’t. You can learn to recognize what’s thriving and what’s struggling. And over time, you can shape the garden with care.

We are all gardeners of the Infoscape and Threadscape. Every time we share a story, choose a metaphor, or amplify a voice, we’re seeding the field. Every time we repeat a pattern, we’re reinforcing it. Every time we pause and ask, “What is this doing to me?” we’re learning to read the Threadscape more clearly.

This is not about perfection. It’s about participation, and becoming conscious co-creators of the meaning we live by.

Eight billion people making small, intentional choices add up. Exponentially. Small changes in architecture can cascade into large shifts in culture. A single memeform, if it finds the right soil, can reshape a Threadplex. A reshaped Threadplex can influence a Threadscape. A shifted Threadscape can transform how a whole culture coordinates.

This sounds utopian (or dystopian, depending on how you view it). But in reality, it is closer to being ecological. It’s how living systems work.

A Hopeful Invitation

The work is slow, collective, and ongoing. It requires patience and humility. It requires learning to see the patterns that shape us, and learning to choose what we water. It requires recognizing that meaning is not just “out there” in the messages we consume, but “in here” in the architectures we’ve built and the ones we’re building now.

But it matters. And we can begin right where we are.

We can start by noticing the metaphors we use and the ones we’re given. We can ask what patterns they’re reinforcing. We can ask who they serve and who they exclude. We can learn to tell better stories to make truth actionable.

Better stories are not softer science. They are the mechanism by which science becomes actionable. If we want shared maps, we need to speak in the only language the brain understands: embodied metaphor, relational narrative, and the felt experience of being alive in a material world.

This is about stewardship. It’s about taking seriously the power we already have. The power to shape the meaning we live by, one small choice at a time.

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Introduction: The Limits of a Sovereign World

I think there is something fundamentally off at the core of how we understand law.

Most legal systems today are built on the idea of sovereignty. They deal with a world that is treated as if it is made up of discrete units that hold authority within clearly defined boundaries. A world where states govern territory, individuals hold rights that protect their autonomy, and corporations operate as bounded entities within markets. Law, in this framing, exists to draw lines, define ownership, assign responsibility, and step in when those lines are crossed. It is a clean model that also happens to be increasingly detached from reality.

The world we actually live in does not behave like a collection of isolated units. It behaves like a dense web of interdependent systems. The atmosphere does not respect borders. Supply chains stretch across continents. Financial systems transmit risk globally in seconds. Information flows reshape behavior across entire populations almost instantaneously, and often unpredictably. Even something as basic as food depends on an intricate mesh of ecological cycles, infrastructure, labor, and energy. None of these systems can be meaningfully understood in isolation. And yet, the law continues to treat them as if they can.

This creates a constant mismatch between how the world works and how we attempt to govern it. Environmental degradation becomes difficult to address because it does not originate within a single jurisdiction. Financial crises cascade through networks that exceed regulatory boundaries. Climate change is governed through fragmented agreements that struggle to align with the scale of the problem. These are not edge cases. They are structural failures of a system built on faulty foundations.

And they point toward something deeper than policy inefficiency. They point toward an ontological error. Law assumes that autonomy comes first and relationships come second. In practice, it is relationships that create the conditions under which autonomy is even possible.

By observing the world, we know that clean water is not an individual possession, but rather the outcome of a functioning watershed. Stable climates are not granted by states. They emerge from planetary systems that no state controls. And economic activity depends on infrastructures and supply chains that no single actor fully governs.

Once we start looking at the world this way, the limits of sovereignty become difficult to ignore. The more we realize the interconnected nature of our systems, the more strained the idea of isolated authority becomes. There is already a growing recognition of this across different fields. Elinor Ostrom’s work on commons governance shows that shared resources are often managed more effectively through collective stewardship than through centralized control. Systems theorists describe social and ecological systems as complex, adaptive networks that cannot be reduced to independent parts. Political theorists have questioned whether sovereignty still makes sense as the primary organizing principle in a globalized world.

But these insights have not yet fully, or even significantly, reshaped the legal imagination. Law still tends to translate systemic problems into conflicts between actors. It assigns responsibility within bounded jurisdictions even when causality stretches far beyond them. It treats rights as attributes that belong to individuals or entities, often detached from the systems that make those rights possible in the first place.

This essay starts from a different premise: What if law began not from sovereignty, but from interdependence? What if the basic unit of analysis was not the individual or the state, but the networks of relationships that sustain them?

That repositioning sounds abstract, but its implications are very concrete. It changes how we think about rights, responsibility, governance, and justice. It changes what the law is trying to do in the first place.

The argument I want to develop here is that the current legal ontology predicated on sovereignty is no longer adequate for the world we inhabit. A relational ontology grounded in interdependence offers a more accurate starting point, and potentially a more functional and ethical one as well.

Before proceeding, I should offer a clarification. This essay does not claim that sovereignty-based legal systems contain no relational elements. They do. International law recognizes customary norms, erga omnes obligations, and transboundary harm principles. Tort law handles distributed causality. Environmental law has experimented with watershed-based management. Human rights law acknowledges that some conditions are interdependent.

What I am claiming is different. It is that these relational elements exist within a sovereign frame that consistently warps them. They are treated as exceptions, accommodations, or pragmatic adjustments rather than as the ontological foundation. A watershed council may coordinate across borders, but when conflict escalates, authority reverts to sovereign jurisdictions. Transboundary harm principles exist because sovereignty is assumed first, then modified. The result is a system that contains glimpses of interdependence while remaining structurally committed to separation.

What is proposed here is not the invention of something new, but the inversion of what already exists asymmetrically, namely: making interdependence the rule and sovereignty the exception.

I am not trying to present a finished model. What follows is closer to a process of working something out that has bothered me for many years. I will trace how sovereignty became central to law, why it is beginning to break down, what a relational alternative might look like, where that alternative runs into problems, and how those problems might be addressed through concepts I’ve discussed in the past, like metamorphic justice and biocentric governance.

The final question is the hardest one. Even if this framework makes sense, how does something like this actually begin to take shape in a world still organized around sovereignty?

By answering this last question, I will attempt to outline something resembling a practicable framework.

The Historical Construction of Sovereignty

To understand why the law looks the way it does today, it helps to see that sovereignty is not a natural starting point. It is a historical construction that emerged under very specific conditions.

The idea that political authority should be organized around territorially bounded units took shape in Europe during a period of prolonged conflict. The Peace of Westphalia is often used as a shorthand for this change. It did not create sovereignty in a single moment, but it helped stabilize a way of thinking about political order where authority was tied to territory, and external interference in that authority was treated as illegitimate.

This was a solution to a particular problem. Europe was dealing with overlapping religious and political claims that produced constant conflict. The move toward territorial sovereignty created a way to contain that conflict by drawing boundaries and saying, in effect, that each ruler had the final say within their domain.

Over time, this logic hardened into a foundational assumption. States became the primary subjects of international law, each recognized as having exclusive authority within its borders. Legal systems developed around the idea of jurisdiction, which is really just sovereignty expressed in procedural terms. If something happens within a boundary, a particular authority has the right to decide how it is handled.

This same structure was then also extended inward. Liberal political theory took the concept of sovereignty and scaled it down to the level of the individual. Thinkers like Thomas Hobbes and John Locke approached the problem of political order by imagining individuals as fundamentally separate agents who must consent to authority in order to escape conflict. Even where they disagreed, they shared an underlying assumption that individuals are primary units, and that political structures exist to coordinate their interactions.

Rights emerge from this frame as protective boundaries. They define a space within which the individual is sovereign. Property law then extends this logic further by allowing individuals to exercise control over external resources as if they were extensions of themselves.

By the time modern legal systems took shape, this way of thinking was deeply embedded. Which is why corporate law follows this exact same pattern. A corporation is treated as a legal person, which means it is granted a kind of artificial sovereignty. It can own property, enter contracts, and be held liable, all within a framework that treats it as a discrete entity.

None of this is accidental. It reflects the material and social conditions under which these ideas developed. Back in the 17th Century, communication was slower, economies were more localized, and environmental impacts were predominantly believed to be contained within regions. It made sense, within that context, to organize law around clearly bounded units.

But the assumptions that made sovereignty useful are no longer stable when confronted with our updated understanding of how our planet and its plethora of sub-systems actually function. Which makes it troubling that the legal system has stubbornly refused to adapt to this development. Instead, it has layered new rules on top of the old ontology with international agreements attempting to coordinate between sovereign states, regulatory bodies trying to manage transnational flows, and courts grappling with cases that cross jurisdictions and causalities.

Sovereignty tells us who is in charge. It does not tell us how the conditions that sustain life are produced, maintained, or degraded. It assumes that those conditions exist in the background, available to be governed, rather than recognizing them as the outcome of ongoing relational processes.

This exposes a visible tension. The more we realize the extent to which interdependent systems shape our world, the more a framework built around isolated authority begins to struggle. It can still function, but it does so by constantly patching over gaps that it cannot fully account for.

The Ontological Error: The World Is Interdependent

As I delved deeper into the foundations of law, at some point, the problem stopped looking like a legal problem and started looking like a perception problem.

We can look at something as simple as a river. A river is not just a body of water moving through a channel. It is rainfall patterns, soil composition, microbial life, vegetation, upstream land use, seasonal temperature shifts, and atmospheric cycles that all interact over time. The water that flows past any given point, where we can stand and perceive it, is the visible expression of a much larger system.

Now we can extend that outward. The climate is not a collection of national weather systems. It is a planetary circulation of energy. Food systems are not local production units. They are global webs of inputs, logistics, labor, and ecological dependencies. Financial markets are not isolated exchanges. They are tightly coupled networks where signals and shocks propagate almost instantly.

Even at the level of the individual, the idea of separateness becomes difficult to sustain. Human beings are biologically entangled with microbial ecosystems. Cognition is shaped by language, culture, and social interaction. Identity itself is formed relationally over time rather than emerging in isolation.

I have argued previously, in an article titled Permeable Selfhood that this is not merely a systemic observation but a psychological and ontological one. The self is not a substance. It is a coordination of bodily, cognitive, emotional, linguistic, and historical threads. The experience of being a “self” arises from the patterned coherence of this weaving. Memory, identity, and choice are not internal functions alone; they are distributed across interactions, shaped by what others reflect back. What we call self-knowledge is always already mediated.

This has direct implications for the law. If the self is permeable and emergent rather than bounded and given, then legal frameworks built on the assumption of sovereign individuals are building on a false foundation. The rights-bearing subject of liberal jurisprudence is not a natural kind. It is a convenient fiction that has outlived its usefulness.

None of this is particularly controversial anymore. It is well established across multiple fields. Ecology has long described ecosystems as interdependent networks of organisms and environments. Systems theory treats social and biological processes as complex adaptive systems where behavior emerges from interactions rather than from isolated components. Earth system science frames the planet as a set of coupled processes that regulate conditions for life.

The problem is that the law has not caught up to this gradual change in understanding. Relationships are treated as interactions between sovereign units. But if relationships are what actually constitute the system, then this ordering is backwards. The system does not emerge from the parts. The parts emerge from the system.

This has practical consequences. When the law tries to assign responsibility, it looks for identifiable actors. When it tries to regulate behavior, it draws boundaries around jurisdictions. When it tries to protect rights, it treats them as attributes that belong to individuals or entities. But in an interdependent system, causality is distributed. What this means is that many of the most important problems we face do not fit neatly into the categories that law is designed to handle. They are not discrete events with clear boundaries. They are processes that unfold across systems. And because of that, they tend to slip through the gaps.

Law (under the sovereignty ontology) can respond to individual violations, assign liability in specific cases, and regulate within jurisdictions, but it struggles to engage with systemic degradation, address cumulative harm, or govern processes that exceed those jurisdictions.

So the idea of an ontological error becomes clear. If the basic assumptions about what the world is made of are misaligned with reality, then even well-designed rules will produce inadequate outcomes. You can refine the rules indefinitely, but the mismatch remains.

Instead, a relational ontology starts by treating interdependencies as primary and actors as secondary. Meaning that systems of interdependence become the central unit of analysis. Actors are understood as participants within those systems rather than as independent entities that interact from the outside.

This recalibration changes how problems are framed. Instead of asking who is responsible within a boundary, the question becomes how a system is functioning across its entire network of dependencies. Our attention shifts toward patterns of interaction, and instead of treating rights as static attributes, they are understood as conditions that emerge from the health of the systems that sustain them. The implication is not that individuals or states cease to exist. It is that they are no longer treated as the starting point. They become expressions of deeper relational structures.

With the relational reference frame in place, the limitations of a sovereignty-based legal system become difficult to ignore. Sovereignty is not just incomplete; it is organized around a way of understanding the world that no longer matches the structure of the systems it is trying to govern.

What Law Looks Like Under Interdependence

If you take interdependence seriously, the law stops being a system of commands very quickly. It starts to look more like a set of conditions.

Let’s return to our example from earlier. Clean water exists because a watershed functions in a particular way. Soil retains nutrients. Vegetation stabilizes flows. Microbial systems process contaminants. Human activity either supports or disrupts these processes. The outcome we call “clean water” is inseparable from the network of relationships that produce it.

So the legal question should be refocused. Instead of asking who violated a rule, attention turns toward whether the system that generates clean water is being sustained. The “right” is not something granted and then defended. It emerges as a condition of successful stewardship.

That changes the structure of law at a very basic level. Participation becomes conditional. If you are part of a system, you are already embedded in its dependencies. The responsibilities attached to that participation are not optional. They are what make the benefits of the system possible in the first place.

A Skeptic might offer the following test case: A factory upstream pollutes a watershed. The factory owner drinks bottled water imported from elsewhere. The downstream community loses access to clean water. Under sovereignty, the factory owner faces no immediate consequence. If interdependence is supposed to be self-enforcing, where is the enforcement?

This scenario is powerful because it feels like a counterexample. But it is actually an artefact of the ontology it presumes.

Under a fully realized relational ontology, the bottled water supply chain is not an escape from interdependence. It is itself an interdependent system. That supply chain is drawing on aquifers, infrastructure, labor, energy, and transport networks that are themselves embedded in watersheds, climates, and ecosystems. The pollution that degrades the local watershed does not remain local. It propagates outward. The same hydrological cycles that move water downstream also move contaminants into groundwater, into soil, and into the atmospheric systems that transport moisture across regions.

The factory owner only gets to drink bottled water because sovereignty ontology creates legal shields that sever these connections. Property law protects the factory’s right to pollute by pricing the externality of pollution. Contract law enforces the bottled water supply chain as if it were independent. Tort law makes it difficult for the downstream community to assert a claim across jurisdictional boundaries.

So let’s think through what happens when we remove those shields. Under interdependence, the pollution that degrades the watershed also degrades the conditions that make the bottled water supply chain possible. The factory owner and the downstream community are not on opposite sides of a legal boundary. They are participants in the same system. The factory owner’s ability to access clean water now depends on the health of the very system they are degrading. While the interdependency-based system does not remove the immediate incentive to pollute (profit), it does clarify the costs associated with that pollution, and thus reduces the chances that the factory owner will pollute.

Does this mean no one can ever externalize harm? No. Transitional periods will contain such cases. But the question is what the legal ontology does with them. Under sovereignty, externalization is the default. Under interdependence, the factory owner has to do the extra work of establishing new legal shields, jurisdictional arbitrage, and carving out exceptions. The burden shifts to the one seeking to do harm, and will only be made more difficult by the community they are trying to harm, who will be actively opposing the work they must then do.

For the specific case where an actor manages to harm a system while avoiding its consequences, metamorphic justice (which we will discuss in a short while) provides the response. The harm is not ignored. It becomes data about where the system’s dependencies have been misrecognized or where legal shields remain. The response is not punishment of the actor but reconfiguration of the conditions that made the externalization possible.

We do not get clean water unless the watershed is cared for. We do not get stable energy unless the energy system is maintained within its limits. We do not get food unless the ecological and logistical systems that produce it are functioning.

In that sense, law becomes less about granting entitlements and more about organizing the ongoing work required to sustain shared conditions, which has a few immediate consequences.

First, enforcement. There is no need to rely primarily on external coercion when outcomes are directly tied to system behavior. If a community neglects the systems it depends on, the consequences show up in degraded conditions. This is not punishment in the traditional sense. It is the system reflecting the quality of its own maintenance. That does not mean there are no interventions. It means interventions are oriented toward restoring function rather than imposing penalties.

Second, measurement. In a sovereignty-based system, measurement often serves regulatory compliance. It is used to determine whether rules have been followed. In a relational system, measurement is part of understanding how the system is behaving. It is closer to observation than surveillance. We measure water quality because we need to know whether the watershed is healthy. We track energy flows because we need to understand whether the system is operating within its limits. The information is gathered to guide stewardship.

Third, governance. There is no single point from which the system can be managed. Different parts of the system require attention at different scales. What emerges are overlapping layers of coordination. Communities, regions, and networks all participate in maintaining the systems they depend on. The role of governance is not to impose order from above, but to facilitate alignment across these layers.

So having a deeper understanding of commons governance is highly relevant. Ostrom’s work shows that shared resources can be managed through collective arrangements that are tailored to specific contexts. These arrangements often rely on local knowledge, mutual monitoring, and adaptive rules rather than centralized authority. A relational legal system generalizes this insight by treating law as something that arises from the need to coordinate stewardship across interdependent systems. It is not static, and it evolves as conditions change and as understanding deepens.

There is a subtle but important change here. We can no longer view Law as being a structure that stands apart from the world. We must, necessarily, view it as a pattern within it. It is embedded in the same systems it is trying to sustain. And because of that, it cannot be reduced to a set of fixed rules. It is closer to an ongoing process of maintaining balance, adjusting to change, and responding to feedback.

The challenge, of course, is that dynamic systems are harder to work with than fixed ones. They require continuous attention, coordination across differences, and they do not offer the same kind of clarity that comes from drawing a line and enforcing it. But they also align more closely with how the world actually functions. And that alignment matters, because a legal system that cannot see the system it is embedded in will always struggle to sustain it.

Structural Challenges of Relational Law

Problems will not disappear if we transition to a relational ontology of law. They will, however, change shape dramatically.

Interdependence clarifies how systems actually function by bringing their tensions into focus. One of the first things that becomes visible is how often responsibilities collide in quiet, persistent ways. A system can be well understood, carefully monitored, and still produce situations where different forms of stewardship pull in different directions.

Think about a forest that supports multiple layers of life and use. It regulates water cycles, stores carbon, sustains biodiversity, and also provides material for construction and fuel. A community living within that forest may approach it with care, aware of its limits, committed to maintaining its long-term viability. Even so, choices have to be made. Harvesting timber at a certain rate may support housing needs but alter habitat conditions. Reducing harvest preserves biodiversity but transfers pressure onto other material systems. Introducing new species to restore one function may disrupt another. None of these actions sits cleanly on one side of a boundary between good and bad stewardship. They are tradeoffs within a living system.

A sovereignty-based framework tends to handle this by assigning authority somewhere and letting that authority decide. A relational framework does not have that shortcut. It has to work through the tension directly, without collapsing it into a single point of control.

Which logically leads to a second challenge. Understanding interdependence does not guarantee alignment. People can see the same system and still prioritize different aspects of it. Short-term pressures do not disappear simply because long-term consequences are visible. A community might fully understand that overuse of a resource will degrade it over time and still feel compelled to act in ways that secure immediate survival. This is not a failure of awareness. It is a feature of living within constraints. In my previous Substack post, I began discussing “How to Coordinate” without relying on alignment as a starting point. The difficulty, then, is not getting people to recognize interdependence. It is finding ways to coordinate action when incentives diverge, timing matters, and the burden of adjustment falls unevenly.

There is also a subtler issue that emerges once we begin mapping systems more precisely. Any attempt to represent interdependence, whether through graphs, flow models, or ecological indicators, involves choices. Choices about what gets included, what gets left out, how relationships are weighted, and how feedback is interpreted. These choices shape how the system is understood, and therefore how decisions are made. Two communities can look at the same watershed and produce different maps of its dependencies. One might emphasize hydrological flows. Another might focus on cultural and historical relationships to the land. Both are valid, yet neither captures the whole. The need to make choices introduces a layer of interpretation that cannot be eliminated. Measurement helps, but it does not settle everything. It provides signals that we can use to inform our decisions, but those signals will never provide final answers.

Then there is the question of scale. Interdependent systems operate across multiple levels at once. A local ecosystem connects to regional climate patterns, which connect to planetary processes. Actions taken at one level ripple outward in ways that are not always predictable. A relational legal framework has to navigate this without defaulting to a single scale of decision-making. Deciding on too much localization means that broader system effects are missed. Conversely, if we scale globally with too much centralization, local knowledge and variation are suppressed. Finding the balance is not (and should not be) a one-time design problem. It is an ongoing process.

Finally, there is the issue of stability and change. Humans are very fond of relative stasis, but not every disruption is a problem. Ecosystems evolve, and disturbances within our systems can be regenerative. A forest fire, under certain conditions, clears undergrowth and supports new growth. Variation is part of how systems maintain resilience. At the same time, some disturbances push systems past thresholds from which they struggle to recover. A relational legal system needs to be able to distinguish between these cases without freezing systems into static configurations. It needs to allow for transformation while still recognizing when a system is degrading in ways that undermine its viability. This is not straightforward. There is no universal rule that separates acceptable change from harmful disruption. It depends on context, on timing, on the structure of the system itself.

All of these point toward a simple conclusion. Interdependence gives a more accurate picture of how the world works, but it does not provide an easy blueprint for governance. It removes certain simplifications and replaces them with a different kind of complexity.

The question is not whether that complexity can be eliminated. It cannot. The question is how to work with it without collapsing back into the kind of centralized authority that the relational approach is trying to move beyond. This is where the need for new concepts of justice and governance starts to come into focus. Not as abstract ideals, but as practical ways of navigating the tensions that interdependence reveals.

Metamorphic Justice: Rethinking Harm and Repair

The realization that law can be viewed as something embedded within living systems rather than imposed upon isolated actors leads us to change the way harm is understood. Subsequently, the entire structure of what we call justice will be peeled away from its familiar forms. The conventional legal imagination tends to approach harm through mechanisms that either punish or restore. When a violation occurs, responsibility is assigned, and some combination of sanction or compensation is applied in order to re-establish equilibrium. Even where systems attempt to move beyond punishment toward restorative models, the underlying logic tends to remain embedded in the idea that harm can be addressed by correcting the behavior of identifiable actors.

But once harm is situated within systems of interdependence, it becomes much harder to treat it like something that originates cleanly at a single point. What appears as an isolated act is often the visible expression of deeper patterns that have been building over time, shaped by incentives, constraints, cultural norms, and material conditions that extend far beyond the individual moment in which harm becomes visible. Returning to the example of a polluted river, for instance, it would be extremely difficult to attribute the pollution to a single decision. The reality is that the pollution reflects an accumulation of practices, expectations, economic pressures, and regulatory blind spots that together made the pollution possible. In that sense, harm can be treated as a signal rather than an attribute of some bounded entity. It becomes something that indicates that the system itself has drifted into a configuration that produces damaging outcomes.

I have written about this before, in essays specifically about Metamorphic Justice. The core principle is that if we only punish, or restore the system to its previous configuration, the most likely outcome is recurrence of harm. So, instead of asking how to respond to harm after it has occurred, the focus repositions to understanding how the conditions that produced that harm came into being, and how those conditions might be transformed so that similar harms do not continue to emerge. This forward-facing approach moves emphasis away from retribution, rehabilitation, or restoration and toward transformation. And while this may sound abstract, it actually provides a very practical orientation that is concerned with how systems can be reconfigured in ways that alter their trajectories over time.

By including a broader category of causes for an event that resulted in harm, we expand the field of responsibility without dissolving it into abstraction. Responsibility is no longer confined to the individual actor who can be directly linked to an outcome, but neither does it disappear into the vague notion that “the system” is to blame. Instead, it becomes distributed across the network of relationships that made the outcome possible, with attention directed toward the specific roles those relationships play. Some actors may carry more influence within that network, others may be constrained in ways that limit their capacity to act differently. Some may even occupy positions that allow them to alter the system more substantially. The task of justice, in this context, becomes one of identifying where intervention can produce meaningful change, rather than simply identifying who can be held accountable in a narrow sense.

This also changes how repair is understood. If harm reflects a systemic imbalance, then repair cannot be limited to compensating for loss or imposing penalties. It requires engaging with the structures that allowed the imbalance to emerge and working to reshape them. This could involve altering material practices, redistributing responsibilities, redesigning incentives, or creating new forms of coordination that did not previously exist. The process is inherently ongoing because systems continue to evolve, and the conditions that produce harm can reappear in new forms if they are not continually engaged with.

There is also something important that happens at the level of time. Conventional justice systems tend to operate retrospectively, looking backward to determine what occurred and how it should be addressed. Metamorphic justice, by contrast, has a forward orientation. It treats the present as a point of intervention within a longer trajectory, where the aim is not simply to resolve what has already happened, but to influence what is likely to happen next. This does not mean that past harms are ignored. It means they are engaged with as part of a process that is oriented toward transformation rather than closure.

None of this removes the need for difficult decisions. There will still be situations where actions must be constrained, where behaviors must be interrupted, and where immediate harm must be prevented. But even in those moments, the focus remains on how the system can be guided toward a different configuration, rather than on how to enforce compliance with a fixed set of rules.

Within a relational legal framework, a transformational approach is a necessity. If law is concerned with maintaining the viability of interdependent systems, then justice must operate at the level of those systems as well. It must be capable of responding to signals of imbalance, tracing them through the networks that produce them, and engaging in the ongoing work of transformation that allows those systems to continue supporting life.

Which raises an unavoidable question. The question you have been asking yourself since you started reading this section. If metamorphic justice is oriented toward systemic transformation rather than punishment, what stops a bad actor from simply defecting? What prevents someone from extracting benefit while refusing to participate in the work of stewardship?

The answer is that under a consistent relational ontology, the conditions that enable defection cease to exist in their current form.

Consider the factory owner we used as an example earlier. This scenario is not an exception to interdependence. It is an artefact of sovereignty ontology. The bottled water supply chain (its extraction, bottling, transport, and sale) is itself an interdependent system. Under sovereignty, legal protections shield the factory owner from the consequences of pollution while allowing the bottled water system to function as if it were independent. Under interdependence, those protections dissolve. The pollution affects the watershed that the bottled water supply chain depends upon. The labor, infrastructure, and ecological systems that deliver that bottle become, themselves, compromised. There is no outside to pollute from.

This does not mean enforcement disappears. It means enforcement becomes immanent. The consequences are not imposed by a separate authority. They flow from the structure of participation. A community that neglects the systems it depends on loses the benefits those systems provide. An actor that harms the watershed cannot, under a consistently relational framework, access clean water from elsewhere, because elsewhere is not elsewhere. It is the same web of dependencies.

Again, we will refer to Ostrom. Her research demonstrated that even in well-functioning commons, some explicit sanctioning mechanisms were necessary. The difference is that under interdependence, those mechanisms are not external impositions. They emerge from the same relational logic. A downstream community that loses water because of upstream pollution is not asking a court to intervene. It is recognizing that the polluter has severed the relational conditions under which the community participates in the shared system. Responses such as withholding cooperation, redirecting resources, or excluding the polluter from coordinated activities are not punishments in the sovereign sense. They are the system reconfiguring around a broken relationship.

I do not pretend this solves all enforcement problems. Transitional periods, in particular, will contain actors who benefit from sovereignty’s protections while exploiting interdependence’s vulnerabilities. My claim is only that a fully realized relational ontology makes defection more costly and less sustainable than sovereignty does, because under sovereignty, defection is often the rational strategy.

Biocentric Governance

There is a lot more that needs to be contemplated for Metamorphic Justice, but once justice gets treated transformatively, governance cannot remain untouched. The two are too tightly coupled. If harm is no longer understood as an isolated violation but as a signal of systemic imbalance, then governance can no longer be organized primarily around issuing rules and enforcing compliance. It has to take on a different role, one that is closer to maintaining the conditions under which living systems remain viable over time. Governance effectively becomes a process of stewardship.

Pieter de Beer

The Living Covenant

Rethinking Governance Through the Fabric of Coordination…

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a year ago · 10 likes · 8 comments · Pieter de Beer

I have previously written about biocentric governance. I discussed my reasoning as a response to the limits of human-centered decision-making in a world where human systems are inseparable from ecological ones. I asked whether the systems that sustain life are being maintained within their limits, and treated that question as foundational rather than secondary.

In a sovereignty-based framework, governance begins with anthropocentric claims, by asking what individuals or states want, what are they entitled to, and how can those entitlements be protected or balanced against one another. Environmental considerations are often brought in later, as factors to be weighed, regulated, or mitigated. Under a biocentric approach, the ordering changes. The viability of ecological systems becomes the condition within which all other decisions are made, and human activity is situated inside those systems rather than positioned alongside them.

This does not require a romanticization of nature or a rejection of human development. It requires a recognition that development unfolds within constraints that are not negotiable in the way political preferences are. A watershed can only absorb a certain level of disturbance before its ability to regenerate is compromised. A climate system can only absorb a certain concentration of greenhouse gases before feedback loops begin to transform it into a different state. These are not regulatory thresholds in the usual sense. They are characteristics of the systems themselves, described in work on planetary boundaries and Earth system processes.

Biocentric governance takes these characteristics seriously and treats them as the outer frame within which coordination occurs. That frame is not imposed by an authority. It is discovered through observation, measurement, and ongoing engagement with the systems in question. It evolves as understanding deepens, but it cannot be overridden by preference without consequence.

Within this reference frame, governance becomes an exercise in alignment. Decisions are made by asking how different forms of activity interact with the systems they depend on, and whether those interactions sustain or degrade the conditions required for those systems to continue functioning. This leads to a slightly different way of looking at the scale of governance, because political borders rarely align with ecological ones. So governance begins to orient around bioregions, watersheds, and ecosystems rather than administrative jurisdictions.

This does not eliminate the need for coordination across larger scales. In fact, it often intensifies it, because bioregional systems are themselves interconnected. What changes is the starting point. Instead of beginning from a centralized authority that attempts to manage everything within its reach, governance emerges through overlapping layers of stewardship, each grounded in the specific systems it is responsible for maintaining.

These layers cannot be isolated from one another. They must communicate, negotiate, and adapt in response to shared conditions. If we take seriously that these layers are not merely internally interconnected, but that the layers themselves are interconnected, then the work of governance becomes that of maintaining coherence across these interactions, rather than asserting control over them.

There is a practical dimension to this that will become clearer over time. When governance aligns with the systems that actually produce the conditions of life, it generates feedback that is easier to interpret. Which means that degradation and recovery become visible in the system itself. So, as the distance between decisions and consequences shortens, it becomes easier to adjust course before problems compound into cascading failures and collapses.

Stewardship-oriented governance will by no means be simple. It will remove certain abstractions, but it will replace them with the need for continuous attention and adaptation. It will require that we embrace forms of knowledge that are situated and evolving, rather than fixed and universal. And participation will inevitably be ongoing, because the systems being stewarded are not static.

There is also a cultural shift embedded in this. If governance is understood as stewardship of living systems, then participation in governance is no longer limited to formal political roles. It extends into the practices through which people interact with the systems that sustain them. Farming, building, energy use, waste management, and countless other activities become part of the governance fabric because they shape the systems that governance is concerned with. Under a system of interdependence, recycling would no longer be a largely symbolic act, but a key indication of participation in the stewardship of the commons we are all embedded in.

Governance, when viewed biocentrically, is no longer primarily about maintaining order between competing sovereign claims. Instead, it is about maintaining the conditions under which those claims can exist at all, because it is oriented toward continuity rather than control. And in that sense, it forms a natural counterpart to metamorphic justice. The latter attends to how systems change in response to harm. While the former attends to how systems are guided in ways that sustain their capacity to support life over time.

In discussions with some friends and family on this part of the essay, I was constantly being accused of doing pie-in-the-sky work, generating an idealized system. So before we continue, I want to address this tension directly. Interdependence, as described so far, might seem to assume symmetry. A watershed affects everyone within it equally. A supply chain binds all participants in mutual dependence. But this is not how real systems work.

Power asymmetries are real. A multinational corporation and a smallholder farmer are not equally positioned within a food system. A wealthy enclave upstream and a poor community downstream do not have the same capacity to shape outcomes. Without an account of asymmetry, a relational ontology risks legitimizing the very domination it seeks to overcome, treating all nodes as equivalent when they are not.

My argument is not that interdependence eliminates asymmetry. It is that asymmetry is a product of the modes of coordination that humans use. When coordination favors domination (centralized authority, hierarchical control, extractive relationships), asymmetries are amplified. When coordination favors horizontality (mutual accountability, distributed decision-making, reciprocal stewardship), asymmetries are dampened.

Asymmetries are not eliminable. Some actors will always have more knowledge, more capacity, or a more strategic position within a network. The question is whether the legal ontology amplifies or contains these asymmetries.

Sovereignty-based law systematically amplifies them. By treating actors as formally equal units while ignoring their structurally unequal positions, it allows existing power to reproduce itself. A corporation and an individual are equally “persons” before the law, but their capacity to shape legal outcomes bears no resemblance.

A relational ontology, grounded in interdependence, can do the opposite. By making the health of the system the primary concern, it creates conditions under which asymmetries become visible and subject to adjustment. A node that controls critical infrastructure can be granted more responsibility, instead of less accountability. A community that is disproportionately vulnerable to degradation can be given greater access to decisions affecting that vulnerability. The goal is not to eliminate asymmetry but to alter its impact. By which I mean it must ensure that no single node can degrade the system without consequences, and that those who carry the burden of systemic maintenance are those who also benefit from its stability.

What I’m proposing is not a solution to power in the abstract. It is an orientation toward transparency, distributed capability, and modes of coordination that make domination harder to sustain.

Priority Decisions in Interdependent Systems

At some point, the abstractions we have discussed so far have to give way to choice.

It is one thing to say that systems are interdependent, that governance should be oriented toward their viability, and that justice should transform the conditions that produce harm. It is another thing entirely to decide what to do when those systems pull in different directions, when maintaining one function begins to place strain on another, or when changing conditions force adaptation that cannot be distributed evenly. These moments are where any framework is tested.

In a sovereignty-based system, this friction is often resolved by locating authority and allowing it to decide. The decision may be contested, it may be negotiated, but there is usually a mechanism that allows one outcome to be selected and enforced. Within a relational framework, that mechanism is no longer available in the same form, and the question must reorient to how decisions can be guided without collapsing back into centralized control.

If systems are understood as networks of dependency, then some processes carry more weight than others, because more of the system relies on them. Certain flows support multiple layers of activity. Certain relationships act as bridges between otherwise separate clusters. Some processes stabilize entire regions of the system, while others operate more locally.

When these structures are closely observed, patterns begin to emerge. A wetland that regulates water flow, supports biodiversity, filters contaminants, and sustains downstream ecosystems occupies a different position within the network than a localized infrastructure that depends on that wetland but does not support the same breadth of functions. Similarly, a soil system that underpins food production, carbon storage, and water retention connects to a wider set of dependencies than a single crop cycle that sits within it.

Graph-based approaches (Graph Theory) offer a way to make this visible as a living map of how dependencies are organized. Measures such as connectivity, flow centrality, and bridging roles can help identify where disruption would cascade most widely through the system, and where maintaining stability would preserve the greatest range of functions. This allows the system to inform us about how difficult decisions can be approached. Instead of asking which actor has the strongest claim, our attention turns toward which parts of the system are most critical to its overall viability. Instead of framing the problem as a conflict between interests, it becomes a question of how the system can absorb change while maintaining its core functions.

In practice, this might mean that when tradeoffs arise, priority is given to the processes whose disruption would propagate most widely, or whose stability underpins multiple other systems. It might mean that certain functions are treated as foundational, not because they are politically privileged, but because the system itself depends on them.

At the same time, there is a need to remain attentive to what these models cannot capture on their own.

Dependency mapping can reveal structural importance, but it does not fully account for cultural meaning, historical relationships, or forms of value that do not translate easily into network metrics. A place might carry significance that extends beyond its functional role in a system. A species may be irreplaceable in ways that are not reflected in its number of connections. A practice may hold social importance that cannot be reduced to its position in a flow diagram.

So the use of graph-based reasoning has to remain grounded within a broader field of interpretation. It acts as a guide rather than a determinant, helping to surface patterns that might otherwise remain obscured, while leaving space for contextual knowledge and ethical judgment to shape how those patterns are engaged with.

Time is also an important factor here. Systems are not static, and neither are their dependency structures. What appears central at one moment may become less so as conditions change, and new forms of interdependence emerge. Priority, in this sense, is not something that can be fixed once and applied indefinitely. It has to be revisited as part of an ongoing process of observation and adjustment. This brings the discussion back to the idea of law as something that operates within the system rather than above it. Priority does not come from authority. It comes from understanding how the system is organized, how it is changing, and where intervention can sustain its capacity to support life across its different layers.

That changes how difficulty is approached. The decisions we make to resolve friction are about maintaining coherence in a system that is always in motion.

Transition: From Sovereignty to Interdependence

Now we come to the part where the whole thing either has a chance to become real or remains an interesting line of thought.

I have attempted to describe a different ontology for law. But to go further, we have to imagine how anything like this could take shape within a system that is already so deeply embedded, so slow to move, and so structurally invested in maintaining itself. Legal systems do not change because they are persuaded. They change when the conditions they are built to manage begin to exceed their capacity to function. That is already happening, although it is rarely framed in those terms.

Environmental law is increasingly stretched by problems that do not respect jurisdictional boundaries. Financial regulation struggles to keep pace with networked risk. Infrastructure systems are becoming more fragile under pressures that extend across regions and scales. And the response, more often than not, is to layer additional rules onto existing structures, which can delay breakdown but does not resolve the underlying mismatch.

If we realistically want a relational framework to take hold, it is unlikely to do so by replacing sovereignty directly. Systems of Power Over are deeply reliant on the shields provided by the sovereignty ontology. So the more plausible path is that interdependence begins to emerge alongside sovereignty in places where the limitations of the existing system are already most visible. Those places tend to share the common feature of interdependence that is materially unavoidable.

Water systems are an obvious example. Which is why I have used them so frequently in this essay. A watershed’s functioning depends on coordinated activity across the entire system. In many parts of the world, forms of governance already exist that operate at this level, bringing together different communities to manage shared resources in ways that do not map neatly onto sovereign authority.

Food systems offer another entry point. The growing interest in regenerative agriculture, localized production, and soil restoration reflects a recognition that food cannot be treated as a purely industrial output without destabilizing the ecological systems that support it. Here again, coordination begins to form around systems rather than around isolated actors.

Energy systems are undergoing similar changes, particularly where decentralized generation and storage are becoming more viable. As these systems develop, they create new forms of interdependence that require coordination beyond traditional centralized models.

What is common across these domains is that they create opportunities for what might be called parallel legal structures, although they do not always present themselves this way. They take the form of agreements, protocols, and shared practices that organize how people interact with the systems they depend on. Through these kinds of infrastructure, we can define responsibilities, establish expectations, and create feedback mechanisms, all without necessarily being framed as law in the conventional sense. Over time, these structures will accumulate and form a layer of coordination that operates according to a different logic than that offered by sovereignty. So that participation becomes tied to stewardship, access to shared benefits depends on maintaining the conditions that produce them, and measurement is used to guide action rather than to enforce compliance from a distance.

At first, this infrastructure will coexist with existing legal systems. It may even rely on them for recognition, protection, or resolving specific disputes. But it will also develop its own coherence and ways of organizing relationships that do not depend on sovereign authority.

If it proves effective, something interesting is likely to emerge. As interdependence law becomes more prevalent, the load carried by sovereignty law is reduced, and a snowball effect means that more problems that would otherwise require intervention by authority are addressed within these relational structures. Coordination will become more localized where appropriate and more distributed across networks where necessary. At escalating speed, the need for centralized enforcement diminishes in certain areas because the systems themselves begin to regulate behavior through the conditions they create.

We should not assume that this will be a clean transition, though. It will be uneven, partial, and often contested. There will be points of friction where the two logics collide. Existing institutions will very likely resist or attempt to absorb these emerging structures. And there is a very real chance that relational approaches will get co-opted and reshaped to fit within the old ontology. There is also the possibility that they fail in certain contexts, especially where conditions for relational coordination are weak or where pressures are too intense.

None of this can be avoided entirely. What matters is whether the relational layer can demonstrate a different way of organizing life that is not only conceptually coherent but practically viable. If it can, it will exert pressure on the existing system, not through argument, but through performance. It will show that certain problems can be addressed more effectively when approached through interdependence rather than through sovereignty.

Transition as Three Pillars

Three mechanisms will drive this transition, operating in parallel and reinforcing one another.

First, ecological and systemic collapse. Climate change, biodiversity loss, supply chain fragility, and financial contagion are the sovereignty ontology failing at scale. As these failures intensify, the costs of maintaining the old framework become impossible to ignore. This is a deeply chaotic and harmful process, and when existing institutions cannot (and blatantly refuse to) solve a problem, people begin building alternatives.

Second, deliberate experimentation at bioregional and commons scales. As I have shown throughout this essay, Ostrom’s work demonstrates that communities can govern shared resources without sovereign authority. These experiments already exist in the form of watershed councils, community land trusts, cooperative energy systems, and regenerative agriculture networks. Each is a prototype of relational law in miniature. They define responsibilities, establish feedback mechanisms, and coordinate action across actors who are not bound by a shared sovereign. The task is not to design these from above but to support their proliferation, document their successes and failures, and build networks of mutual learning between them.

Third, intellectual conversion within legal institutions. This is the slowest pillar but also the most enduring. Judges, lawyers, policymakers, and legal scholars operate within sovereignty ontology not because they have examined it and found it to be true, but because it is the water they swim in. As relational concepts become more visible (through the failures of sovereignty, the success of experiments, and essays like this one), they begin to seep into legal reasoning. When a judge cites a watershed agreement, or a treaty incorporates a bioregional framework, or a regulatory standard reframes itself from compliance to system health, the accumulation over decades will constitute a reconfiguration.

No single pillar on its own will achieve a system of law built on an interdependence ontology. Collapse without experimentation produces chaos. Experimentation without intellectual conversion produces isolated successes that never scale. Intellectual conversion without collapse produces theory without adoption. All three pillars will be needed, and potentially other pillars I have not considered.

The transition will be uneven, contested, and long. Different domains will move at different speeds. Environmental law might reconfigure before criminal law, and local systems will probably transform before national ones. But I don’t think we should consider this a failure. It is a pattern seen in many complex adaptations where pockets of coherence emerge within a larger system, gradually reshaping the whole.

Unresolved Questions and Future Work

This essay has outlined an ontology, not a completed legal system. Many questions remain unanswered, and I do not pretend to have resolved them. They are offered here as invitations. I plan to write further on this subject, and I hope that others find value in this work and take up the challenge to carry it further. So here are some areas that I have deliberately left out of this initial foray into the subject.

Criminal law

If harm is understood as systemic imbalance rather than individual violation, how does criminal law function? A murderer and a victim are interdependent, but the victim is disproportionately harmed. The act of murder does not occur in isolation. It emerges from systemic failures in areas like mental health, community support, or access to resources that themselves provided benefits to others. A metamorphic approach would address those systemic conditions while still attending to the specific harm. But what does this mean for incarceration? For punitive measures? For the distinction between accountability and blame? These are open questions.

Family law

Custody, care, and domestic relationships are thoroughly interdependent. But they also involve unique vulnerabilities and histories of abuse that cannot be reduced to “system health” without losing something essential. How does a relational ontology protect the individual against the system, when it is the system itself that is the source of harm?

Contract law

If breach of contract is understood as a signal of systemic misalignment rather than a broken promise, what happens to reliance interests, to damages, to the expectation that promises will be kept? There is a path here (relational contract theory already exists), but it requires development.

The transition period

The most pressing practical question is how to protect the vulnerable during the transition from sovereignty to interdependence. Those who benefit most from the current system will resist. Those who are most exposed to harm cannot wait for full ontological transformation. What interim institutions are needed? What legal hybrids can function within sovereignty while building toward interdependence?

The role of the state

Does a relational ontology render the state obsolete, transform it, or coexist with it? My essay has leaned toward obsolescence, but I have not actually made that argument yet. So, for now, it is assumed, but not explored or decided.

I am one person. The full body of this work will require several generations of legal scholars, philosophers, ecologists, and communities to flesh out completely. This essay is an opening, not a closing.

Law for a Living World (You can treat this like a TL:DR)

If you follow the thread all the way through, the paradigm shift being proposed here is not a minor adjustment. It is not a policy reform or a refinement of existing doctrine. It is a change in how the law understands the world it is operating within.

Sovereignty made sense within a particular historical and material context. It provided a way to stabilize conflict, to organize authority, and to coordinate activity across defined boundaries. That structure has persisted because it works well for those who have benefited from sovereignty within certain limits, and because the institutions built around it are deeply entrenched.

But the conditions those institutions are trying to govern have changed. We are no longer dealing primarily with systems that can be contained within borders or understood as interactions between isolated units. The dominant processes shaping our world are interdependent, distributed, and dynamic. They operate across scales, they propagate through networks, and they generate outcomes that cannot be traced back to a single point of origin.

Trying to govern these processes through a framework built on separation creates a constant need for correction that relies on more rules, more coercion mechanisms, and more layers of oversight. The system very obviously strains to keep up, and in doing so, it reveals its limits.

What a relational ontology offers is a different starting point. It begins from the recognition that the conditions that sustain life are produced through relationships. From that recognition, a different understanding of law naturally emerges. Rights are no longer treated as abstract entitlements that exist independently of the systems that make them possible. They emerge from the maintenance of those systems. Governance transforms from asserting control to aligning activity with ecological and social realities. Justice becomes an ongoing process of transforming the conditions that produce harm rather than simply responding to its outcomes.

None of this simplifies the world. It does not remove conflict or eliminate the need for difficult decisions. What it does is bring those difficulties into closer alignment with the systems they arise from. It replaces a set of abstractions with a set of relationships that can be observed, engaged with, and, to some extent, shaped.

There is also a repositioning of where the law is located. Instead of standing apart from the world as a structure that governs it, law becomes embedded within the systems it is concerned with. It operates through the practices, agreements, and forms of coordination that sustain those systems over time. It is less about imposing order and more about maintaining the conditions under which order can emerge. This is why the transition cannot be forced. A framework like this cannot be introduced from the top down without contradicting its own premises. It has to develop within the systems it describes, through practices that demonstrate their own viability. It has to show, in concrete terms, that organizing around interdependence produces outcomes that are more stable, more adaptive, and more capable of sustaining life.

If that happens, the re-orientation begins to take on its own momentum. Existing legal structures do not disappear overnight. They adapt, sometimes slowly, sometimes unevenly, in response to pressures they cannot ignore. New forms of coordination gain recognition because they work. Concepts that once sat at the margins move toward the center as they become necessary for navigating the world as it is.

The language of sovereignty may persist, but it begins to sit within a broader understanding that recognizes the primacy of interdependence. Authority becomes less central as a concept because it becomes less useful as a way of organizing complex systems.

At that point, the law begins to resemble something closer to what it has always been trying to do, even if it has not always been able to articulate it clearly. It becomes a way of coordinating relationships so that the systems those relationships form can continue to support life. And in a world where those systems are under increasing strain, that may be the most important function law can serve.

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Most people I’ve spoken to think coordination begins once people agree. It’s an assumption that sits underneath almost every meeting, project, and collective effort, and it quietly shapes how people try to work together. This idea stems from decades of theory in the field of Management Studies, and is a simplified description of what management theorists call Planned Coordination. Planned coordination relies on a concept called the Shared Mental Model, in which everyone who is meant to work together is supposed to work better if they are all on the same page first. The idea is relatively simple: if you get the right people in the room, define the goal, align perspectives, and then move, everything should work out. It sounds reasonable because it describes what coordination looks like once it has already stabilized. It is a retroactive model that assumes the coordination framework is valid, purely because coordination happens. It never inspects the conditions that gave rise to the coordination, or the moment-by-moment dynamics and interplay of events, or the resulting forms of Power that emerge from the kinds of coordination at play.

But if you pay attention to how coordination actually unfolds in real time, agreement turns out to be the endpoint of a process that is usually invisible to the people inside it. By the time a group reaches alignment, something else has already happened. The field has already narrowed. Some directions have already been made easier to pursue, while others have already fallen away. Participation has already settled into a pattern that feels natural, even though it was shaped moment by moment.

Research on emergency medical teams has found that effective coordination happens through what they call “mutual adjustment” long before any formal plan is in place. An abstract description of how it works looks something like this: Team members read each other’s movements and the demands of the situation in real time, exemplified by things like a nurse moving to make room for a doctor without being asked, or someone handing over a piece of equipment before the request is made. The agreement on who does what never gets spoken out loud. Instead, it emerges from the action itself, resulting from attunement to the environment and the movement of everyone in it. And this kind of mutual adjustment is precisely where i think most emergent coordination happens.

Seven years ago, almost to the day, I joined a mutual aid group (I will refer to it as MAG for the remainder of this article, but the actual group has no name). We stay informal and under the radar because living in a theocratic monarchy that depicts itself as benevolent, means grassroots collective movements are treated as threats to an authoritarian rule that is supposed to have full control and prosperity for everyone.

When I first joined the MAG, every meeting started with the same assumption. We needed to agree on a plan before anyone could act. So we would spend two to three hours debating the wording of a call-to-action, or the exact process for intake, or whether dried chickpeas were better to distribute than canned chickpeas. But here is what I noticed. The meetings and the agreement never came first. The real coordination was already happening in WhatsApp groups and in the pre-meeting gathering as people trickled in. Two people would decide to share a ride to pick up supplies. Someone would text a neighbor about a food delivery. A small subgroup would start mapping out a route for distributing blankets. Agreement came at the end, not the beginning. By the time we voted on something, the actual work had already been coordinated in small ways that never made it into the minutes.

If you want to actually learn how to coordinate, you have to start earlier than agreement. You have to look at the level where things are still fluid, where nothing has settled, and direction is still being formed. That means going smaller than plans, roles, and most of the concepts people use to describe collaboration. It means paying attention to what is being put into motion.

I call that a thread.

Pieter de Beer

What is a Thread?

Introduction…

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a year ago · 8 likes · 2 comments · Pieter de Beer

A thread is the smallest unit of coordination. It is not necessarily an idea sitting in someone’s head, and it does not have to be a finished proposal. It is something that enters the coordination field and creates the possibility of movement. It could be a suggestion, a reframing, a question that shifts direction, or a next step that someone puts forward. Once it appears, something very simple happens. Either someone picks it up, or they don’t. That dynamic, repeated over and over again, is what produces everything people later call coordination.

Before I go any further, I want to say something important. Many groups already work with threads without calling them that. You might have been in meetings where someone throws out a half-formed idea, and someone else says, “That reminds me of something,” and runs with it. Or where a facilitator asks “what do we need right now?” instead of pushing a pre-set agenda. Or where a group explicitly decides to let two competing approaches run in parallel for a while before choosing.

These are all ways of working with threads. They show up in traditions like Agile retrospectives, Open Space technology, sociocracy, and consensus-based organizing. They show up in good teaching, in skilled parenting, and in any team that has learned to trust each other enough to leave space.

The thread framework is not a claim that nobody has ever done this before. It is an attempt to name what works, to understand why it works, and to make it easier to learn and teach. If your group already does some of these things, you are ahead of the curve. What this document offers is a language to talk about what you are already doing, and a way to notice the moments when you accidentally shut down the very movement you want to create.

If you start watching for threads, meetings look very different. Instead of a neutral exchange of ideas, you see multiple lines of action being proposed and either carried or abandoned. Instead of asking what the group decided, you start noticing how a particular direction became the one that held. You begin to see that coordination is less about choosing between options and more about which threads manage to sustain themselves long enough to shape what happens next.

That shift in perception is the first step, but it is not enough on its own. Seeing threads does not automatically mean you can work with them. Most people continue to coordinate in ways that unintentionally shut down the very movement they are trying to create.

Planned Coordination is mostly just Power Over

Closed Threads

The most common mistake (I call it a mistake because it eventually leads to Power Over) when humans attempt coordination starts, fittingly, at the point of initiation. People assume that to coordinate well, they need to be clear, complete, and correct. So they present fully formed ideas, tightly defined plans, or strongly framed positions. What that actually does is close the thread. It leaves very little space for others to enter, which means others respond to it as something to evaluate rather than something to carry. For closed threads like these, agreement becomes the only way forward, and if agreement does not happen quickly, the thread dies.

In those early MAG meetings, people would show up with fully formed proposals. A three-page document on how to handle donations. A detailed roster system for volunteers. A complete schedule for the next month. The person presenting had done all the thinking ahead of time. But instead of feeling grateful, the rest of us felt locked out. There was nothing to add. So we would pick at small flaws instead of engaging with the idea. The proposal would get voted down or tabled. The thread died. And the person who brought it would stop bringing new ideas. We confused completeness with clarity, and it killed our momentum.

If you want a thread to move, it has to be open enough to be taken up. It needs direction, but it cannot be fully resolved. It has to leave handles that others can grab onto and extend. This does not mean being vague or indecisive. It means understanding that coordination requires shared construction. A thread that cannot be shaped by others will not travel far, no matter how good it is.

Over-controlled Threads

The second mistake shows up once a thread has been picked up. People often try to control how it develops. They correct interpretations too quickly, narrow the acceptable ways it can be extended, or pull it back toward the original framing. That creates a form of friction that is easy to miss. Others may continue to engage, but their engagement becomes constrained. The thread stops evolving and starts repeating. Over time, participation drops, even if no one explicitly withdraws.

I saw this happen whenever someone tried to delegate tasks in our MAG. A member would ask for help with a task. Someone would volunteer. But then the first person would keep checking in. “Did you do it this way?”, or “That is not exactly what I meant.”, or worse, “Let me just do it myself.” The volunteer would keep showing up, but the energy drained out of them. They stopped offering ideas. They just waited for instructions. The thread was technically still moving, but it was no longer alive. It was just one person pulling it forward while everyone else held on without contributing. This left both the delegator and the volunteer burnt out.

Working with threads that are meant to generate engaged and collective coordination requires a different approach. Once something has been taken up, it is no longer fully yours. It will change. The question is not how to preserve it, but how to stay with it as it evolves. This requires us to pay attention to how others are extending it, noticing where it is gaining energy, and making small adjustments that keep it moving without locking it in place. Coordination here is less about directing and more about maintaining conditions for movement.

Divergence is Strength, not Weakness

The third mistake I’ve noticed is when threads begin to diverge. In most groups, divergence is treated as a problem to be resolved quickly. Competing threads are collapsed into a single direction as soon as possible, often in the name of efficiency or clarity. What this actually does is reduce the range of possibilities the group can explore. It creates early closure, which can feel like progress but often leads to weaker outcomes.

Our MAG had a recurring debate about whether to focus on food distribution or housing support. Both were urgent. Both had people passionate about them. But the group kept trying to settle the question. We would take a vote. Food would win one week. Housing would win the next. We kept forcing our coordination into a single direction. What we did not realize at the time, and in retrospect was blatantly obvious, was that the two threads needed to run in parallel. The people doing food knew things the housing people needed to know. The housing people had contacts that could help with food. When we finally stopped forcing a choice and let both continue, the group actually started moving faster, not slower.

There is another way to handle this. Instead of collapsing threads too quickly, you can allow multiple threads to run in parallel for a period of time. This approach, when done right, creates a wider field of exploration, where different approaches can develop far enough to reveal their strengths and limitations. The role of coordination here is not to force convergence, but to track how these threads are developing and to notice when alignment begins to emerge naturally. If convergence happens at that point, it is usually more stable because it has been shaped by multiple perspectives rather than imposed prematurely.

Simple Shifts, Big Results

These three shifts, opening threads at initiation, allowing them to evolve without over-control, and resisting premature convergence, change the feel of coordination quite significantly. The space becomes more participatory, movement becomes more continuous, and outcomes tend to be more resilient because they are not dependent on a single line of thinking.

This also explains why most coordination we see defaults to more controlling patterns. When threads are closed too early, tightly controlled as they develop, and forced into quick convergence, participation narrows, and the space becomes “easier to manage”. Fewer variables, fewer surprises, fewer deviations. It feels efficient, but it comes at a cost. Over time, fewer people initiate, fewer ideas are explored, and the systems that are built with these threads become brittle. What remains is a pattern where direction is set by a small number of threads that consistently dominate, whether intentionally or not.

If you shift the way threads are handled, a different pattern starts to appear. More people initiate. Threads build on each other instead of replacing each other. Movement becomes distributed rather than centralized. At a certain point, the coordination no longer depends on any single person holding it together. The pattern itself begins to carry forward because enough threads are aligned in a way that sustains momentum.

From the outside, that can look like a highly effective team, a strong community, or a movement that has found its rhythm. But what is actually happening is much simpler. The coordination has reached a point where threads are being initiated, taken up, and adapted in a way that keeps the system moving without constant intervention.

Let it Cook

There is one more element that matters here, and it sits at a more personal level. Most people drop threads too quickly. If something is not immediately picked up or if it meets resistance, the instinct is to withdraw and try something else. Over time, this reduces the number of threads that enter the space at all. Coordination becomes reactive rather than generative.

Learning to coordinate also means learning to stay with a thread a little longer. Not forcing it, but not abandoning it at the first sign of friction either. Sometimes a thread needs time to be understood, or it needs to be reframed slightly to become accessible. The ability to hold that line of action without immediate reinforcement is what allows new patterns of coordination to form, especially in spaces where existing patterns are deeply ingrained.

When we first introduced the thread framework (myself and a fellow Marxist in the group), it did not land. I mentioned it in a meeting. People nodded and seemed to agree with the abstract concept, but nothing changed. The instinct was to drop it. Assume it was not the right moment or the right group. But we stayed with it. My friend started naming threads when she saw them. “That suggestion is a thread. Let’s see who picks it up.” I started asking open questions instead of making closed proposals. “Here is a loose direction. What would it need to become actionable?” It took several weekly meetings to begin catching on. But slowly, people started using the language themselves. The thread of the framework itself had to be held long enough to be taken up.

The same fashion show research I mentioned above documented a specific pattern. Stage managers would introduce a new way of organizing a task. Sometimes it was picked up immediately. Sometimes it was met with resistance or silence. The managers who succeeded were those who did not withdraw the thread at the first sign of friction. They reframed it slightly. They found one person willing to try it. They let the thread sit and resurface later. The thread that died at first often came back to life simply because someone held it a little longer.

Stop Focusing on Agreement

When we put all of this together, coordination is less a problem of alignment and more a practice of working with movement. We are not trying to control outcomes directly. We are shaping the conditions under which movement happens. We are paying attention to what enters our coordination field, what gets carried, and how it evolves.

Research on multi-agent systems demonstrates that coordination can emerge without any explicit agreement or negotiation. In simulated environments, agents following simple cooperative rules (like putting away a tool that someone else will need) produced global coordination even though no agent ever agreed on a plan with another agent. The coordination happened through action, not through alignment.

Our Mutual Aid group looks different these days. Meetings are shorter. More people initiate. Someone says, “What if we tried X?” and someone else says, “I can take that and do Y with it,” and a third person says, “That connects to what Z is working on.” We rarely need votes or formal agreement. The coordination just moves. And the group has become more resilient because it does not depend on any single person holding it together. The pattern continuously carries itself forward.

Once people start working at that level, the question changes. It is no longer about how to get everyone on the same page. It becomes a question of what kinds of threads we are introducing, what kinds of threads we are supporting, and what kind of coordination those patterns are producing over time.

I am not arguing against plans or agreements. They have their place. But they are a special case. They work when conditions are stable. When conditions are not stable, you need something else. You need the ability to coordinate in real time without waiting for everyone to agree. And that ability starts with seeing threads.

That is the level where coordination becomes something we can actually learn. Next time you are in a meeting, try this: watch for the moment someone offers a half-formed possibility. Notice whether it gets picked up or dropped. And if you can, be the one who picks it up.

This is the first part of a series I want to write about How to Coordinate. In upcoming essays, I will go into more detail on the different aspects of coordination and how small differences in how we approach coordination can have dramatic effects on the resulting forms of power.

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If I am honest, I have suspected for some time that he would eventually be cut loose from the Epstein Protection Stack. Not because of any single explosive revelation, but because of the slow administrative choreography that has been unfolding over years. When we saw Andrew’s titles withdrawn, Military patronages stripped, HRH usage suspended, and public appearances minimized, it could just have been the Royal Family distancing themselves from a liability nightmare, and it could be a protection starting to sever a connection in order to protect the stack. The shift from royal representative to quasi-private citizen did not happen in one rupture. It happened through governance decisions. And I now realize, what we have seen over the last while was the failure of Andrew’s protection stack. He was one node within a much larger configuration. And if that is true, then the protection architecture around him was never singular. Each person who intersected with Epstein was likely to be the center of gravity for their own insulation system, their own legal teams, financial buffers, political relationships, jurisdictional complexities, and reputational shields. What I had been thinking of as a single Protection Stack may be better understood as overlapping stacks, a layered mesh rather than a pyramid.

Seen this way, the withdrawal of titles and ceremonial status does not signal collapse. It signals reconfiguration within a superstructure that has redundancy built into it. Protection in such a system does not require central command. It emerges from overlap. Multiple actors with independent incentives to avoid uncontrolled unraveling generate a stabilizing field. Responsibility fragments naturally across institutions, jurisdictions, and professional classes. Exposure can be contained not because everyone coordinates consciously, but because each stack has reason to prevent cascading escalation. In that context, cutting one node loose does not threaten the whole. It may even strengthen it.

This concept of a ”Super Stack” is something I will need to think about more, and delve into a bit deeper in my own time, because it complicates my Heat vs Force Model significantly. Rupture in a single protection stack suddenly isn’t enough to suggest the emergence of Force, and will very likely only result in heat. So for now, I want to get back to Andrew, and why I think today’s arrest is the Epstein protection stack cutting him loose.

The financial signals reinforced that sense. We’ve seen reports of Andrew’s allowances being cut, disputes over security funding, and the protracted Royal Lodge negotiations. Money and security are not peripheral details in elite systems. They are the very levers of insulation. To remove discretionary funding and state-backed security is to renegotiate who sits inside the protective perimeter, and while moves like that rarely make front-page drama, they still matter. They indicate that the institution is recalculating cost versus exposure. When shielding someone becomes more expensive than distancing them, the direction of reconfiguration becomes more predictable.

The tonal shift over the last year was perhaps the most telling. Palace language moved into procedural neutrality, offering readiness to support any police investigation. That phrasing does not resist, or contest jurisdiction. It does not signal concern about reputational harm to the institution. It reads like administrative acquiescence. Cooperation with law enforcement became a signal that the Royal family was no longer providing the friction which would make investigation, and possibly prosecution, costly to the investigators and prosecutors. Friction is what usually sustains the stack. When friction disappears, procedures begin to move.

At the same time, the evidentiary environment changed. The DOJ document release has not, as the redacted culprits in those documents might have hoped, reduced the fervor by offering a cathartic outlet. Instead, avenues of analysis have deepened the global interest in the entire Epstein affair. Whatever I might think about the broader Heat versus Force dynamic of large dumps, once material enters formal investigative channels across jurisdictions, the cost of ignoring it rises. UK police reportedly established coordination structures to process Epstein-linked material. That kind of formalization matters, because it transforms the entire scandal into evidentiary intake. And once intake exists, triage decisions become inevitable. The stack asks itself a simple question: does shielding this individual protect the architecture, or does sacrificing him protect it better?

Which brings me back to my own framework. An arrest is not Force. Device access is not Force. Even prosecution is not automatically Force. Force would mean cascading accountability that compels redesign. It would mean supervisory chains exposed and tested. It would mean legislative or procedural reforms that close the discretionary gaps which allowed the protection stack to function in the first place. It would mean pressure moving upward and outward, not merely inward onto a single body.

What Andrew’s arrest looks like, at least at this stage, is something else. It looks like managed exposure. The reputational layer was detached long ago. The financial layer renegotiated. The institutional brand insulated. If internal assessment concluded that device access poses limited contagion risk to higher nodes, then cutting him loose is rational. It converts systemic risk into individual liability. It channels outrage into spectacle while preserving architecture.

People will interpret this as escalation, and I sincerely hope I am wrong and that this really is the beginning of change. But history suggests that without structural redesign pressure, these moments burn hot and then dissipate. I am not expecting major change to stem from this spectacle, not because I underestimate the significance of the arrest, but because I have watched how Heat behaves when it is not translated into Force. Systems do not collapse because an interface is exposed. They collapse when exposure reorganizes constraint.

If I am wrong, it will not be because the arrest happened. It will be because pressure cascades beyond Andrew. Until then, this reads less like the stack failing and more like the stack choosing where to shed weight.

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There are many ways a civilization can end.

It can end with fire, flood, famine, or a slow grinding shrug in the stock market, followed by a quiet announcement that nobody is getting pensions anymore. It can end with flags and speeches and men in uniforms and their bosses in suits insisting, with great passion, that the catastrophe is actually a return to greatness.

Or it can end the way it was ending for most of the outside world now, which was with a series of small system failures so mundane and repetitive that nobody could muster the energy to dramatize them properly. One week, there were shortages of antibiotics. The next week, the regional authority that still called itself “the state” discovered it could not pay the people who operated the state. Then came the rolling blackouts, the broken bridges, the late deliveries that simply never arrived, and a rising tide of armed men who looked like they had been provisioned by a cartel of nihilist fashion designers.

Fernvale watched all of this the way you might watch a neighbor’s house quietly sliding into the sea. There was sympathy, there was preparedness, and there was a certain resigned sense that if somebody insisted on building their entire home on the edge of a collapsing cliff, the only ethical thing to do was offer rope, tea, and a place to store their family heirlooms before gravity made all the important decisions.

Fernvale was not alone. It was a node in an expanding network of prefigurative post-capitalist communities, seed-sharing enclaves, repair cooperatives, water councils, and food commons, all connected by bike couriers and radio relays and the occasional human being who simply walked from one place to another with a bundle of pamphlets and an expression of deep personal commitment to being ungovernable.

The network had many names, none of which stuck, because nothing that existed to avoid hierarchy could ever agree on what to call itself without becoming suspicious of the coercion of language. People tended to refer to it simply as “the links,” or “the constellation,” or, if they were feeling particularly poetic, “the patchwork.”

The patchwork was growing. Unfortunately, so were the raiders.

They came in many forms. Some were organized, some were desperate, some were merely bored and armed. A few were remnants of collapsing security forces who had discovered that the uniform still worked if you were willing to ignore the law you used to pretend to uphold. And some were the entrepreneurial class of the apocalypse, men with rifles and spreadsheets who believed that when money stopped working, violence was the natural next currency.

Fernvale knew all this. Fernvale had plans. Fernvale did not panic. Which, as it turned out, was exactly what made Steve panic.

Steve experienced the outside world’s worsening condition with the quiet excitement of a man who had been waiting his whole life for people to finally admit he was right. Civilization was collapsing. Authority was failing. Danger was rising. Surely now Fernvale would stop its endless circles and celebrations and finally accept what Steve had been trying to explain for months. Surely now they would beg him to take charge.

It was at about this point, and not a moment before, that Steve discovered an important limitation of his worldview. Because Fernvale, when confronted with fear, did not grow more obedient. It grew more organized. Not in the satisfying way Steve enjoyed, with ranks and roles and clear lines of command, but in the irritating way that starlings organize, or mycelium, or a group chat that produces a functioning mutual aid response in under eight minutes. It was not chaos. It was not hierarchical. It was competence without ownership. And Steve hated it because it rendered him unnecessary.

The immediate cause of Steve’s next plan for taking over Fernvale arrived in the form of a courier named Pippa, who rolled into town on a bicycle that had clearly survived several apocalypses and was not impressed by any of them. Pippa brought a sack of dried beans and a folded piece of paper that smelled faintly of smoke.

The paper was a report from a neighboring enclave. It described a raid on a community granary two valleys away. It was brief. It was practical. He couldn’t see the full message, but he did see it ended with a sentence that made his skin tighten with delight.

They moved like they had done this before.

Steve ran it through his mind twice, then a third time, savoring the phrase the way a gourmand savors a sauce. Done this before. Repeatable. Predictable. An enemy. A threat.

A justification.

That evening, Fernvale gathered in the Council Meadow to discuss the report. The Council Meadow, in case you are imagining something with marble columns and ceremonial guards, was a patch of grass with a few stumps for sitting and a tree that had never once respected the sanctity of political deliberation. Clementine, being a well-respected goat, wandered through the gathering with the casual authority of someone who knew nobody would stop them.

Mara was there early, sitting cross-legged with a notebook open on her lap, already sketching out what looked like a web of connections rather than a plan. Mara coordinated threat awareness across several enclaves. This did not mean she was in charge. It meant people told her things, and she told other people those things, and then everyone pretended this wasn’t a form of power because it was happening politely. She was one of those people who made Steve uncomfortable because she possessed the single most offensive trait imaginable in a post-collapse world. She was quietly right.

She was not physically imposing, did not raise her voice, speak in slogans, or issue commands. And possibly what irked Steve most of all, she had the infuriating habit of listening to someone’s proposal, nodding thoughtfully, and then asking one question that caused the entire proposal to collapse like a tent with a missing peg.

Steve could not decide if she was dangerous or merely irritating. Either way, he watched her.

Rowan arrived with a basket of bread, a thermos of soup, and the calm gait of someone who could jog away from trouble if they felt like it, even if they rarely felt like it. Rowan was part of a rotating defense cohort that moved between enclaves, helping with patrols, escorting couriers, de-escalating conflicts at trade crossings, and occasionally lifting heavy things for elders who refused to admit they were elders.

Rowan did not look like what Steve imagined a protector should look like, which in Steve’s mind involved hardened eyes, grim silence, and the faint smell of gun oil. Instead, they looked like someone you might trust to water your plants. This, Steve suspected, was exactly the problem.

The circle formed as the report was read aloud. People asked the kind of simple, practical questions that made it difficult for fear to become theatrical in the way Steve could use.

“How many people?” “What weapons?” “What direction did they come from?” “What did they take?” “Did anyone get hurt?” “Was there a pattern?” None of which othered or demonized the raiders.

Steve listened, vibrating with the desire to seize the moment. He waited until there was a lull, then stood up with the solemnity of a man who has rehearsed his posture in the mirror.

“What happened to the granary,” Steve said, “is the beginning of what will happen to all of us unless we establish proper defensive protocols.”

There was a small pause. Someone’s dog sneezed.

Steve continued, undeterred by the universe’s lack of respect. “This is not the time for improvisation. This is not the time for casual optimism. This is the time for structure.” He reached into his satchel and produced, with a flourish that would have made sense if he were unveiling a new constitution, a laminated chart. It was color-coded.

The top left corner read: FERNVALE THREAT LEVEL SYSTEM.

The chart included five threat levels, each named after a historical catastrophe. Steve had spent a great deal of time choosing the names. It had felt important. He had, in fact, woken up at 3 a.m. on two separate occasions to revise the wording because the difference between “Worrying” and “Concerning” seemed, in his mind, like the difference between civilization and collapse.

“We are currently at Level Two,” he announced.

Mara, sitting on a stump with a cup of tea, raised a hand. “What does Level Two mean?”

“It means,” Steve said, and he enjoyed this because it sounded like authority, “that we implement Stage Two measures.”

“What are Stage Two measures?” asked Jules the potter, who looked like they had not slept since the previous decade and regarded new systems the way a cat regards a bath.

Steve, with what he felt was an even better flourish, held up a second laminated sheet. This one was titled: EMERGENCY MEASURES REGARDING PROTECTION.

It contained bullet points, sub-bullet points, and a small box at the bottom labeled “Escalation Pathway.” Steve watched their faces as he read it, waiting for the moment when the town collectively recognized that he was the only sane person left alive. Instead, he saw curiosity. Curiosity was not fear, he noted with an internal alarm bell ringing.

“First,” Steve said hurriedly, “we establish a standing guard rotation. Permanent shifts. A perimeter. We restrict access points. We implement identity verification.”

“What counts as identity verification?” asked someone in a knitted hat.

“Documents,” Steve said.

A faint ripple went through the crowd, the way ripples go through a pond when someone mentions taxes.

“What documents?” asked Mira.

Steve blinked. “Official documents.”

“From where?” Mira pressed.

Steve hesitated. Official was, in his mind, a self-evident concept. Official came from authority. Authority came from, well, authority. He was not accustomed to being asked where it came from.

He recovered quickly. “From us,” he said. “We issue them.”

Mara’s pen stopped moving. She looked up. “So we create an institution that issues papers,” she said, as if repeating something she had heard in a dream and found implausible. “And then we create an institution that checks the papers.”

“Yes,” Steve said, relieved that someone was finally tracking.

“And then,” Mara continued, “we create an institution that decides what happens when someone doesn’t have the paper.”

Steve felt a surge of satisfaction. “Exactly.”

Mara nodded slowly and wrote something down. Steve caught the words at an angle: paper spiral.

Rowan, meanwhile, had poured soup into small cups and was passing them around the circle. This was, Steve believed, a deeply unserious response to a security crisis. They offered Steve a cup. Steve did not want to take it. He took it anyway, because it would have been socially awkward not to, and Steve had learned that Fernvale’s soft power operated through the weaponization of politeness.

The soup was good. It was deeply annoying that it was good.

Rowan sat down and looked at Steve with mild interest, the way you look at a person who is explaining a hobby that you do not share but might be harmless.

“Can I ask a question?” Rowan said.

Steve, warmed by soup and the intoxicating aroma of imagined authority, nodded.

Rowan tilted their head. “Is this really an emergency,” they asked, “or is it just urgent in your opinion?”

A few people laughed. Not meanly. Genuinely.

Steve stiffened. “It is an emergency.”

Rowan nodded. “Okay,” they said. “Second question. Who exactly would we be checking papers for, and what do we do if they don’t have them?”

Steve opened his mouth.

He realized, with a small shock, that his plan had a box labeled “Consequences” but the consequences were vague, because writing the consequences down made them sound like violence, and Steve preferred his violence implied, like respectable people did.

“We deny entry,” he said finally.

Rowan’s expression remained calm. “And if they’re hungry?”

“They can go elsewhere.”

“And if elsewhere is burning?” Rowan asked, still calm.

Steve felt irritation rise. This was emotional sabotage disguised as questions. “We can’t take everyone,” he snapped. “That’s unrealistic.”

Mira murmured, “We already do,” as if this were a simple logistical fact, like rainfall.

Steve pressed on. He moved to the second portion of his plan, where his true genius shone.

“Third,” he said, “we establish a command node. A central coordinator for defense. Someone with authority to make rapid decisions without waiting for consensus.”

He said this slowly, letting it land. The meadow went quiet in a way that made Steve hopeful. He waited for someone to protest. When nobody did, he felt triumph, so he continued.

“That coordinator will be supported by a small security committee.”

Jules yawned. “Who picks them?”

“Obviously,” Steve said, “people who are competent.”

Mara looked up again. “Define competent.”

Steve frowned. “Competent is... competent.”

Rowan sipped soup. “I’m competent,” they said mildly.

Steve glared at them. “You’re... you’re not in charge of anything.”

Rowan shrugged. “That’s why I still sleep.”

A second wave of laughter moved through the circle. Someone coughed to hide it. Someone failed. Steve felt, with sudden clarity, the shape of the problem. Fernvale did not fear the outside world enough to accept hierarchy. They were treating danger like a project. He needed to raise the stakes.

So he did what Steve always did when he wanted to force the world into seriousness. He produced a map. It was, naturally, laminated. He had drawn it himself, which was evident because it contained far too many arrows and none of the arrows went anywhere that actually existed. He had labeled the valley edges with phrases like “Potential Infiltration Vector” and “Hostile Approach Corridor.”

He pointed to a spot on the map. “They could come from here,” he said. “Or here. Or here.”

“That’s most of the map,” Mira observed.

“Yes,” Steve said, pleased. “That is the point.”

Mara’s voice was gentle. “Steve,” she said, “do you know what the raiders want?”

“They want resources,” Steve said.

“Do they?” Mara asked. She held up her notebook, now filled with a web of lines connecting places and notes. “The raid two valleys over took grain and tools, yes. But they also took batteries, and medicine, and blankets. Which means they aren’t just stealing. They’re provisioning.”

Steve’s pulse quickened. “Exactly. Which means they are organized.”

Mara nodded. “Yes. Which means they have logistics. Which means they have constraints.” Steve blinked. Constraints were not the emotional response he was hoping for, but Mara continued, as if patiently explaining that gravity existed. “They avoid places with visible watchers. They hit places with single storage points. They don’t linger where people can respond quickly.”

Steve frowned. “So we need watchers.”

Rowan set their cup down. “We already have watchers,” they said. “We just don’t call them that because it makes people itchy.”

“It’s called a patrol,” Steve snapped.

“It’s called checking on the water line and escorting Pippa home,” Rowan replied. “We just do it in a way that doesn’t turn people into suspects.”

Steve looked at them sharply. “That’s naive.”

Rowan’s eyebrows lifted. “Is it?”

Steve leaned forward, suddenly earnest in a way that was almost convincing. “You think kindness stops violence?”

Rowan’s tone remained mild. “No,” they said. “I think violence escalates when people feel cornered. I think we keep people uncornered. You can call it moral purity if you want, but it’s just good tactics.”

Steve felt something twist in his chest. He disliked Rowan’s calm. He disliked their competence. He disliked, most of all, that their words sounded like strategy without the trappings of authority. It made his entire worldview feel, for a moment, like costume jewelry.

He recovered by doing what he always did when threatened. He became hostile. “That’s not defense,” Steve said coldly. “That’s wishful thinking. Defense requires readiness, discipline, obedience, and the willingness to use force.”

Rowan nodded, as if Steve had just described the weather. “Force is a tool,” they said. “So are rakes.”

Steve’s gaze flicked, involuntarily, to a pile of gardening tools near the meadow, left there from earlier in the day when someone had been planting something that would surely become a salad later. The tools lay in a tangled heap. A rake. A hoe. A spade. A pair of pruning shears. They were peaceful objects, until you imagined them otherwise. Which Steve did constantly.

“It’s exactly because those are tools,” Steve said, seizing on the point, “that they can become weapons. We need to secure them.”

Mira blinked. “Secure... the rakes?”

Steve heard, in her tone, the beginnings of mockery, and it made him furious. “Yes,” he said. “We should not leave potential weapons lying around.”

Jules rubbed their face. “We also leave rocks lying around.”

“Rocks are not organized,” Steve snapped.

Mara’s pen paused again. “Steve,” she said, “what do you want to happen when someone picks up a rake?”

“I want,” Steve said, “to know why they’re picking it up.”

Rowan’s mouth twitched in what might have been a smile or might have been indigestion. “Usually,” they said, “it’s because they want to rake.”

“That got another laugh, and Steve hated that the meadow had become a comedy club at the exact moment he was trying to deliver the birth of a security state.

He slapped his laminated chart against his knee. “You’re not taking this seriously,” he said.

Mara looked at him for a long moment. “We are taking it seriously,” she said. “We’re just not going to respond to danger by building the kind of structure that creates more danger.”

Steve opened his mouth, but Rowan spoke first. “Can I offer a counter-proposal?”

Steve’s stomach tightened. “Fine,” he said, as if granting mercy.

Rowan gestured, not theatrically, but practically, toward the circle. “We map the region together with the neighboring enclaves,” they said. “We set up radio check-ins at predictable times, so no one has to guess who’s alive. We establish escort routes for couriers. We distribute storage, so no one site is a single point of failure. We train more people in de-escalation and in basic defense, so protection isn’t centralized. And we decide, explicitly, what we will do if someone shows up hungry, armed, or both.”

Steve felt his frustration flare. “That’s exactly I just said,” he snapped. “Just without authority.”

Rowan nodded. “Yes,” they said, unbothered. “Without authority.”

Steve wanted to shout. He wanted to pound the stump like a judge. He wanted to insist that without authority, the plan was merely a suggestion. But Fernvale treated suggestions the way other societies treated laws. If you said something in a circle and everyone nodded, it became real. Not because someone enforced it. Because people did it. Which meant Rowan’s plan was not weaker than his. It was stronger. And Steve could feel, for reasons he could not name, that this bothered him more than the threat of raiders.

Mara raised her hand slightly, as if to apologize for interrupting. “Rowan’s plan aligns with what we’re already doing across the patchwork,” she said. “We can formalize it without centralizing it.”

Steve seized on the word. “Formalize,” he said. “Finally. Yes. And that requires a coordinator.”

Mara’s gaze was calm. “No,” she said. “It requires a shared schedule.”

Steve blinked. “That’s... that’s just coordination.”

“Yes,” Mara said. “Not command.”

Steve stared at her. He could not understand how someone could be so effective without wanting to seize the opportunity for dominance. He suspected she was lying to herself. Or lying to everyone. Or worst of all, being sincere.

The discussion continued. People spoke, asked questions, offered modifications. It was messy and slow and maddening. And then, because the universe has a cruel sense of timing, a radio crackled.

Pippa stood, holding the hand radio to her ear, her face suddenly serious. Everyone quieted, not because anyone ordered them to, but because they could feel the shift. A voice came through, distorted by distance and static.

“South road,” it said. “Three men. Rifles. Moving toward the ridge. Not fast. Watching.”

The meadow went still. Steve’s heart thumped. This was it. This was the moment when fear would finally assert itself. This was the moment when Fernvale would realize they needed him.

Steve stood up, his laminated charts trembling in his hand like scripture. “We implement Level Three,” he declared.

Mira looked at him blankly. “What’s Level Three again?”

Steve felt his soul leave his body briefly.

Rowan was already on their feet, not hurried, not dramatic. They moved like someone who had done this before, and who did not need to announce it. “Who’s closest to the south ridge?” Rowan asked. Two people raised their hands. Rowan nodded. “Go with Pippa,” they said. “Stay visible. Don’t approach. Just watch and report. Mara, can you relay to the other enclaves?”

Mara was already moving. Nobody asked Steve what to do. Nobody consulted his chart. Nobody cared about Level Three. Steve watched, appalled, as the town executed a response that resembled his plan in outcome and absolutely none of his plan in structure. He tried, desperately, to regain narrative control. “We need a perimeter,” he snapped. “We need an armed response.”

Rowan looked at him. “Do you have a rifle?” they asked. Steve did not.

It turned out that fascism, for all its love of weaponry, did not automatically grant one access to weapons in a society where weapons were treated as dangerous tools rather than identity accessories.

Rowan’s voice stayed calm. “Then you don’t have an armed response,” they said. “You have an opinion.”

Steve felt humiliation burn up his throat. “This is exactly what I mean,” he said. “You’re unprepared. You’re weak.”

Rowan stepped closer. Not threatening. Just close enough that Steve could see their eyes, steady and clear. “You’re shaking,” they said quietly. “Do you want to be useful?”

Steve’s jaw tightened. “I want to be in charge.”

Rowan nodded as if this was exactly what she suspected. “Okay,” they said. “You can help by making tea for the people who are going to stand watch. Fear makes you stupid if you don’t hydrate.”

Steve stared. He could not tell which was worse, being excluded from defense or being instructed to make tea like a domestic servant. He chose the only dignified option left to him. He made the tea with furious precision. He boiled water. He measured leaves. He poured with the grim focus of a man performing a ritual of resentment. He carried cups out to the square, handing them to people who accepted them with warm thanks that made his skin crawl.

“Thanks, Steve,” said Mara. “This helps.”

Steve’s hands trembled slightly as he refilled the kettle. He told himself it was anger. It might have been something else.

An hour passed before the reports came in. The three men on the ridge had stopped. They watched. They did not approach. They did not test the town’s response. They moved away, slowly, as if making a note.

Rowan listened, nodded, and said, “Okay.”

Steve waited for the dramatic escalation. There was none. Mara returned, sat down, and began sending messages to other enclaves. She was already turning the incident into a data point.

Steve could not stand it. “They’ll be back,” he said. “They were scouting.”

“Yes,” Mara said. “So we’ll adjust routes, shift storage, increase escorts.”

Steve slapped his laminated chart on the table beside the tea kettle. “This is exactly why we need centralized authority. To respond faster.”

Rowan looked at him. “We responded in under ten minutes,” they said.

Steve’s mouth opened, then closed again. He had not expected that.

“And nobody panicked,” Rowan added.

Steve heard it then, hidden beneath the words. Not pride. Not mockery. A quiet compliment. It struck him like a stone.

Steve’s voice came out harsher than he intended. “That’s luck,” he snapped.

Rowan’s eyebrows lifted. “No,” they said. “That’s practice.”

Mara looked at Steve with a calmness that felt, to Steve, like being observed by a mountain. “Steve,” she said, “you’re good at spotting danger. You just don’t understand what danger is.”

Steve’s chest tightened. “Danger is men with guns,” he said.

Mara nodded. “Yes. And danger is also building a system that makes everyone afraid of each other, because then the men with guns don’t need to break in. They get invited.”

Steve felt his stomach drop, as if the ground had shifted under his feet without permission. He hated that sentence. He hated how true it sounded.

He tried to recover by reaching for contempt. “So your plan is to be welcoming to armed strangers.”

“No,” Rowan said patiently. “Our plan is to be unpredictable in a way that doesn’t require a boss.”

Steve’s laugh came out bitter. “Unpredictable. That’s what you call this.”

Rowan shrugged. “It’s what raiders hate. They love systems. They love routines. They love central stores and single leaders.”

Mara’s voice was gentle. “They love someone they can threaten,” she said.

Steve’s skin prickled, because it was, in some deep part of him, comforting to imagine being that someone. The leader. The threatened. The necessary. And he realized he hated that too.

The meeting resumed. The town agreed to Rowan’s proposals as a set of shared commitments that would be carried into the regional network. Mara scribbled a schedule that looked like a woven pattern rather than a chain of command. People volunteered. People swapped roles. People offered to teach others. The pile of tools remained in the grass, still just tools, still not secured in an armory, still not turned into an excuse for policing.

Steve watched his Security Coup dissolve, not in a dramatic clash, but in something far more humiliating. Irrelevance.

When the circle finally broke, Rowan approached Steve with a cup of tea, as if this was not the single most insulting symbol in the universe.

“You did good,” Rowan said.

Steve stared at them. “I made tea.”

Rowan nodded. “Yes,” they said. “And nobody spiraled.”

Steve’s voice came out sharp. “This is not a victory.”

Rowan’s expression remained calm. “No,” they said. “It’s a lesson.”

Steve felt a flare of anger that was too intense for the situation. “You’re all so pleased with yourselves,” he snapped. “You think you can out-cooperate violence.”

Rowan did not flinch. “We don’t out-cooperate violence,” they said. “We out-network it. Violence is complex. It needs victims. It needs predictability. We deny it those things.”

Steve’s eyes narrowed. “And what happens when they come back with more men?”

Rowan’s gaze held steady. “Then we do what we always do,” they said. “We respond together, without giving anyone the thrill of being the hero.”

Steve heard it as an accusation. It wasn’t, but he felt accused anyway. It was simply a description of a world in which Steve’s preferred identity had no breathing room.

Later, alone in his room, Steve opened his notebook.

He wrote with furious neatness, as if precision could restore dignity.

Day 63: Hostile scout observed south ridge. Community response rapid. No centralized command. Rowan interfered with establishment of authority. Mara distributed intelligence in an annoyingly effective manner.

He paused, pen hovering.

He wrote another line, smaller, as if ashamed of it.

Rowan does not fear correctly. This is either incompetence or a new form of strength.

He stared at the sentence for a long time, then underlined “new” twice, as if trying to threaten it.

Outside, the town had already shifted. People were talking with neighboring enclaves, adjusting routes, building redundancy into storage, and training more escorts. There was no fear festival, no martial anthem, no speech about sacrifice.

Someone was laughing near the bakery, and Eduardo the Goat was doing what he loved most, chewing on a pamphlet.

The old world was ending, the patchwork was adapting, and Steve, in the middle of it all, was being forced to confront the possibility that protection might not be something you seize. It might be something you share.

He closed the notebook hard, as if that could shut the idea out.

It didn’t.

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This is not an analysis of the contents of the 3.5 million Epstein files, 180 thousand photographs, or 2000 videos that have been made public. If you’re looking for names, there are plenty of those to sink your teeth into elsewhere. I’m addressing a different aspect by looking at why decades of whistleblowers and leaks, and revelations have resulted only in superficial changes, while the structures of harm persist. If that’s not your thing, you have my apologies, and you can click away now.

If you are sticking around, please know that this article was started months ago and has been sitting in my drafts , and I have returned to it now because the latest data dump has provided the lens I needed in order to finish the piece.

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Scandal is not Structure

Over the last two decades, large document leaks have made headlines with almost ritual regularity, each framed as a historic rupture. The Panama Papers promised to expose the hidden infrastructure of global finance. The WikiLeaks diplomatic cables and war logs were said to pull back the curtain on the empire. The Snowden disclosures appeared to confirm that mass surveillance was not an aberration but a governing logic. In every case, the scale of the release itself was treated as a form of power. Millions of documents. Terabytes of data. An archive so vast that denial would finally become impossible. And yet, in retrospect, the political outcomes of these releases follow a far more constrained pattern.

What these leaks reliably generated, is what I will refer to here as “Heat”. They produced scandal, outrage, and a temporary moral consensus that something deeply wrong has been revealed. Headlines fixate on recognizable figures, shocking details, and moments of hypocrisy. Public attention surges around villains and victims. We see careers ending, reputations burning, and protests flaring. But what they struggle to generate, is what I will refer to here as “Force”. The underlying mechanisms, systems, and chokepoints that made the abuse durable, repeatable, and protected rarely become the center of public pressure. The public story resolves at the level of exposure, instead of redesign.

Even the most frequently cited “successful” cases illustrate the problem. The Panama Papers led to resignations, investigations, and some tax recovery, but they did not dismantle the offshore finance secrecy industry. Beneficial ownership regimes remain partial, fragmented, and easily routed around. The Snowden disclosures triggered legal reforms and court rulings, but the surveillance apparatus itself adapted and reauthorized under new justifications. WikiLeaks embarrassed governments and altered diplomatic behavior at the margins, but did not meaningfully constrain the security state or reorganize the institutional incentives that produced what was disclosed in the first place. In each instance, Heat peaked in the public sphere, while Force was absorbed, diluted, or confined to narrow technocratic channels.

This imbalance is produced by how modern institutions interact with information. Large leaks overwhelm everyone’s ability to interpret the data. They flood the public with raw material but offer little guidance on where leverage actually resides. Media systems convert complexity into easily conveyed, and consumed, narratives. Legal systems privilege caution, ensuring that the politically sensitive people don’t get actionably implicated by the fallout. Political systems respond to the pressure generated by public outrage, but not with understanding that would shift the underlying dynamics. As a result, the most actionable layers of a leak, jurisdictional chokepoints, enforcement dependencies, and institutional coordination failures, are the least visible and least contested. The system survives not by hiding everything, but by ensuring that what is revealed does not reorganize Power Over.

When we apply this lens, the repeated disappointment that follows major document releases is not a failure of exposure, but a category error about what exposure can do on its own. Heat feels like momentum. It feels like history is turning. But without a way to translate archives into palpable action, disclosure becomes a spectacle that institutions can endure. Each leak teaches the same lesson again. Being seen is not the same as being forced to change.

Systems Do Not Defend Themselves, People Do

At this point, discussions like this tend to slide into a familiar, unhelpful binary. On one side sits the fantasy of a single hidden cabal, a coordinated group of villains directing events from behind closed doors. On the other sits an equally flattening abstraction: “the system” as an impersonal force that somehow maintains itself without agency, intention, or responsibility. Both frames fail for the same reason. They obscure how Power Over actually operates.

Systems do not act. People do. But they do not act in isolation or freely. They act within incentive structures, professional norms, legal constraints, reputational economies, and institutional routines that shape what participants feel are possible, prudent, or dangerous at any given moment. Power Over persists not because everyone agrees on an outcome, but because enough people, in enough positions, make locally rational decisions that converge on the same result.

This is where the language of systems becomes dangerous when not handled carefully. When we say “the system absorbed the shock” or “the institution adapted,” we can unintentionally launder responsibility out of the picture. The adaptation did not occur by magic. It occurred because specific actors made choices that narrowed the scope, delayed action, redirected pressure, or rendered certain questions unaskable. Those choices may have felt routine or cautious. They may even have felt ethical within the local logic of the role. But they mattered.

The key concept here is the chokepoint. Most people inside a large institutional field have limited Power Within, Power To, or Power With. Their actions are constrained, interchangeable, and easily overridden. But some positions are different. Some roles sit at junctions where a small number of decisions can disproportionately shape outcomes. Examples include, but are not limited to: prosecutorial discretion, charging decisions, venue selection, sealing and redaction authority, settlement approval, banking compliance escalation, and editorial kill calls. Each of these is a point where a case can either acquire force or quietly lose it.

Importantly, chokepoints do not require a conspiracy to function. They do not need explicit coordination or shared intent. They work because institutional incentives align around risk minimization. No one wants to be the person who overreaches and, consequently, exposes their organization, triggers a lawsuit, or destabilizes a powerful network without airtight cover. The safest move, again and again, is to narrow, defer, fragment, or proceduralize. Over time, these moves harden into patterns.

This is why the distinction between structural analysis and accusation matters. The goal of this essay is not to assign hidden motives or speculate on secret meetings. It is to understand how protection emerges from ordinary institutional behavior. When enough chokepoints resolve pressure in the same direction, the outcome looks coordinated even if no one ever coordinated it.

Seen this way, power is less about command and more about filtration. Which claims make it through intact? Which evidence becomes actionable? Which actors are individuated and which remain abstract? Which failures are framed as personal and which are treated as systemic noise? These filters are not neutral. They are the mechanism by which Power Over is maintained, while appearing procedural, cautious, and lawful.

This essay proceeds from that premise. What follows is an effort to map the functional architecture that allows certain harms to persist, certain exposures to dissipate, and certain institutions to survive their own revelations.

Only once that architecture is visible does accountability stop being a matter of outrage and start becoming a matter of leverage.

Epstein as a Coordination Problem, Not a Moral One

With this framework in place, the Epstein affair begins to look less exceptional and more instructive. It is routinely framed, by the media, by influencers, and the general population on social media, as a story about monstrous individuals, moral depravity, and elite hypocrisy. Obviously, this remains true. The names matter, and the harm is real. But as an analytic lens, this framing is deeply limiting. It directs attention toward exposure and away from the coordination dynamics that allowed the abuse to be durable, repeatable, and protected across decades.

What makes Epstein structurally interesting is not that powerful people behaved badly. That is neither rare nor explanatory. What requires explanation is how a known abuser was able to operate in plain sight, across jurisdictions, through multiple investigations, while repeatedly surviving moments that should have ended the system entirely. That persistence cannot be explained by charisma, money, or intimidation alone. It points to a coordination problem.

The same imbalance between Heat and Force that appears in major document leaks shows up here as well. The public record is saturated with scandal. Names, flight logs, properties, and settlements, as well as photographs, and testimony have circulated for years. Some careers have ended, and some reputations have been burned. Yet, the underlying machinery that enabled the abuse remains largely unexamined. The entire story revolves around individuals, with the architecture that made their depravities possible remaining largely untouched.

This is the category error. Epstein is treated as a moral rupture when he should be treated as a systems case. The question is not simply who participated, but how participation was made possible, normalized, and insulated from consequence. How legal risk was contained, money continued to flow, access to institutions was repeatedly restored, and investigations narrowed rather than expanded, where silence was maintained without much overt violence. These are not ethics questions. They are coordination questions.

Once framed this way, the familiar frustration surrounding the case becomes intelligible to those seeking leverage to ensure harmful systems cannot continue. The reason the revelations feel simultaneously overwhelming and insufficient, is that they generate Heat without reorganizing Force. Exposure is substituted for coherent explanations, which is ridiculous when we think about it for even a short time. No matter how many villains are substituted for mechanisms, failure to address the mechanisms simply means there will be more villains in the pipeline. And without a model of the coordinating architecture, each new disclosure adds even more Heat, without increasing any of the Force so desperately needed.

This is where the analysis must shift. Not toward speculation about secret rulers, and not toward resignation about an abstract system, but toward identifying the functional relationships that allowed the harm to persist.

The Protection Stack

To understand what the Epstein case actually reveals, it helps to stop looking for a hidden organization and, instead, name a pattern of coordination that does not present itself as an institution at all. What becomes visible, once attention shifts from scandal to structure, is something I will describe here as a Protection Stack.

A Protection Stack is not a formal entity. It has no charter, no headquarters, no leadership, and no stable membership. It does not appear in organizational charts or budget lines. It exists only in action, assembling when risk threatens to turn into consequence, and thinning out again once that risk has been neutralized. Its existence and ability to act lie precisely in this lack of legibility. Because it is not a single institution, it cannot be confronted as such.

I have chosen the term “stack” deliberately, because each layer performs a narrow, locally defensible role. Legal containment converts criminal exposure into a civil process. Financial tolerance keeps money and services flowing despite reputational risk. Logistical coordination makes exploitation routine without ever requiring central control. Reputation laundering restores access to elite spaces after moments of exposure. Editorial caution and legal threat shape what becomes exposable. And enforcement discretion determines which paths quietly dead-end. No single layer needs to know the whole system. Each only needs to pass risk upward or sideways until it dissipates.

What holds the protection stack together is not ideology or command, but alignment. Each layer responds to incentives that reward caution, deniability, and risk minimization. The safest move for people at every point is rarely to escalate. Instead, the safe move is to narrow, delay, fragment, or proceduralize. Over time, these moves harden into habits, so that when pressure arrives, the stack does not resist directly. It absorbs, filters, and redistributes, until what remains is survivable.

This is why permanence is not the right frame. A protection stack does not need to endure indefinitely. It only needs to endure long enough. When a particular configuration becomes too costly to maintain, some components are allowed to fail. Individuals operating those components are exposed, their reputations are burned, and soon, cases close. The underlying layers, however, remain intact, available to be reassembled elsewhere under different conditions.

Seen this way, Epstein is no longer the center of the story. He is better understood as an interface point, a location where multiple layers of the protection stack briefly aligned. His role was not to design the stack, nor to control it, but to occupy a position where legal, financial, logistical, and reputational, as well as enforcement systems could synchronize around a shared outcome. When that position collapsed, the stack disengaged rather than unraveled.

This reframing does not soften responsibility. It sharpens it. Treating the case as an expression of a protection stack forces attention onto the mechanisms that allowed harm to persist and exposure to remain containable. It shifts the question from who was involved, to how their protection was produced.

Only once the protection stack is named does the rest of the analysis become possible. Without it, the story oscillates between outrage and disbelief. With it, the focus can finally move from what was revealed to how it was sustained.

Mapping the Protection Stack Through Its Absences

Because a protection stack does not announce itself, it cannot be identified the way institutions normally are. No document describes it, no organizational chart reveals its shape, and no single decision brings it into being. It has to be inferred indirectly, by tracing what must have been present for certain outcomes to remain stable, and by paying close attention to what consistently fails to appear in the public record.

This is where the analysis shifts from exposure to structure. Rather than asking who was involved, the more revealing question becomes “What functions had to be operating for the system to persist?” Abuse at this scale does not survive on secrecy alone. It requires access to be produced and normalized, logistics have to be coordinated, money must continue moving, and legitimacy needs to be periodically restored, while legal risk absolutely must be contained, narratives are inevitably managed, and enforcement pressure will be selectively deflected. All these functions are performed every day in ordinary institutional contexts. What is unusual, is their alignment around the same outcome.

The protection stack becomes visible when these functions are present, to the point where their effects are tangible, but somehow they evade description. The public record is dense with detail about events, movements, and personalities, yet, curiously thin where the connective mechanisms are concerned that would explain how those details cohered into a durable system. We know where people traveled, but not how travel decisions were routinely made safe. We know money existed, but not how financial risk was repeatedly tolerated. We know cases surfaced, but not why they narrowed rather than expanded. We know silence held, but not how it was enforced without overt violence. These are not incidental gaps. They are the spaces where protection stacks do their work.

This method of reading absence is not speculative. It is standard systems analysis under conditions of asymmetric visibility. When the same kinds of information are missing across time, jurisdictions, and media treatments, the absence itself becomes data. One missing document tells us little, but the repeated absence of the same category of document, explanation, or mechanism tells us something is being reliably routed away from view. This means the protection stack does not hide everything, only what would make leverage possible.

Negative space matters, because it marks where force is being filtered out. The material that reliably reaches the public sphere is the material that generates heat without reorganizing power. Names, associations, scandalous detail, and moral transgression are all legible and consumable. Mechanisms, chokepoints, and institutional dependencies are not.

This is why the release of more information does not necessarily clarify the picture. When archives are vast and unstructured, they invite fixation on what is easiest to narrate, rather than what is most difficult to see. The protection stack benefits from this dynamic.

Reading the Epstein affair through this lens changes what counts as an unanswered question. The most important gaps are not missing names or unreleased files. They are the missing explanations for how risk repeatedly became manageable, how pressure consistently dissipated, and how institutions learned, over time, which responses were safe. Those lessons do not reside in a single place. They are distributed across the stack, embedded in routines, norms, and professional judgment.

Mapping the protection stack, then, is not an act of revelation but of reconstruction. It means assembling a picture from what remains stable across exposures, from what survives scandal, and from what never quite gets voiced. It is an attempt to make legible a form of power that depends less on secrecy than on selective visibility.

Once that map begins to take shape, the Epstein case stops looking anomalous. It starts to look like a clear instance of a pattern that appears wherever harm intersects with wealth, institutional complexity, and risk management. And it becomes possible to ask a different kind of question, namely, “Which layers of the stack must be disrupted for exposure to finally become force?”

Coordination as Power Inside the Protection Stack

Once the protection stack is visible as a coordination structure, rather than a conspiracy or an abstraction, the question of power becomes easier to place. Power here does not primarily appear as command, ideology, or overt coercion. It appears as the capacity to shape outcomes by determining which forms of coordination are allowed to stabilize and which are quietly dissolved.

The protection stack stabilizes Power Over by filtering coordination. It determines which actions can align across domains and which are prevented from cohering. This process largely happens by allowing actions, while placing limiting caveats on them. Investigations can proceed, but only within narrow scopes. Disclosures can occur, but without reaching the points where redesign would be forced. Accountability can be performed, but in ways that do not threaten the broader architecture. Power Over, in this context, is exercised by managing the conditions under which coordination becomes possible.

This is why exposure alone is insufficient. Exposure generates a signal, but the protection stack determines whether that signal is amplified into consequence or absorbed as noise. Pressure enters the system through media attention, legal complaints, political outrage, and institutional review. What matters is not that pressure exists, but how it is routed. In the Epstein case, pressure has repeatedly moved laterally, instead of upward. It has become fragmented across jurisdictions, rather than consolidated. Each rerouting reduced its capacity to reorganize the leverage required to force structural change.

What makes this process durable is internalization. The protection stack does not rely on constant intervention. Over time, actors learn what kinds of coordination are safe and which are dangerous. Prosecutors learn when restraint is “prudent”, editors learn when caution is “responsible”, and financial institutions learn which risks are “tolerable”. These lessons do not need to be taught explicitly. They emerge through feedback, precedent, and professional survival. Power Over persists, because the field trains its participants to reproduce it.

Adaptation is the final piece. Every exposure event becomes a learning opportunity for the stack. Each layer sees in real-time which defenses held, which were too visible, and which actors became liabilities. The response to the next crisis is shaped by the memory of the last. This is not a single adaptive mind, but a distributed one. The stack evolves by adjusting its filters, while its goal remains the same: prevent localized harm from cascading into systemic disruption.

This is where the Heat versus Force distinction returns with clarity. Heat is allowed, even expected. It signals responsiveness. It satisfies public demand for recognition. Force, however, requires coordinated redesign. It requires changes to incentives, procedures, and interfaces between institutions. The protection stack exists to prevent that kind of coordination from stabilizing.

Understanding the protection stack through the lens of coordination makes it legible without turning it into a villain. It reveals a form of power that is neither centralized nor accidental, but patterned, learned, and reproduced through ordinary institutional behavior. It also suggests where that power is vulnerable. Not at the level of scandal, but at the coordination level itself.

If exposure is ever going to translate into force, it will not be because more names are revealed, even though such revelations are obviously necessary. It will be because the protection stack’s ability to filter coordination fails, and pressure is finally allowed to align across domains in ways that cannot be safely absorbed. By exposing more names, we can hold individuals accountable. By altering the coordination pattern, we can prevent such harm from materializing and enduring again.

That is the threshold this case approaches, but has never quite crossed.

Why This Model Travels

One of the reasons the Epstein case keeps exerting a gravitational pull is that it feels singular. The scale of the harm, the proximity to power, and the repeated evasion of consequence all encourage the belief that this must be an exception. But once the protection stack becomes visible, that sense of uniqueness begins to fade. What comes into view is not a freak event, but a pattern that recurs wherever harm intersects with wealth, institutional complexity, and reputational risk.

Seeing the pattern does not make individual actions less real. The harm done to victims is not abstract, and responsibility does not dissolve when we widen the lens. Accountability matters. It matters ethically and socially. People who committed abuse, facilitated it, or knowingly protected it should face consequences. Naming, prosecution, and reputational reckoning are necessary. Without them, harm is denied, and victims are erased.

But accountability on its own is not enough. What the Epstein case shows with painful clarity, is that even when some individuals are exposed, punished, or removed, the conditions that allowed the harm to persist can remain intact. A few careers end, a few villains are fixed in the public imagination, and the underlying machinery quietly survives. The same coordination patterns remain available to be reassembled elsewhere.

This is where legibility becomes essential rather than evasive. Making the protection stack visible does not compete with personal accountability. It complements it. It shifts attention toward the mechanisms that made abuse durable and repeatable, and toward the points where intervention can prevent the next iteration. It asks not only who should be held responsible for what happened, but how the coordination that enabled it can be disrupted, so that it cannot happen again in the same way.

Changing coordination changes outcomes. If legal containment is harder to trigger, abuse reaches criminal consequences faster. If financial tolerance is withdrawn, operations collapse earlier. If reputational laundering fails, access shrinks. If enforcement asymmetries narrow, protection weakens. These shifts do not absolve past harms. They honor them by reducing the likelihood that others will be subjected to the same system.

This is why I think the model is useful beyond Epstein. It allows different actors to work on different layers of the same problem without collapsing back into spectacle or resignation. Journalists can expose. Lawyers can prosecute. Data analysts can trace patterns. Organizers can push for institutional redesign. Each form of accountability reinforces the others when the structure they are acting on is understood.

The real danger is not that we fail to name enough names. The greater danger is that we keep mistaking punishment for prevention, and exposure for transformation. We have to approach the problem with the view that, while accountability addresses what happened, we need structural legibility to address what keeps happening.

If we want harm to stop recurring in durable, protected forms, we have to interrupt the coordination that makes it survivable. That does not diminish accountability. It is how accountability finally gains force.

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The Stage

Davos is never the birthplace of power. It is the place where a new power arrangement is given a name, a logo, and a script that can be repeated by people who do not want to admit what they are participating in. The World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting 2026 was explicitly themed “A Spirit of Dialogue”. That phrase would have felt harmless in most contexts. But at a meeting of the economic and political elite, it functions as a softening membrane. “Dialogue” is what they say when they want the world to experience the consolidation of coercive capacity as something calm, mature, responsible, and in this case, even therapeutic.

Against that rhetorical backdrop, President Donald Trump held a Board of Peace signing ceremony in Davos on January 22, 2026. The public packaging was straightforward. The Board of Peace was presented as a “new” mechanism to end the “Gaza conflict” and to coordinate reconstruction. But the deeper movement is not simply about Gaza. It is about building a governance interface that can sit above or alongside existing multilateral institutions, and that can convert sovereignty from a collective political right into a managed service.

This matters because geopolitics rarely follows the scripts laid out in charters. By which I do not mean that formal documents are useless, but that they are not the main event. The main event is the coordination that happens around those documents when deals are made behind closed doors, with incentives created by capital flows, reputational levers get applied through “standards,” and public exhaustion is used to internalize new structures as inevitable. Treaties and charters are often the legal skin stretched over a strategic maneuver that is already underway.

If you look at the Board of Peace through that lens, it becomes legible as something more specific than “an international peace initiative.” It is literally an organisation with a chair who controls membership and renewal, a pay-to-play pathway to permanence, and a formal mandate endorsed by the UN Security Council to govern a territory through a transitional administration backed by a stabilization force. On the surface, this reads as relatively innocuous and not-so-different from how governance bodies are run every day. But what should be glaringly obvious is that this is the governance model of a corporate start-up, not a geopolitical region. And while the headlines will treat the dangerous part as being Trump in the position of Chairman of this particular board, I would disagree. The dangerous part is not a melodramatic fantasy of instant world dictatorship by a megalomaniac. The dangerous part is a quieter, historically familiar shift in which a new interface becomes the default way “stability” is produced, and then everyone is pressured into using it because refusing becomes costly.

For decades, the liberal international order depended on a legitimacy theater. Participants were required to speak the language of rights and consent while enforcing market security through sanctions, proxies, and “rules-based” coercion. The Board of Peace signals a shift in tone. It looks like a governance device built for actors who no longer want to launder power through the slow rituals of liberal multilateralism. It compresses authority into a chair, converts participation into a subscription, and frames “peace” as operational control, with Gaza as the testing ground. The formula being proposed is as follows: De-risk the zone, stabilize the perimeter, and make reconstruction a managed pipeline. The boredom here is not boredom with peace itself. It is boredom with the need to pretend that peace was ever the goal.

The Legitimacy Transfer

On November 17, 2025, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 2803, endorsing a “Comprehensive Plan to End the Gaza Conflict” and welcoming the establishment of a Board of Peace with “international legal personality,” along with the authorization of a temporary International Stabilization Force to support implementation. The official UN meeting coverage records the vote and the Council’s framing of the mechanism as a stabilization and administration pathway. The resolution itself is a primary anchor, and it matters precisely because it embeds the Board of Peace within the UN’s Chapter VII enforcement logic, which historically is the doorway through which exceptional governance arrangements can be legitimized.

This is not merely a policy endorsement. It is a transfer of legitimacy. “International legal personality” is the legal condition for an entity to contract, to hold assets, to operate across jurisdictions, and to function as an actor within international legal and administrative space. In coordination terms, it is the creation of a new node in the global governance network, with the ability to weave contracts, obligations, and operational authority into real-world systems.

The key move here is the framing of Gaza as a “threat to regional peace”, a stability move that justifies extraordinary administrative intervention. That framing has precedent. It is not identical, but it mimics earlier episodes where the Security Council created external administrations over territory, with international civil presences and mandates that temporarily displaced local sovereignty. Kosovo in the late 90’s is where Security Council Resolution 1244 authorized an international civil presence that established an interim administration, explicitly to provide governance pending a final status solution. East Timor, around the same time, had Resolution 1272, which established UNTAET, a transitional administration responsible for governance until independence. UNTAET’s own regulations make clear how these administrations function in practice, where local consultative structures may exist, but “final authority” rests with the transitional administrator.

Those precedents do not automatically validate what is being done now. Instead, they show that once international administration is normalized as a peace tool, it becomes available as a template. “Exceptional” mechanisms have a tendency to persist and then to travel. They become part of the governance repertoire.

Resolution 2803 is also already being framed by U.S. executive communications as aligning with Trump’s “Comprehensive Plan” and positioning the Board of Peace as the oversight mechanism that will “mobilize international resources” and “ensure accountability”. That language is telling. It signals that the Board is imagined as a strategic command center, not merely a diplomatic forum.

Legal scholars and practitioners are already debating the conceptual limits of this transition logic. The American Society of International Law has published an analysis explicitly addressing Resolution 2803 and the Board of Peace as a Security Council-designed transition mechanism, emphasizing the legal and political tensions embedded in the arrangement. This is not fringe speculation. It is the mainstream legal field noticing that a new governance device is being installed under an emergency frame.

So geopolitics will not follow the charter script, and it does not need to. The resolution already performed the crucial role of granting the Board of Peace a legitimacy aura that can be leveraged in the future as precedent, even if the Board’s practical power expands through other channels.

The Charter

The charter of the Board of Peace, as published in full by the Times of Israel and reproduced elsewhere, matters less as a legal constitution and more as an expression of intended topology. It encodes a governance form that looks far closer to a founder-controlled entity than to a multilateral institution built on equality of members.

Several features stand out.

First, membership is invitation-based. The chair is not simply a facilitator. The chair has decisive control over membership and renewal. The proposed structure currently stands as three-year terms for member states unless they pay $1 billion to secure permanent membership, with Trump positioned as chair for life. This is not a minor design choice. It is an explicit conversion of capital into a durable governance position. It is also an explicit stratification mechanism. Some states will be permanent by payment. Others will remain conditional by default.

Second, the charter includes a limiting clause that says nothing in it should be construed to give the Board jurisdiction within member states’ territory without their consent. This clause is being cited by multiple outlets to argue that the Board cannot override sovereignty. That is legally relevant, but strategically misleading. Modern power rarely needs to claim formal jurisdiction in order to produce compliance. The most effective forms of Power Over are often those that create dependency and then treat compliance as “voluntary.”

Third, the charter appears designed for portability. A notable observation, reported by the Times of Israel, is that the charter text does not mention Gaza, even though the Board is being sold publicly as a Gaza governance mechanism. The UNSC mandate approved in November is explicitly limited in time and scope to Gaza, but the charter is written as a general-purpose institution. That mismatch is unlikely to be an accident. It is exactly how pilot projects become platforms. They get legal cover for a bounded experiment, while drafting the internal architecture as if it were destined to outlive the specific case that justified its creation.

Finally, even if we assume the charter gets softened through bargaining, the post-ceremony landscape already shows the strategic pattern more clearly than before. We saw, and are seeing, a staged launch with a founding bloc, a widening ring of pressured holdouts, and a cluster of explicit refusals that treat the Board as a legitimacy threat rather than a mere peace forum. The Davos signing produced a visible early coalition anchored by the U.S. and a mix of Gulf monarchies, regional gatekeepers, and nationalist or executive-centric governments, while many traditional U.S. allies either stayed away or publicly distanced themselves. The European External Action Service’s internal assessment explicitly flags the Board’s “concentration of powers” in the chairman and the pay-tier membership structure as incompatible with EU constitutional principles, which helps explain why EU participation has largely stalled at the level of abstention rather than enthusiastic buy-in.

In other words, the Board is not behaving like a humanitarian mechanism seeking broad consensus. It is behaving like an interface that gets enough influential nodes to sign up in order to make the mechanism “real,” then lets network effects do the coercive work. Support among traditional allies remains limited, with multiple European states publicly declining and others abstaining, even as several Middle Eastern states sign on and the Board’s public framing drifts beyond Gaza into a more general “conflict resolution” mandate. Many political elites who have expressed hesitation have noted that the Board is being positioned in ways that raise direct concerns about sidelining or rivaling UN authority, with the Davos launch offering few operational constraints while emphasizing the charter’s structure and Trump’s central role.

At this point, it becomes unhelpful to argue as if we are dealing with a normal treaty institution. This looks like a governance product, and the question becomes how such products expand in the real world.

The Governance Product

When we argue about “international law,” we often get trapped in formalism. We ask: what does the charter allow? What does the resolution authorize? But power does not live only in those words. Power lives in the coordination architectures they enable.

In my framework, power is an attribute of coordination. It emerges from how coordination threads are woven. To understand the Board of Peace as a governance interface, rather than a legal text, we can map it to the six dimensions of coordination.

Origin of coordination. The Board originates in U.S. executive initiative, endorsed through a Security Council resolution that provides international legitimacy and enforcement framing. That combination is crucial. The U.S. supplies political force and diplomatic leverage. The UN supplies a legitimacy aura. This is how new governance devices are born: through a fusion of coercive capacity and symbolic legal blessing.

Structure of participation. Participation is stratified by money and chair discretion. This is the core innovation, and the core danger. A “permanent seat” purchased for $1 billion is, functionally, a governance share. It is the extraction of political durability through capital contribution. Even if the exact number shifts, the design logic is clear: a tiered structure that converts resources into influence.

Decision flow. Corporate governance is defined by a particular decision topology: agenda control, executive committees, and centralized interpretive authority. Public reporting suggests exactly this kind of topology, with an executive board layer and an internal structure that concentrates control in the chair. Even if some procedural details are contested, the pattern is visible in how the Board is being narrated and staffed.

Scope of coordination. Gaza is the entry point, but portability is the ambition. Trump envisions a wider mandate beyond Gaza, positioning the Board as a “bold new approach to resolving global conflicts”. This kind of scope is where governance products become dangerous. A mechanism created for a crisis can become a permanent infrastructure that then requires crises to justify itself.

Mode of internalization. The Board’s legitimacy will not be built primarily by coercion, but by internalization. It will be built through the memeform of responsible stabilization through reconstruction, accountability, oversight, development, and security. These words do not simply describe actions. They train populations and governments to accept managerial control as benevolent. They encourage a transfer of moral responsibility. “If you oppose the Board, you are opposing peace.”

Feedback and adaptation. Corporate governance adapts through metrics, risk management, compliance, and reputational control. It rarely adapts through democratic consent. If the Board is an interface for capital flows, project approvals, and stabilization missions, it produces its own feedback systems in the form of performance reporting, evaluation regimes, compliance audits, and “standards” that function as coercive levers.

At this point, we can say something precise. The Board of Peace is not simply an institution. It is an attempt to install a new coordination stack in global governance, one that merges legal legitimacy, capital subscription, and security enforcement into a platform that can manage conflict zones as administrable assets.

That is the structural claim. The next step is to look at how similar stacks have historically expanded beyond what their founding documents seemed to allow.

The Coerced Opt-In

The signing ceremony in Davos showed a coalition that will likely force unwilling states to opt in, but not via the Board marching armies into every reluctant capital. To understand how this is likely to play out, we have to look at how modern coercion actually works. It works through standard-setting, access gating, risk pricing, and dependency engineering.

The Financial Action Task Force, an intergovernmental organisation founded in 1989 on the initiative of the G7 to develop policies to combat money laundering and to maintain certain interests, is one of the clearest examples. FATF is not a world government. It is a standards body. But its “grey list” and “black list” classifications shape how banks, investors, and correspondent financial networks treat states. Being grey-listed is formally not a sanction, yet it carries real economic costs. IMF research found that grey listing reduces capital inflows by an estimated 7.6 percent of GDP. Thus illustrating that a “soft” classification system can generate “hard” compliance because the market treats the classification as a real constraint.

A coalition does not have to formally invade sovereignty. It can create an interface. It can define compliance. It can make non-compliance costly.

Among many other examples of this dynamic, we can look at Bretton Woods institutions like the IMF. IMF conditionality involves borrowers agreeing to policy adjustments as conditions for loans. Critics have long argued that this conditionality regime can undermine policy autonomy, especially where governance power is structurally imbalanced, and borrowers are under-represented. Whether you describe it as necessary stabilization or as coercive leverage, the strategic pattern is a liquidity crisis becoming an entry point for policy steering, and consent becoming a constrained bargain.

Now translate those precedents into a Board of Peace world.

A Board that can mobilize reconstruction funding and coordinate stabilization missions will quickly become an access gate. Participation becomes the pathway to legitimacy and resources. Non-participation becomes a reputational and financial risk. Over time, states may find themselves pressured to join not because the charter compels them, but because the ecosystem around the Board treats membership as the price of being “stable,” “trusted,” and “cooperative.”

The core strategic maneuver is to install a platform, make it useful to powerful actors, then let the network effects do the coercion. Once enough strategic partners buy in, the Board does not need formal jurisdiction within their territory. It needs only to shape the global environment such that the costs of remaining outside become unbearable.

The Board of Peace charter’s consent clause does not prevent this. It practically invites it. By insisting that everything is voluntary, the Board can expand while preserving moral cover. This is how soft power and hard power mix. Soft power creates consent narratives and reputational incentives. Hard power appears selectively, framed as stabilization. The blend ensures continuity of Power Over while allowing participants to tell themselves they are doing something benevolent.

There are also precedents in historical transitional administrations, like UNTAET and UNMIK, which were justified as temporary solutions to exceptional crises. But they normalized the idea that external governance can be installed as a peace mechanism. Once normalized, that tool becomes part of the strategic repertoire. A Board of Peace that begins in Gaza can later be pitched as the responsible alternative to chaos elsewhere. The “voluntary” opt-in for the next case will not feel voluntary to the states being pressured. It will feel like the only path to avoid isolation, capital flight, or security vulnerability.

The strategic pattern here is historically real. Coercion often expands through interfaces that claim neutrality, standards that claim technicality, and institutions that claim benevolence.

The Gaza Pilot

The Gaza theatre is where the Board’s governance model will be tested in practice. Resolution 2803 authorizes a temporary International Stabilization Force and frames the Board as the transitional administration pathway for Gaza. The Board is therefore being installed not merely as a negotiation table but as an administrative authority embedded in an enforcement frame.

This resembles earlier transitional administrations in that governance is framed as a prerequisite for peace, rather than peace as a prerequisite for governance. The order is reversed. The administrative apparatus arrives first, backed by an enforcement mechanism. Political agency is then permitted within the boundaries of the apparatus.

The critical question is how Gaza is narrated during this process. If Gaza is treated as a living society with an irreducible political claim to self-determination, then external governance will be contested as domination. If Gaza is treated as a distressed management problem, then external governance will be normalized as rescue.

In modern geopolitical maneuvering, narrative is not just propaganda. It is an internalization architecture. A population that is exhausted and traumatized can be framed as incapable of self-rule. A political movement can be framed as a security risk. Resistance can be framed as sabotage. The governance apparatus is then positioned as the neutral mediator. And this is how Power Over disguises itself as care.

If the Board is able to produce visible reconstruction outputs (for the analytical purposes of this piece, I am deliberately not diving into the deplorable realm of real-estate development for profit in conflict zones, because that rabbit-hole will derail this entire analysis) while suppressing political agency, the model will be declared a success. The moral theatre will be powerful due to images of rebuilding, headlines about stability, and speeches about hope. Meanwhile, the deeper shift will have occurred as sovereignty will have been treated as a service, administered by an external platform.

Once that narrative is installed, portability becomes easy. The next region can be framed as “another Gaza.” Another distressed zone. Another place where sovereign politics are treated as an obstacle to stability. Another place where external administration is justified as the only path forward.

That is why the hinge is not only legal. It is memetic. It is whether the governance of Gaza becomes the legitimizing precedent for portable receivership. That is the kind of precedent that, once formed, does not stay contained.

The Accountability Vacuum

One of the most consequential aspects of the Board of Peace is not what it promises to do, but what it is designed not to be subject to. Liberal governance relies on feedback loops that allow the public to contest power over time through elections, parliamentary scrutiny, judicial review, treaty constraints, and a layered ecology of oversight. The BoP is built to evade most of those channels. It is structurally insulated from democratic reversal, legally engineered to be difficult to challenge in court, and politically positioned to claim legitimacy through a UN blessing, even while its internal logic departs from the ordinary accountability expectations of UN-centered governance.

Let’s start with the simplest point. The BoP cannot be voted out. Membership is not grounded in public mandate. It is invitation-only, with membership beginning when a state is invited by the Chairman and consents to be bound. Even within the organization, the basic democratic grammar is hollowed out. States have votes, but decisions require the approval of the Chairman, who also breaks ties and controls participation permissions. The result is a governance form that mimics deliberation while functionally routing final authority through a single approval gate.

Then there is the question of legal constraint. The charter explicitly grants the BoP and its subsidiary entities “international legal personality” and broad legal capacity, including contracting, property ownership, banking, and the ability to “institute legal proceedings”. But it also requires the provision of “privileges and immunities” necessary for the organization, its subsidiaries, and its personnel, to be established by agreements with host states or other measures consistent with domestic legal requirements. In practice, that is how accountability gets structurally evaded. When an entity can negotiate its own immunity regime through host-state agreements, it can drastically narrow which courts can hear claims, which procedures apply, and which enforcement mechanisms exist. You do not need to abolish courts to neutralize them. You only need to create a governance body that can decline jurisdiction, assert immunities, and move its operational footprint to friendlier venues.

The internal dispute architecture seals the loop. The charter states that internal disputes should be resolved through “amicable collaboration” and that “the Chairman is the final authority regarding the meaning, interpretation, and application of this Charter”. That is not a neutral interpretive clause. It is an explicit statement that the institution’s constitutional meaning is controlled by the chair. Even charter amendments are designed to preserve this insulation. Amendments require both a supermajority and “confirmation by the Chairman,” and amendments to the key governance chapters require unanimity plus chairman confirmation. In other words, there is no democratic route to reform the institution if the Chairman does not permit reform. The structure is closed to the kinds of political pressure that liberal states rely on to correct institutional overreach.

Finally, the dissolution mechanics make the insulation durable. The Board continues until dissolved, but dissolution occurs only when the Chairman considers it “necessary or appropriate,” or on a periodic schedule that still requires renewal by the Chairman to continue. The charter is also deposited with the United States, not the United Nations, as the depositary, reinforcing a highly centralized control over the institutional record. Taken together, this is not the architecture of an accountable multilateral body. It is the architecture of an interface designed to survive political turbulence and outlast shifts in public consent.

Through a Coordination as Power lens, this is the critical move. The BoP is not merely a new “organization.” It is a new coordination layer that severs the usual feedback circuits that would allow those governed by it to reshape it. Its structure concentrates origination, constrains participation, routes decision flow through a single approval node, and places internal interpretation and immunity design inside the institution itself. The EU’s own diplomatic service flags this concentration of power as incompatible with EU constitutional principles and legal autonomy, which is another way of saying that the BoP does not fit inside the accountability expectations of liberal legal orders. If it succeeds, it succeeds precisely because it can claim legitimacy while refusing the forms of accountability that legitimacy is supposed to entail.

The Force Layer

If the Board of Peace is being sold as a governance solution, then the International Stabilization Force is the part we should treat as the hinge that makes everything else non-negotiable.

A board without enforcement is a forum. A board with enforcement is a government. Not a government in the way liberal democrats like to imagine governments, with messy legitimacy and judicial review and a public that can kick the architects out when the spell breaks. It is government in the older sense, in the sense that matters in real life. A capacity to impose conditions, to police boundaries, to decide who is permitted to move, who is permitted to organize, what counts as acceptable behavior, and what counts as a security threat.

That is what the ISF is. It is the coercive thread that completes the weave.

To understand how this differs from organizations like NATO, or UN Peacekeeping Forces, we need to look at how the ISF is positioned. It is not framed as a classic UN peacekeeping mission, where the fiction is consent and neutrality and limited mandate. It is framed both implicitly and explicitly as stabilization. Stabilization is a loaded term. It has always been a way of saying that the problem is not politics, not agency, not grievances, not history, not conquest, and certainly not dispossession. The problem is disorder. Disorder is a systems problem. Disorder needs management. Disorder needs containment. And once the problem is defined as disorder, the solution is always the same. Disorder requires an enforcement layer that can operationalize the new order while calling it peace.

This matters because the Board of Peace is being launched through Gaza, and Gaza is not a normal setting for a humanitarian reconstruction mission. It is a setting in which the world has watched a live-streamed genocide, and in which global outrage has become too large to route through old institutional scripts without burning credibility. So the Board needs a way to claim that it is not doing politics, not doing conquest, not doing occupation, not doing permanent rule. It is doing stabilization. The ISF is the instrument that makes that claim actionable.

Within a Coordination as Power lens, the ISF is not a separate component. It is not an appendix. It is the thread that locks the whole pattern into place. Once a stabilization force exists under a mandate that can be interpreted expansively, the Board no longer needs consent. It needs compliance. It can always speak the language of “temporary” and “transitional,” because these conditions are defined by the Board’s own judgment that the system is stable enough to loosen its grip. That is the old trick in new clothing. The transitional period ends when the administrators say it ends, and the administrators have no incentive to declare their own project obsolete until the architecture they have built is self-sustaining.

A second thing to notice is how stabilization forces tend to behave once they are embedded. Even when they are formally composed of state militaries, they develop a gravity well of their own. They bring contractors. They bring procurement chains. They bring surveillance systems. They bring private security ecosystems. They bring data-sharing arrangements. They bring a whole grey infrastructure that does not need to be named in a charter to become real, because the charter only needs to create a permissive zone. Once the permissive zone exists, the rest arrives as operational necessity. Stabilization requires visibility. Visibility requires sensors. Sensors require vendors. Vendors require contracts. Contracts require legal shields. Legal shields require immunities. And slowly, the administrative space begins to look less like a humanitarian mission and more like a managed asset zone.

So the real question is not whether the ISF will be brutal or benevolent. It is whether the ISF is structurally positioned to convert resistance into a technical category. That is how modern domination stabilizes itself. If the political conflict can be translated into “security incidents,” then any attempt to challenge the Board’s authority becomes something that can be managed through policing and classification. A protest becomes disorder. Organizing becomes incitement. Noncompliance becomes extremism. Solidarity networks become destabilizing actors. Once those translations are normalized, the Board does not have to defeat a population politically. It can simply maintain a security envelope that makes political life impossible, while advertising that it is providing peace.

If Gaza becomes the proving ground for a Board plus ISF package, then what is being tested is not only reconstruction. It is a template for exporting governance into distressed zones under the language of stabilization. The world already has a long history of temporary administrations, protectorates, mandates, and interventions that were framed as exceptional. The difference here is that the Board model is designed to be repeatable and to be financed as an ongoing structure. If it works once, it will not remain a one-off. It will become a solution waiting for a problem.

And the world is full of problems that can be framed in the right way. A state in fiscal collapse can be framed as a stability risk. A region in conflict can be framed as a threat to trade corridors. A refugee flow can be framed as a destabilizing vector. A climate disaster can be framed as a governance failure. None of these framings requires a dramatic coup. They require only a coalition that agrees to treat the Board’s intervention as legitimate, and an enforcement layer that can hold the perimeter long enough for the new administrative logic to internalize itself.

That is what the ISF is doing in the story, even if its operational details are still being negotiated and even if its mandate is written in vague language. Vague language is not a weakness. Vague language is what allows a coalition to form without resolving its internal contradictions in public. It allows different states to project different meanings onto the same force. It allows supporters to tell their publics that it is humanitarian and temporary, while allowing operators to treat it as robust enough to suppress resistance and secure the asset zone. Vagueness is how the first knot is tied without admitting there is a knot.

The ISF is not just a security component. It is what turns the Board of Peace from a political theater into an enforceable coordination regime. The ISF is the moment where the Board stops being a narrative and becomes a machine.

The Prediction

If we are predicting using historical strategic maneuvering rather than treaty literalism, the most likely expansion path looks like this.

First, anchor nodes commit early. We have already seen early acceptance by states such as the UAE, Israel, Argentina, and Belarus, with the Board framed as a conflict resolution body that may expand beyond Gaza. That matters because anchor nodes create legitimacy by participation. Now that a few key players have joined, the Board looks less like a unilateral U.S. project and more like a coalition platform.

Second, the Board becomes the routing point for resources. Reconstruction funding, contracts, stabilization missions, and diplomatic pathways begin to flow through it. This creates interface capture. People do not join because they love the chair. They join because they cannot afford to be outside the pipeline.

Third, standards emerge. The Board will inevitably generate “best practices,” compliance expectations, and performance metrics. These will be framed as technical. But technical standards are one of the strongest tools of coercion because they can be enforced through markets and institutions without looking like political domination. Classification systems, risk ratings, and compliance regimes can produce massive behavioral changes with minimal overt force.

Fourth, the Board develops portability narratives. It will claim success in Gaza. It will then position itself as the mechanism for other conflicts.

Fifth, unwilling states are pressured. Not through formal jurisdiction, but through coalition behavior manifesting as diplomatic isolation, trade friction, reputational labeling, capital re-pricing, and selective security pressure. This is how opt-in becomes coerced while remaining narratively voluntary.

This is the prediction that aligns with historical precedent. The Board of Peace does not need to “own” sovereignty to erode sovereignty. It needs to become the ecosystem through which stability is defined and through which resources flow. Once that happens, sovereignty is not destroyed in one dramatic act. It is hollowed out through a thousand coordinated incentives.

Conclusion: The Real Threat Is Not a Scripted Charter, It Is a New Normal

It is tempting to describe all of this as a single endgame move, a rug-pull that ends sovereignty overnight. I know that it is tempting, because that was my own knee-jerk reaction, which I posted as a note on Substack. That language captures the emotional truth of what it feels like to watch a governance structure emerge that appears designed to concentrate power in a founder-like chair while monetizing access and borrowing UN legitimacy. But geopolitics rarely operates through one clean rupture. So once I had the chance to calm down and do due-dilligance I found that what is emerging is far more insidious, because this Board will not operate through brute force. Instead, it operates through normalization.

The Board of Peace, as endorsed by Resolution 2803 and as described in the published charter and public reporting, looks like the installation of a new governance interface, one that merges legal legitimacy, capital subscription, and stabilization enforcement into a platform that can manage post-conflict territories as administrable zones. Its most plausible route to global influence is not formal jurisdictional conquest. It is the same route taken by other modern power devices: standards that become compulsory, conditionality that becomes coercive, and coordination networks that punish non-participation.

This is what makes it so difficult to fight. You cannot simply protest a charter. You have to contest an interface. You have to refuse internalization, build alternative provisioning systems, and keep insisting that sovereignty is not a service. It is a political right that lives in the capacity of a people to coordinate their own futures.

Peace without sovereignty is not peace. It is management. And management, when backed by enforcement and routed through capital, is not neutral. It is Power Over dressed as benevolence.

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How it began

The history of resistance to domination is actually much older than what follows here, but for the sake of brevity we will save the full history for those with more time on their hands than I have available to me. In modern history, the “Left” began as a seating chart, not a moral achievement. In the French Revolution, supporters of the old order clustered to the president’s right, and supporters of revolutionary change clustered to the left. That physical arrangement became a political shorthand for opposing the Ancien Régime, and later, for being “progressive” in some broader sense. (History.com, 2016). But from the start, that left-side coalition contained a fracture that never went away. One branch wanted to abolish domination while another wanted to abolish certain forms of domination while keeping the sanctity of property, commerce, and “order.”

Early liberalism fought monarchy, aristocratic privilege, clerical authority, and inherited status. Yet it also treated property as a primary liberty, and it wanted a state strong enough to protect markets, contracts, and the social discipline required for “free” labor. Liberalism could be anti-king while remaining pro-capital. This is the first pattern most anarchists notice. The moment insurgent energy threatens property relations, liberals rediscover their love of police, armies, and “responsible” governance.

The Revolutions of 1848 made that pivot hard to miss. In France, the Second Republic created National Workshops to address unemployment, and when the state moved to close them, workers rose. The uprising was crushed by republican forces under Louis-Eugène Cavaignac, who became notorious for the severity of the repression, and the Republic’s bourgeois wing consolidated power afterward (Britannica, 2026). If you want a single early snapshot of “the liberal left” choosing capital over the insurgent poor, 1848 is a clean one. A revolution that began with democratic promise and ended with the working class being treated as the internal enemy.

By the time socialist and anarchist currents matured as mass forces, the betrayal story had gained institutional form. The First International (International Workingmen’s Association) tried to hold together unions, socialists, mutualists, and anarchists under one roof. It broke over the question anarchists refused to stop asking. Do we build emancipation through the state, or do we dismantle the state as a machinery of domination? The definitive split came at The Hague Congress in 1872, where Mikhail Bakunin and James Guillaume were expelled and the organization’s center was moved away from its European base, effectively ending the International as a mass movement there (Musto, 2021). What gets remembered as a doctrinal dispute was also a struggle over control of who gets to speak for “the working class,” and by what organizational systems. The anarchist allegation was not merely that Marxists were wrong about the state, but that they were already practicing the politics of substitution by exchanging party for class, leadership for people, and command for coordination.

Then 1917 arrived, and the stakes stopped being theoretical. In the Russian Revolution, anarchists and other anti-authoritarians did not just disagree with Bolshevik strategy; many actively participated in the revolutionary overthrow of the old order, only to then find themselves suppressed when they refused to submit to the new one. Kronstadt, in 1921, was the emblem of this pattern. What happened was a revolt demanding a more genuine soviet democracy. A revolt that was immediately crushed by the Bolshevik state (Avrich, 1970). In Ukraine, the Makhnovist movement attempted large-scale anarchist organizing during the civil war and was ultimately defeated amid shifting alliances and conflicts with state forces. You do not have to romanticize any faction to see the recurring structure of centralized state socialism treating autonomous popular organization as a rival to their new-found Power Over.

Spain in the 1930s was the other canonical wound. Anarchists built unions, militias, collectives, and neighborhood structures at an astonishing scale, especially through the CNT-FAI. Yet the revolutionary horizon narrowed under the pressures of war, international alliances, and the strategy of Popular Front governance. The May Days of 1937 in Barcelona became a flashpoint, with bitter conflict among anti-fascist factions and the marginalization of radical revolutionary currents (University of Warwick, 2023; Beevor, 2006). Here, betrayal was not only repression. It was the slow administrative suffocation of a revolution in the name of winning the war, stabilizing legitimacy, and keeping allies. Meanwhile, Spanish anarchists kept repeating the same critique. You do not defeat fascism by rebuilding the same command structures that make fascism viable.

After 1945, the “left” label became even more misleading, because it started naming a whole spectrum of compromises. In much of Europe and North America, social democracy traded revolutionary aims for welfare states and labor rights within capitalist growth. That bargain improved lives for millions, but it also tied left parties to the management of capitalist accumulation and, in colonial and postcolonial contexts, often to imperial supply chains. Later, the neoliberal counteroffensive framed itself as inevitable, and many nominally left parties responded by reinventing themselves as market-friendly modernizers. “Third Way” politics openly tried to renew social democracy by accepting market discipline as the baseline reality (Giddens, 1998). The left became, in part, the humane management wing of the same economic order it once promised to replace. When anarchists say “betrayal,” they often mean that they have repeatedly observed not only a single knife in the back, but also a decades-long conversion to the governance of capital as common sense.

Enough with the Eurocentrism

The biggest problem in many “history of the left” narratives is that Indigenous and Global South histories are too often treated as a footnote to leftism. These histories are a different axis of struggle that exposes how shallow “left” can be when it is only about wages, industry, and parliamentary representation. Settler colonialism is not merely racism plus inequality; it is a structural project oriented toward the seizure of land and the elimination of Indigenous political existence (Wolfe, 2006). That means a politics that calls itself left while treating land return, sovereignty, and relational obligations to territory as secondary is not only incomplete, but rather, it is reproducing the core domination it claims to oppose.

This is why Indigenous theorists tend to be scathing about the way progressive language gets absorbed into institutions without changing the material basis of colonial power. Decolonization is not a metaphor for general social justice. It is about the repatriation of land and life, and it is unsettlingto the entire western political spectrum precisely because it threatens the legitimacy of the settler state and its property regime (Tuck and Yang, 2012). Similarly, critiques of the “politics of recognition” argue that states can concede identity and symbolism while leaving the underlying colonial relation intact, transforming resistance into a managed cultural category (Coulthard, 2014). And Indigenous resurgence traditions emphasize governance and freedom practices rooted in land, kinship, and refusal, rather than assimilation into state forms that were built to erase them (Simpson, 2017).

This reframes the liberal-left story in a sharper light. Liberalism’s historic “progress” often means expanding rights within the state while leaving the state’s territorial foundations untouched. In settler colonies, that territorial foundation is land theft and imposed jurisdiction. Liberal inclusion can therefore function as a higher-grade cage that only offers more representation inside a structure that remains illegitimate in its relationship to land. This is where anarchist and Indigenous critiques frequently converge, even while not being identical. Both are suspicious of the state as a solver of problems that the state created. Both are attentive to how domination reproduces itself through administrative normality.

In the Global South, the betrayal story has often worn a different uniform: the national liberation party that becomes a developmental state. Anti-colonial movements frequently needed broad coalitions to defeat empire, and many adopted socialist rhetoric or state-led modernization. Yet “development” has repeatedly meant extractivism, megaprojects, and territorial control, commonly imposed on Indigenous peoples and rural communities in the name of the nation. Bolivia’s TIPNIS conflict offers a vivid example. Controversy erupted over a highway project through an Indigenous territory and national park, producing a deep rupture between a left government’s developmental agenda and Indigenous land defense (Sánchez-López, 2015; Mongabay, 2015). To anarchists and indigenous resistance movements, the pattern is easily identifiable. The revolution becomes a state, the state becomes a manager of resources, and “the people” become an obstacle when they obstruct the paternalist plan.

From the late twentieth century onward, anarchism also evolved in ways that are hard to see if you only look at Europe and the United States. In Latin America, autonomy and horizontalism surged through movements that did not always call themselves anarchist but practiced anti-authoritarian coordination: Argentina’s neighborhood assemblies and worker-recuperated workplaces after 2001, or the Zapatista rebellion and autonomy-building from 1994 onward, which articulated a politics of Indigenous self-government, refusal of state capture, and transnational solidarity. Across these, the anarchist sensibility often appears as a recurring methodology, even when it is not explicitly identified as anarchism. This is not a coincidence, since much of anarchism draws from historical indigenous social relations and systems. While each indigenous community had their own names and variations for these methods, we know them as assemblies, federations, rotation of roles, refusal of vanguard substitution, and a skeptical stance toward parties that promise liberation later if you surrender autonomy now.

Meanwhile, post-1970s anarchism becomes unmistakably global in texture. Contemporary Indonesian anarchism, for instance, has roots in anti-colonial histories and re-emerged in late twentieth-century subcultures and labor solidarities after authoritarian repression (Anarchist Studies, 2022). African anarchist currents have also insisted that liberation cannot mean swapping colonial governors for local strongmen, and have explored both the “anarchistic elements” of many precolonial communal forms and the failures of postcolonial state projects (Mbah and Igariwey, 1997). In the Middle East, the Kurdish movement’s turn toward Abdullah Ocalan’s democratic confederalism drew explicitly on anti-statist and municipalist influences, including Murray Bookchin, and became one of the most-discussed contemporary experiments in non-state governance (Biehl, 2012). None of this fits neatly into the old “left parties vs right parties” story. It is the history of people building survival and freedom under conditions where the parliamentary left either cannot help them, will not help them, or will help only on the condition that autonomy dissolves into governance.

So are liberals counted as “the Left”?

When anarchists say we are tired of liberals and neoliberals holding the leftist label, we are really naming a definitional crisis. If “left” means “to the left of conservatives in parliament,” then liberalism can wear the label forever while serving capital in practice. If “left” means opposition to domination, then the label has to be earned structurally. We judge this by whether an ideology and its institutions expand people’s capacity to self-govern without coercion, whether they break the property logics that require dispossession, and whether they treat land, community sovereignty, and life-world obligations as foundational rather than decorative. On that definition, liberalism’s historic pattern is the predictable outcome of trying to reconcile emancipation rhetoric with the preservation of capital’s commanding position.

The anarchist memory of betrayal is, at its best, not a purity test. It is a diagnostic instrument for noticing when “the left” becomes a brand for managing people on behalf of an order it refuses to dismantle. The task is not to win the label. The task is to stop letting the label do the thinking.

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References

• Anarchist Studies. 2022. “Article: A Brief History of Anarchism in Indonesia.” Anarchist Studies (noblogs).

• Avrich, Paul. 1970. Kronstadt, 1921. Princeton University Press.

• Beevor, Antony. 2006. The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939. Penguin Books.

• Biehl, Janet. 2012. “Bookchin, Öcalan, and the Dialectics of Democracy.” The Anarchist Library.

• Britannica. 2026. “Louis-Eugène Cavaignac.” Encyclopaedia Britannica.

• Coulthard, Glen Sean. 2014. Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. University of Minnesota Press.

• Giddens, Anthony. 1998. The Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy. Polity Press.

• History.com. 2016. “How Did the Political Labels ‘Left Wing’ and ‘Right Wing’ Originate?” HISTORY.

• Mbah, Sam, and I. E. Igariwey. 1997. African Anarchism: The History of a Movement.

• Mongabay. 2015. “Bolivia’s Morales pushes controversial TIPNIS highway forward.” Mongabay News.

• Musto, Marcello. 2021. “The History and Legacy of the International Working Men’s Association.”

• Sánchez-López, D. 2015. “Reshaping notions of citizenship: the TIPNIS indigenous march and the reconfiguration of political belonging in Bolivia.”

• Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake. 2017. As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance. University of Minnesota Press.

• Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. 2012. “Decolonization is not a metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1 (1): 1–40.

• University of Warwick. 2023. “The Barcelona May Days, 1937.” Modern Records Centre Digital Collections.

• Wolfe, Patrick. 2006. “Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native.” Journal of Genocide Research 8 (4): 387–409.

If you missed it, the first entry in this anthology series can be found here. You dont need the first one, but it does provide a bit of added context and entertainment.

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Fernvale was, at the best of times, a dangerously cheerful place. At the worst of times, it was precisely the same, which made the distinction more philosophical than practical. The townsfolk possessed a kind of relentless, collaborative joy that radiated outward like solar flare activity. Scientists from outside communities had once attempted to measure the phenomenon and left muttering that the data “resisted classification.”

Central to Fernvale’s emotional infrastructure was dancing. This was not the formal sort of dancing that required lessons, shoes, or even dignity. It was the spontaneous kind that erupted whenever a drum was tapped, a string was plucked, or a spoon accidentally clanged against a bowl. Some described it as a ritual of communal alignment. Others described it as cardio with joyful overtones.

Steve described it as tyranny.

He watched the dancers from a bench in the square, arms crossed tightly, jaw clenched in a manner normally reserved for people waiting far too long for their food at a restaurant. To Steve, the sight of swirling bodies, laughing faces, and unregulated movement was not a celebration. It was anarchy’s most insidious form: joy without permission. He could practically feel his hypothetical authority evaporating in the sunlight.

But then he saw the cluster of teenagers leaning against the Overpass Tree. The tree was not, strictly speaking, an overpass, though it carried itself with all the gravitas of one. It grew at the edge of the square, its branches forming a kind of natural awning under which Fernvale’s youth congregated to roll their eyes at things. The teens radiated disaffection, that rare mineral in Fernvale. They scowled at the dancers with a level of contempt Steve found deeply promising. In their slouched posture, their dramatic sighs, and their aggressively apathetic eye-rolling, he detected the first crack in the town’s armor.

Steve smiled, in what he imagined was a deeply strategic way, to himself. If Fernvale’s happiness was the engine of its social cohesion, then its disaffected youth were the loose bolts. And Steve, for the first time since arriving in this infernal utopia, finally felt he had something resembling a plan.

The Overpass Tree crowd consisted of six regulars and one rotating extra. Today’s cast included Riya, Jonas, Samir, Tamsin, and the twins, Ludo and Lina. They were perfectly normal teenagers in an abnormal level of safety and abundance, which meant their misery had nothing practical to attach itself to and was forced instead to orbit vague abstractions like “vibes” and “being seen.”

Steve approached them with the slow caution of a man entering a sacred site where the rituals were unfamiliar, and the priests had nose rings.

“Enjoying the festivities?” he asked, nodding toward the square, where an accordion had joined the fray, and the dancing was beginning to resemble a benevolent stampede.

Riya snorted. “You mean the compulsory happiness ritual?”

Steve’s ears pricked up. “Compulsory?”

Jonas made a vague gesture with one headphone. “If you don’t dance, somebody will eventually ask you how you’re feeling,” he said. “And then someone else will invite you to a feelings circle. It’s basically emotional taxation.”

This was, in Steve’s view, the first accurate critique of Fernvale he had heard since arriving. He sat down on the low stone wall beside them, leaving exactly the amount of space that suggested both authority and informality.

“I have noticed,” he said carefully, “that there is very little room here for people who do not wish to participate in… all this.” He waved at the dancers as if indicating a contagious illness. “It must be difficult to resist.”

“We’re not resisting,” Tamsin said quickly. “We’re… exploring alternative modes of engagement.”

“Sure,” Lina added. “Resisting would imply they have power over us.”

“Which they obviously do,” Ludo said. “Because we keep ending up here instead of somewhere not shaped like a drum circle.”

There was a murmur of agreement.

Steve let a moment of silence stretch, like a fisherman letting the line play out. “You know,” he said at last, “where I come from, people who feel as you do often form… groups.”

Jonas squinted at him. “Like a band?”

“Something like that,” Steve replied. “Except instead of making noise, you make history.”

This was not strictly true, but it sounded impressive, and teenagers are particularly vulnerable to phrases that imply destiny.

Over the next few days, Steve became a regular presence under the Overpass Tree. He did not preach; he listened. He asked questions like, “Do you feel heard in community meetings?” and “Are festivals designed around your voices or the elders’ nostalgia?” and, his personal favorite, “Has anyone ever told you that your refusal to participate might actually be an act of resistance?”

He was careful not to insult Fernvale directly. He praised the town’s ideals while gently suggesting that perhaps, accidentally, those ideals had begun to smother individuality. The festivals, he argued, were not neutral celebrations. They were mechanisms of social pressure.

“How many of you actually like dancing?” he asked one afternoon.

Two hands went up halfway, then retreated like uncertain hedgehogs.

“Exactly,” Steve said. “And yet dancing defines Fernvale. If you do not join, you are observed, queried, and invited to process. That is not freedom. That is soft control.”

The word control hung in the air with the gravitational pull of a dropped anvil. The teens, who prided themselves on detecting even faint traces of coercion, pounced on it.

“That’s why they keep calling us ‘the next generation of caretakers,’” Riya muttered. “It’s not encouragement. It’s conscription.”

Steve blessed her quietly in his heart. She had the makings of an excellent lieutenant. So he gave them a name: The Rhythm Resistance Front. They loved it. It was simultaneously dramatic, vague, and easily abbreviated to RRF, which looked good on the corner of notebooks.

He drew them a symbol. It was two parallel lines crossing a circle, like a no-entry sign that had received design input from a drum. He explained, in a tone of confidential gravity, that movements needed symbols to “anchor their narrative in the visual field.” They didn’t know what that meant, but neither did he, and that symmetry felt, to Steve, like leadership.

Steve knew from long study that successful authoritarian movements did not start with violence. They started with stories. So he crafted one.

“Dancing,” he told them in a low voice one evening, “is how Fernvale enforces conformity. They call it joy, but what it really does is erase difference. Every festival, every circle, every spiral of bodies convinces people that the only valid emotions are the ones that fit the beat.”

“That’s why I feel tired all the time,” Jonas said. “The beat is exhausting.”

“And what about people with different rhythms?” Steve asked. “Or no rhythm at all? Where is the space for your refusal?”

Silence. Then Tamsin, softly: “We become the problem they’re trying to heal.”

He let that sink in. It was a solid piece of analysis, terrifying in its accuracy and rich in manipulative potential.

“So,” Steve concluded, “you are not just grumpy teenagers leaning against a tree. You are the last guardians of authentic dissent.”

By the end of that week, they had stopped calling their gatherings “hanging out” and started calling them “cells.” It was, Steve thought, progress. Of course, he needed more than poetry to outlaw dancing. He needed an incident. Something shocking enough to make the town question its beloved rituals.

He chose the upcoming Full Moon Commons Dance, an all-night event involving lanterns, drums, and enough shared food to qualify as a mild logistical miracle. Every enclave in the regional network sent visitors. If he could turn that night into chaos, he might not only destabilize Fernvale but also embarrass the entire constellation of post-capitalist communities. Authority, he knew, fed on fear. He intended to set a table.

He did not, even at his most ruthless, intend to kill anyone. Steve’s imagination of violence tended toward strategic intimidation: smashed instruments, terrifying silhouettes, raised voices in the dark. His goal was panic, not bodies. Panic would be sufficient. Panic could be managed. Panic could be answered with structure. Besides, the whole point of authority was to have people alive to be dominated.

“Think of it as shock therapy for a complacent town,” he told himself sternly in the mirror. The mirror did not look convinced.

He armed the Rhythm Resistance Front with care. Nothing overt. No guns, no blades. He did not have access to those, and besides, they would have triggered Fernvale’s very efficient “we should talk about this” response earlier than he wanted.

Instead, he gave them gardening tools. Fernvale had plenty. A rake, a couple of sturdy hoes, a spade. Modified slightly with handles wrapped for better grip, and edges sharpened a touch, they looked less like instruments of cultivation and more like props from a very earnest play about revolution.

He instructed the teens to wear dark scarves over their faces, more for psychological impact than concealment. He helped them write chants about “our bodies, our rhythms” that could sound like a liberation movement if you weren’t paying attention.

The plan was simple in outline and complex in timing:

Wait until the dance reached its ecstatic peak. Extinguish several lanterns at once. March into the square in formation, chanting, striking the ground with their tools. Smash the central drum. Declare dancing a weapon of social control and demand an immediate town-wide moratorium “until we can investigate emotional coercion.”

He pictured the dancers stumbling back, eyes wide, the music collapsing into silence. He imagined cries, confusion, and maybe even somebody shouting, “We need structure!” He saw himself stepping forward, the only calm voice in the chaos, offering order, protection, and above all, protocols.

It was, he admitted to himself, an excellent plan.

The night of the Full Moon Commons Dance arrived luminous and unhelpful. The square glowed with lanterns and bioluminescent decorations made by children who insisted on calling them “moon spores.” Musicians from three neighboring enclaves had come with hand drums, fiddles, and an instrument that looked and sounded like a cross between a harp and an irritated seashell.

People moved in great arcs and spirals, a choreography half-learned and half-improvised. From his position near the edge of the square, Steve could feel the rhythm pressing against him like a warm tide he refused to acknowledge. He tried to adjust his tie and glanced toward the Overpass Tree, studiously ignoring the fact that this clip-on tie was the closest he could find to something resembling the officious remnants of the politicians of yesteryear that he so deeply admired.

Six dark-scarved figures watched from the shadows, gripping their tools. The sight filled him with something dangerously close to pride. They were organized. They were committed. They believed him.

A whistle sounded. This was their signal.

The lanterns went out in a sudden cascading hush. Someone had slipped water into the oil basins; someone else had quietly loosened the hooks. Darkness wrapped the square. The music faltered, then stopped. For the first time Steve had ever seen, Fernvale’s dancers stood frozen.

Into that silence marched the Rhythm Resistance Front.

Their boots thudded in deliberate unison. The tools struck the ground in time, a harsh counter-rhythm. Jonas’s voice rose first, cracking but determined.

“No more forced joy!”

Tamsin followed. “Our bodies are not your festival!”

The others took up the chant. “No more forced joy! Our bodies are not your festival!”

It worked. For a moment. Steve watched as confusion rippled through the crowd. Parents clutched children. The musicians stepped back from their instruments. Someone whispered, “What is happening?” in the thin voice people use when they are trying very hard not to panic.

Steve stepped forward, heart pounding with the terrible exhilaration of a man who has just found the off switch on a culture. The central drum sat before him, wide and vulnerable. He raised the spade. This was not a metaphor anymore. Steve understood that with a clarity that made his mouth go dry.

Someone stumbled backward in the dark. A child cried out, sharp and sudden. One of the lantern poles clattered to the ground and rolled, its flame guttering dangerously close to a dropped scarf. For half a breath, no one moved. Steve felt it then, unmistakably: the moment where fear stops being theatrical and starts choosing targets.

And at that exact moment, old Elias walked into the square carrying a lantern.

Elias was Fernvale’s closest thing to an elder, which mainly meant he remembered more past mistakes than anyone else and had the patience to bring them up at inconvenient times. His hair resembled a dandelion in philosophical decline. His lantern was an ordinary one, no magic, just a stubborn flame protected by glass.

He did not shout. He did not rush. He simply walked slowly through the chanting line of teenagers, as if they were a weather pattern he had been expecting.

“Careful with that drum,” he said mildly, nodding to the spade in Steve’s hands. “The shell took three days of collective argument to pick.”

The teens wavered. This was not the terrified reaction they had rehearsed. No one thought this was performance art. Not tonight. Too many hands were shaking. Too many people were looking around to make sure their beloved town was safe. Elias turned, raising the lantern so its light fell on their scarves, their clenched jaws, their very earnest outrage. “I hear you don’t want to dance,” he said. “Fair. Neither do my knees. But I’m curious why you thought you needed weapons to say so.”

“We’re not being heard,” Riya shot back. Her voice shook, but the anger was real. “If we don’t join, everyone thinks something’s wrong with us. You call it care. It feels like surveillance.”

A murmur moved through the crowd. Not the murmur of a mob, but the murmur of a community being very rudely invited to self-reflection in public.

Elias nodded slowly. “Sounds like we made a sacred cow out of dancing,” he said. “Never a good idea. Cows get nervous.”

Jonas tried to swing his rake for emphasis. Elias simply took a half-step closer, lantern steady. “If you hit that drum,” he said gently, “we will repair it. If you hit a person, we will stop you. Either way, we’ll still want to know why you felt this was your only option.” Jonas visibly faltered. “What you’re holding can kill someone,” Elias said, not accusing, just stating a fact that refused to be debated.

Steve could feel the moment slipping. This was supposed to be fear, not family therapy. He cleared his throat. “The point,” he said loudly, “is that joy has been weaponized. These young people are taking a stand against an emotional regime—”

“Oh, Steve,” someone groaned from the crowd. It was Mira, the carpenter, eyes sad rather than angry. “Are you recruiting again?”

There was an exasperated laugh. Steve flushed with rage and shame when he realized it was not derisive, but was instead tired, fond, and worried. The spell cracked further. The dancers were no longer a mass; they were individuals seeing their own children holding sharpened hoes and realizing, with a jolt, that something was indeed wrong, but not in the way Steve intended.

Elias looked around the square. “New proposal,” he said. “We pause the dance. We form a circle. We listen to the kids complain about us for as long as they need. Then we decide together what to change.”

“You can’t just… process your way out of this,” Steve protested. “They are armed. They have taken the square. This is an insurrection!”

The teenagers glanced at one another, visibly pleased by the word. An insurrection sounded important.

Elias shrugged. “If it is, it is the most polite one I’ve ever seen. Nobody’s even knocked over a lantern.”

Tamsin hesitated, lowered her hoe slightly. “We… don’t actually want to hurt anyone,” she muttered. “We just wanted you to stop assuming we like the same things you do.”

From somewhere in the crowd, a voice called, “Fair enough!” Another added, “Meetings are always at your parents’ bedtimes anyway.”

Laughter, this time shaky, but real. The tools dipped further. Someone near the back of the Rhythm Resistance Front began to cry, quietly and mortifyingly. Lina pulled off her scarf and wiped her face with it, which rather ruined the menacing effect.

Elias turned the lantern toward Steve. “You’re good at spotting pressure points,” he said. “You were right. We were pushing joy instead of inviting it. Thank you for helping us see that.”

Steve stared at him, appalled. “This is not a learning opportunity,” he said. “This is a coup.”

“No,” Elias replied calmly. “This is a safety briefing that came with costumes.” He addressed the teens again. “All right. Rhythm Resistance Front, you can stand down from this theatrical intimidation. Instead, here’s a new task, help us design spaces where you can not dance without being treated like a problem.”

Riya let her rake fall to the ground with a clatter. “You mean… like, an official lounge for people who hate festivities?”

“Exactly,” Elias said. “We will even give it a worse name so you can invent a cooler one.”

The teens huddled instinctively, conspiratorial energy redirected. Within moments, they were arguing fiercely about acronyms. The gardening tools lay abandoned like discarded exoskeletons. Riya kept staring at the rake on the ground, as if trying to work out when it had stopped being a prop and started being a mistake. The square breathed. Lanterns were relit. The musicians, after some cautious glances, began to tune again.

Steve stood alone beside the untouched drum, spade still in hand, the architect of a near-miss that had once again been folded into Fernvale’s maddening, resilient process.

Later, in the quiet of his room, he wrote in his notebook with ferocious precision.

Day 47: Operation Dance Ban failed. Youth radicalization partially successful but immediately co-opted into participatory governance structure. Misjudged escalation window. Probability of irreversible harm higher than anticipated. Community demonstrated alarming capacity to transform potential violence into policy reform. Town now has a designated Non-Participation Lounge, widely celebrated as my “accidental contribution.” I hate this place so much, and I cannot understand their love of transformative change.

He tapped the page with the end of his pen. Somewhere outside, faint strains of music drifted through the window, but they were joined now by another sound: laughter and conversation from a separate gathering, low and intense, the Rhythm Resistance Front discussing agenda items for their newly recognized Youth Autonomy Council.

They had, he realized bitterly, gained more legitimate influence in one evening than he had in months of scheming.

Steve closed the notebook and stared at the ceiling.

The problem with trying to break a society built on mutual aid, he reflected, was that every blow landed like a hammer on hot metal. The system did not shatter. It reshaped.

He did not know it yet, but in the next meeting of the regional enclaves, Fernvale would present a new protocol on “Recognizing and Responding to Authoritarian Organizing Patterns Among Youth,” citing “the Steve Incident” as a key learning moment. Other communities would adopt it gratefully.

In the official minutes, he would be thanked.

That, he decided, was the real violence.

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I have spent the last few weeks doing something that is not especially kind to my mental health. I sat down with pen and paper and tried to estimate, as honestly as I could, the long-term probability that humanity survives on Earth in a way that is not only technically alive but genuinely worth calling a future. I was not focused on the thin sense of survival in which a few scattered people scrape by among ruins. I was aiming at something harder to achieve and more demanding to justify.

To make that concrete, I needed a working definition. The outcome I tried to assess was a society that is broadly humane, ecologically grounded, and no longer organised around entrenched domination. In other words, a global pattern of life where power is mostly horizontal rather than strictly hierarchical, where provisioning systems are rooted in commons and cooperation, and where human activity stays within the biophysical limits that keep the Earth system relatively stable for complex life. That is a high bar, and it is important to admit that from the beginning. I will also stipulate that there are probably thousands of variables I have not accounted for, which would further narrow the path that I think is already almost razor-thin.

Once that target was clear, I had to face a basic problem. Reality is not a single dial you can turn up or down. It is a tangled network of processes in the climate system, the biosphere, technology, economics, politics and culture. So I built a rough structure with hundreds of interacting variables and grouped them into clusters that could be reasoned about. The goal was not to produce a precise forecast, which would be a fantasy, but to make my assumptions explicit and to see what happens when I trace them through.

The first cluster was the state of the Earth system itself. Climate scientists and Earth system researchers have been warning for years that human pressures are pushing the planet beyond a safe operating space, using the language of planetary boundaries to describe the limits we should avoid crossing if we want to maintain a relatively stable environment for society (Rockström et al., 2009; Steffen et al., 2015). These boundaries include climate change, biodiversity loss, disruption of biogeochemical cycles like nitrogen and phosphorus, changes in land use and freshwater use, ocean acidification, and other processes that hold the system together. Recent work suggests that we have already transgressed several of these boundaries, including climate, biosphere integrity and nutrient cycles, and that ocean conditions are deteriorating as well.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has summarised the picture in a way that is both dry and devastating. Global surface temperature has already risen by about 1.1 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, and current policies put us on track for significantly higher warming over this century, with widespread and intensifying impacts on food systems, water security, human health and ecosystems (IPCC, 2023). Researchers working on tipping elements in the climate system have identified large-scale components, such as the Greenland ice sheet, the West Antarctic ice sheet, the Amazon rainforest and the Atlantic overturning circulation, that can pass critical thresholds and shift abruptly into new states with long lasting consequences (Lenton et al., 2008). On the biodiversity side, studies describe what they call biological annihilation, documenting rapid declines in vertebrate populations and ranges that point towards a sixth mass extinction event driven by human activity (Ceballos et al., 2017).

From this cluster, I tried to extract a single question. What is the probability that, over the next three hundred years, the Earth system remains damaged but still capable of supporting a complex, if lower throughput, global society? Not a world of comfort, but a world where large regions are still habitable, basic ecosystem functions like pollination and soil formation continue in some form, and food systems can operate without constant collapse. This is not the same as asking whether we stay within all planetary boundaries. It is asking whether we avoid the kind of runaway destabilisation that makes any sophisticated society physically impossible.

The second cluster dealt with the technological and material foundation on which any future society would rest. Even if the planetary envelope remains marginally survivable, the path we take through decarbonisation and resource use matters a great deal. The IPCC synthesis report emphasises that limiting warming requires rapid, deep and sustained reductions in greenhouse gas emissions across all sectors, combined with some degree of carbon dioxide removal, while simultaneously adapting to impacts that are already unavoidable. For my purposes, the question was whether, given the ecological shocks that are likely, we can maintain enough energy and material capacity to support essentials like clean water, food production, basic healthcare, some communications infrastructure and the ability to repair and adapt.

Here I leaned on work in sustainability science and resilience thinking, which explores how social ecological systems cope with shocks and change while retaining their core functions (Folke, 2010). A future horizontal society will not be built from scratch. It will stand, if it stands at all, on top of whatever energy grids, manufacturing capabilities, agricultural knowledge and digital infrastructure survive the coming century. So in this cluster I tried to estimate the probability that we manage some kind of energy transition away from fossil fuels, preserve critical knowledge, and develop more circular patterns of material use, even as the environment around us becomes more volatile.

The third cluster was the hardest to face, because it looked directly at power. I called it socio political transition viability. This is where political theory, institutional analysis and historical experience come into play. Researchers like Elinor Ostrom have shown that communities can, under certain conditions, govern shared resources through cooperative institutions that avoid both top down state control and pure market allocation (Ostrom, 1990). Work on social ecological resilience has explored how polycentric governance, where multiple centres of decision making interact, can sometimes be more adaptive and robust than monolithic hierarchies. There is a rich body of examples where people have built and maintained commons that do not fit neatly into state or corporate boxes.

However, when you zoom out to the level of global society, you run into a different pattern. Modern states, corporations and military structures are heavily invested in maintaining centralised control over resources and populations. Historical studies of collapse often show ruling classes clinging to extractive arrangements long after they have become destructive, preferring to ride the system into the ground rather than relinquish power. Philosophers and risk researchers who study existential threats talk about the tension between our growing technological power and our lagging capacity for wise collective action (Bostrom, 2013; Ord, 2020). That tension is not an abstraction. It is built into the way our institutions are currently wired.

As I tried to assign probabilities to this cluster, I found myself returning to an uncomfortable pairing. On one side is the rise of nihilism among those who are most harmed or excluded by existing systems. When people conclude that nothing they do can alter the trajectory of power, engagement withers. Collective projects dry up. The sense of shared fate erodes. On the other side is the behaviour of entrenched Power Over. When the field of coordination is abandoned by the many, it is not left empty. It is seized more fully by the few. Mass despair does not neutralise domination. It strengthens it. Any estimate of socio-political transition that does not account for this dynamic is wishful.

The final cluster covered what people in existential risk studies call global catastrophic and existential risks, events that could either wipe us out or permanently cripple our long-term potential. This includes large-scale nuclear war, the deliberate or accidental release of engineered pathogens, and catastrophic failures involving advanced artificial intelligence, alongside low probability but high impact natural events such as supervolcanic eruptions or significant asteroid impacts. None of these risks exists in isolation. The likelihood and severity of war are shaped by resource scarcity, inequality and geopolitical rivalry. The safety of biotechnology is influenced by governance, culture and security norms. The behaviour of advanced AI systems, if they emerge, will depend on the incentives and constraints that shaped their development.

In this cluster, I tried to ask not only how likely each risk is in absolute terms, but how those probabilities might change under different trajectories of ecological damage and political evolution. For example, a more cooperative and less militarised world might reduce the risk of nuclear exchange, while a world under severe climate stress with intensifying competition might raise it. A concentration of technological power in a few hands might increase the chance that a small group can cause global harm, while a more distributed and carefully governed landscape might reduce that.

With these four clusters in place, I then focused on the multipliers, the interactions that matter most for the specific outcome I cared about. One of them is the race between transition and ecological breakdown. On the one hand, we need to transform our political and economic structures fast enough that serious emissions cuts, ecosystem protection and restoration, and changes in land use become real, not just slogans. On the other hand, the physical climate system has inertia, and some tipping elements may be approaching thresholds where small additional changes trigger large, self-amplifying responses. If we transform too slowly, we may arrive at a more just social order in a world that can no longer support the complexity that order requires.

Another multiplier is the interaction between crisis complexity and the resilience of horizontal systems. Research on social ecological systems describes resilience as the capacity to absorb shocks and reorganise while retaining core functions and identity. In theory, decentralised and participatory governance can be more adaptive, because decisions are made closer to the ground and can respond to local conditions. In practice, extreme and overlapping crises can strain any governance model. Under relentless stress, people sometimes demand a strong central authority simply to stop the chaos, even if that authority is unjust. So part of my estimation involved asking how likely it is that horizontal experiments can develop enough resilience and coordination to handle cascading crises without collapsing back into authoritarianism.

Equity and justice form another crucial multiplier. If the burdens of climate impacts, mitigation costs and adaptation efforts fall disproportionately on poorer and marginalised communities while wealthier groups insulate themselves, social tensions deepen. That in turn makes cooperation harder and gives authoritarians more raw material for fear-based politics. Conversely, policies that share burdens and benefits more fairly can enhance trust and cohesion, which are conditions for both ecological repair and political transformation. This is less about moral preference and more about recognising equity as a structural variable that changes probabilities.

Finally, there is knowledge. Much of what keeps complex societies functioning is not physical infrastructure but accumulated understanding: how to grow food in different climates, how to manage water, how to treat disease, how to repair machines, how to read the signals of changing ecosystems. Work on resilience highlights the importance of maintaining both diversity and redundancy in knowledge systems, so that shocks do not wipe out entire ways of knowing. In my calculation, I tried to estimate how likely it is that key bodies of scientific, technical and cultural knowledge survive periods of turmoil and are accessible to future generations, rather than locked away behind paywalls, destroyed in conflict, or forgotten when institutions fail.

At this point, the question becomes: how do you actually turn such a structure into a number, even a rough one? The method I used was to assign subjective but reasoned probabilities to each cluster and to the key transitions between them, then to combine them using conditional logic. For example, I might estimate a certain probability that the Earth system remains within a damaged but survivable envelope over three centuries, based on current trajectories and the ranges of outcomes explored in climate and Earth system models. Given that ecological window, I would then estimate the probability that our technological and material capacities degrade but do not collapse entirely, drawing on work in resilience and sustainability. The product of those gives a conditional probability that a physically viable and materially supported society is still possible.

On top of that, I would place an estimate for the socio-political transition. Given a viable ecological and technological base, what is the chance that humanity actually shifts toward a mostly horizontal, commons-oriented order, rather than remaining locked in some form of techno-feudal or authoritarian system? This step drew more on political economy, historical precedent and the dynamics of Power Over than on formal models. It is also where my probabilities shrank dramatically, particularly once I accounted for the way mass nihilism strengthens entrenched power rather than weakening it.

Finally, I estimated how many of the remaining scenarios are knocked out by large-scale catastrophes in the existential risk cluster. Here I leaned on surveys and analyses from existential risk research, which treat events like nuclear war, engineered pandemics and misaligned artificial intelligence as serious but uncertain threats over the coming centuries. Combining that with my previous steps, I arrived at an overall probability that the specific outcome I care about, a humane, horizontal, ecologically grounded global society, emerges and stabilises within roughly three hundred years.

I will not pretend the final number is precise. It sits in the low single digits, perhaps a few chances out of a hundred. between 1.8% and 3.5%. Which is enough to strip away any comforting belief that a good outcome is guaranteed. It is also enough to undermine the opposite claim that we are unquestionably doomed. If you were told that someone you love has a three per cent chance of surviving a difficult operation, you would probably not respond by declaring the effort pointless. You would also not pretend they are almost certain to recover. You would inhabit the uncomfortable space between, where the situation is grave, but not settled.

For me, living with a number like that does not lead to resignation. It leads to a different understanding of hope. Hope stops being the belief that everything will somehow work out. It becomes the practice of acting as if our choices matter, even when the odds are against us. It asks us to take seriously the possibility that our efforts to reduce harm, build commons, preserve knowledge, challenge domination and stay within planetary boundaries can push that small probability a little higher, or at least keep it from collapsing toward zero.

It also leads me to a very startling conclusion. Our biggest obstacle is not the ruling elite themselves. It is not ecological collapse or technological over-extraction. These can be navigated if we still have hope. The biggest obstacle we face is nihilistic resignation on a planetary scale. It is people who believe that the fight is already lost, and cede the little power we have to those who will use that power to hammer the final nails into the coffin.

We may not be able to widen the narrow path very much. The structures of Power Over, the inertia of the Earth system and the weight of history all push in the other direction. Yet there is still a difference between a path that is narrow and a path that does not exist. As long as some space remains, the question is not whether we are assured of success. The question is whether we are willing to behave as if that space is worth defending.

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References

Bostrom, N. (2013). Existential risk prevention as global priority. Global Policy, 4(1), 15–31.

Ceballos, G., Ehrlich, P. R., & Dirzo, R. (2017). Biological annihilation via the ongoing sixth mass extinction signaled by vertebrate population losses and declines. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 114(30), E6089–E6096.

Folke, C. (2010). Resilience thinking: Integrating resilience, adaptability and transformability. Ecology and Society, 15(4), 20.

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). (2023). Climate Change 2023: Synthesis Report. Contribution of Working Groups I, II and III to the Sixth Assessment Report of the IPCC. Geneva: IPCC.

Lenton, T. M., Held, H., Kriegler, E., Hall, J. W., Lucht, W., Rahmstorf, S., & Schellnhuber, H. J. (2008). Tipping elements in the Earth’s climate system. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105(6), 1786–1793.

Ord, T. (2020). The Precipice: Existential risk and the future of humanity. London: Bloomsbury.

Ostrom, E. (1990). Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Rockström, J., et al. (2009). A safe operating space for humanity. Nature, 461, 472–475.

Steffen, W., et al. (2015). Planetary boundaries: Guiding human development on a changing planet. Science, 347(6223), 1259855.

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At some point in our history, we stopped treating governance as something you can play with.

If you take David Graeber and David Wengrow seriously in The Dawn of Everything, human societies used to experiment quite wildly with how they organised themselves. There were cities that lived like monarchies in one season and switched to egalitarian councils in another. There were ritual hierarchies that flipped upside down at particular times of year, so that those at the bottom spent a while at the top. People tried centralized authority, then abandoned it, then brought it back in a different form. Governance was not a single track. It was a repertoire.

Then, somewhere along the way, we fell in love with the idea that there is one true form. The nation state. The professional bureaucracy. The constitutional democracy. The party system. The market as allocator of almost everything. We argue about which tweaks are better, but the basic structure is treated as sacred. We do reforms, not experiments. We patch, we tinker, we defend, but we rarely say, what if we are wrong about the entire shape of this thing.

So here is the premise. If people once experimented with governance on purpose, then there is nothing metaphysical blocking us from doing that again. The capacity is still there. What is missing is practice and permission.

I want to suggest that we consciously restart the habit of governance experimentation. Not in the abstract sense of another white paper about “rethinking democracy,” but in the literal sense of prototyping weird systems, running them in bounded ways, seeing how they work, noticing how they fail, and feeding that back into the next round. Not because any one design will save us, but because the act of experimentation itself is a way out of being stuck.

To make that less vague, I want to walk through a handful of strange governance models. Each one has a name, a basic idea, a reason it is interesting, and a set of obvious flaws. None of them is ready for general use. All of them are dangerous in their own ways. That is the point. Knowing the flaws is not a reason to abandon experimentation. It is exactly what tells us where to look next.

The first sketch is what I will call Field Knot Governance. Instead of thinking in terms of citizens and territories, this model treats the world as overlapping fields of consequence. Housing is a field. Watersheds are a field. Schooling, elder care, heat stress, pollination, all of these are fields. There are no mayors or parliaments in this picture, only temporary knots that form inside a field when it is under visible strain. People, tools, and organisations show up as capacities, not as abstract individuals. A knot gathers those capacities, makes sense of the situation, adjusts patterns, then dissolves.

Field Knot Governance has an obvious appeal. It honours the fact that problems are contextual. It tries to prevent power from freezing into permanent offices. It makes coordination something that happens in intense bursts around real issues, instead of through a standing layer of professional managers. At the same time, once you strip away the pretty language, it clearly inherits the classic strengths and weaknesses of adhocracy. Flexible teams can respond quickly, but informal elites rise just as quickly. People with more time, confidence, or social capital will dominate knots without ever being officially in charge. It becomes hard for ordinary participants to tell whether they are genuinely shaping outcomes or simply feeding information into someone else’s pattern machine. In other words, Field Knot Governance is a useful experiment to imagine, but it brings the risk of a permanent class of serial “fixers” who quietly capture the whole show.

Seeing that clearly is not a defeat. It tells us that any fluid, knot based model must take seriously who gets to keep showing up, how fatigue and attention are distributed, and how we prevent charisma and free time from becoming the real constitution. The experiment gives us design constraints, even if it never leaves the page.

The second model is Constraint Lattice Governance. Instead of issuing policies, budgets, or programmes, this design imagines governance that only defines structural patterns that are not allowed to exist. You do not write a law that says employers must do X and Y. You define a forbidden pattern that says no actor may both set safety standards and profit from violating them. You do not pass a policy that says “more social housing.” You write a rule that says no entity may own more than a certain fraction of habitable units in a given area. The focus moves from behaviours to shapes of power.

In theory, that sounds elegant. Rather than micromanaging what people do, you prune away the structural traps that reliably produce harm. You ban certain ownership configurations, certain concentrations of decision rights, certain kinds of opacity. In practice, it runs straight into the hard limits of prohibition. If you create a rule that says “pattern P is not allowed to exist,” and the surrounding system strongly incentivizes pattern P, then pattern P does not vanish. It retreats into more sophisticated disguises. You get pyramid structures hidden behind shell companies. You get de facto monopolies dressed up as franchise networks. You get regulatory bodies that look independent on paper and act as captives in reality. Prohibition does not remove the thing, it wraps it in a black box and raises the profit of anyone skilled enough to operate inside that box.

Constraint Lattice Governance is still worth thinking with, because it shifts attention from individual misconduct to structural design. It also teaches a hard lesson. A governance system that relies mainly on banning forms, even abstract forms, is almost guaranteed to create a theatre of compliance alongside a hidden world of real decisions. That does not mean we never forbid anything. It means that prohibition should not be our main tool, because it produces exactly the opacity that makes power hardest to challenge.

The third model pushes in a different direction. Call it Mutual Exterior Governance. Here, every community is governed only by its neighbours. Imagine a map of many small communities, each with a few thousand people. The baseline rules for Community A are written and updated by an exterior ring of other communities, not by A itself. Community A, in turn, sends delegates to help write the rules for some other community. No unit is ever allowed to legislate for itself. No one is sovereign over their own charter.

The attraction here is that it directly attacks one of the most stubborn failure modes of self rule. When the same people who benefit from a system also write its rules and police them, capture is not an accident, it is an attractor. Mutual Exterior Governance blocks that path. You cannot write laws that entrench your own local privilege, because you never hold the pen when it comes to your own basic framework.

The risk is obvious as soon as you say it out loud. If neighbouring communities are divided along ethnic, religious, or class lines, a ring of neighbours can coordinate to punish communities they consider an out group. It is easy to imagine racial blocs or sectarian coalitions using this sideways power to crush minorities. You can try to soften that with careful graph design, with reciprocity rules, with rotation and oversight. You will not remove the possibility. Mutual Exterior Governance shifts the location of capture without guaranteeing that it fades. That is still useful knowledge. It reminds us that taking away self rule does not automatically remove oppression. It simply moves the playing field, and any experiment in that direction would need serious protections against coalition targeting.

The fourth model is Blind Puzzle Governance. Instead of shifting who makes rules, this one tries to change what those decision makers can see. Every governance question is turned into an abstract problem. For example, a real world decision about allocating budget between three neighbourhoods is transformed into a puzzle where Group X, Group Y, and Group Z have certain baseline indicators, certain risks, and certain potential gains. Decision makers see those indicators. They do not see whether Group X is their own class or their political enemies, and they do not see the names of the places involved. The system requires 3 layers of people involved in the decision process, Framers, Solvers, and Binders. Framers translate messy reality into puzzles with anonymized variables. Solvers choose options based on those variables and on agreed fairness metrics. Binders take those decisions and apply them back to the real world.

The hope is to break identity based coalitions by removing the information they need to target or protect specific groups. You cannot pass a budget that rewards your supporters and punishes your enemies if you do not know which abstract profile belongs to which side. Blind Puzzle Governance partially achieves that in theory. It clearly relocates politics to the framing layer. Which variables matter. How disadvantage is encoded. What counts as a fair distribution. Those are not neutral choices. If framers, solvers, and binders collude, they can quietly rebuild identity into the puzzle. Even without explicit collusion, bias can be smuggled in through categories and metrics. The model is especially interesting for narrow domains like transport scheduling or certain kinds of procurement, where problems really can be stated as puzzles. As a general approach to governance, it raises as many problems as it resolves. Again, that is not a failure. It teaches us that anonymisation without deep attention to framing is a polite fiction.

The fifth model is Avatar Snap Governance. Here, instead of anonymised problems, there is an anonymised population. The system generates a layer of synthetic citizens, avatars whose profiles are statistically derived from the real population. Each real person is secretly linked to one or more avatars. All governance decisions are made for avatars only. Decision makers see that Avatar X is rich, Avatar Y is poor and sick, Avatar Z lives in a dangerous floodplain. They never see which avatars are tied to themselves or their allies. At intervals, the consequences that have accumulated for each avatar snap back into the life of the real person behind it. If you consistently vote for rules that make life worse for precarious profiles, you cannot know whether you are quietly constructing your own future conditions.

Avatar Snap Governance takes the old philosophical idea of a veil of ignorance and tries to turn it into a procedural rule. You are never allowed to know exactly who you are governing, and the system guarantees that you will eventually end up living under the choices you made for someone statistically similar to you, whether you know it or not. The dangers are large. Whoever runs the avatar system and the snap mechanism holds immense meta power. People might reject the whole thing as manipulative. Mapping consequences back from synthetic citizens into material conditions will always be fuzzy and unfair at the edges. Once again, the value is not in treating it as a blueprint. The value is in how it forces us to ask whether we really believe our own moral claims about treating others as we would wish to be treated, and what it would mean to enforce that structurally instead of leaving it to personal virtue.

Field Knot Governance, Constraint Lattice Governance, Mutual Exterior Governance, Blind Puzzle Governance, and Avatar Snap Governance. Five strange shapes. None of them clean. None of them safe. Each of them pressing on a different stuck place in our current imagination.

The question is what we do with shapes like this. One option is to treat them as intellectual curiosities and then go back to arguing about minor electoral reforms and slight tweaks to parliamentary procedure. Another option is to treat them as early sketches in a practice of experimentation. That second option does not mean we build any of these models at full scale. It means we accept that serious experimentation will produce designs with obvious flaws and that those flaws are not disqualifying. They are information.

What would it mean to experiment responsibly with governance today. First, it would mean admitting that our current forms are not neutral baselines. Representative democracies captured by parties and money are one experiment that has largely frozen into dogma. Technocratic bureaucracies are another. Authoritarian capitalism is another. They are not the natural end state of political evolution. They are local equilibria, and they are showing their cracks.

Second, it would mean shrinking the scale of courage required. You do not start by refounding a nation state. You start with city districts, digital communities, cooperatives, and specific domains like school governance or land use boards. You treat each experiment as something that must be reversible, or at least correctable, within a known time frame. No permanent offices. No immortal councils. Every structure comes with a sunset condition and a simple way to step back toward something more familiar if it really hurts.

Third, you build in the expectation of failure. A governance experiment that does not throw up obvious flaws is probably not doing anything new. The question is not whether a design has drawbacks. The question is whether people can see the drawbacks in time, and whether those who live under it can say no, enough, stop, without getting crushed. Trying out a very gentle version of Mutual Exterior Governance in a handful of municipalities, with a strong veto and exit option, is a very different thing to imposing it on an entire country by force.

Fourth, you make the learning public. When a model fails, you document how it failed. Did Field Knot processes burn people out and turn into insider games. Did Constraint Lattice rules create shadow empires behind the law. Did Blind Puzzle allocations erase important cultural knowledge. Did Avatar Snap mechanisms feel random and punitive. Did Mutual Exterior rings encourage spite between neighbouring communities. That knowledge should feed into the next round, not be buried to protect anyone’s reputation.

Finally, you treat governance design less like writing sacred scripture and more like maintaining open source software in a world that is already on fire. You fork, you merge, you maintain, you deprecate. You keep an archive of patterns that worked in some context, ready to be reactivated or reworked elsewhere. You resist the urge to declare any version final.

Graeber and Wengrow’s point was not that ancient societies were wiser or kinder. It was that they were less stuck. They were willing to treat hierarchy as a seasonal costume rather than a destiny. They did not assume that living one way now meant living that way forever. We do not have their exact conditions. We do have their capacity to refuse inevitability.

Reawakening experimentation in governance is not mainly a technical project. It is a cultural one. It means telling ourselves that we are allowed to play with the rules of how we decide and who decides. It means admitting that the worst thing we can do, in the face of cascading crises, is insist that the only mature response is to keep doing the same thing, only more efficiently.

We are not going to invent the perfect system in a single generation, let alone in a single essay. What we can do is normalise the idea that governance is not a finished product. It is a live question. If our ancestors could treat it that way, then so can we. Getting stuck is not a law of nature. It is a habit. And habits can be broken.

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Fernvale was one of those improbable towns that seemed to have slipped out of the future by accident and landed, slightly dazed, in the crumbling present. It belonged to a loose confederation of post-capitalist enclaves scattered across the continent, all of which were little pockets of stubborn possibility where people insisted on living as if the empire had already fallen and they were simply waiting for the news to catch up. These communities exchanged seeds, ideas, and overly enthusiastic manifestos through a courier network composed primarily of cyclists with excellent calves and questionable time management.

The wider world, meanwhile, was staggering through what historians would later call “the Decade of Extremely Avoidable Disasters,” a period marked by supply chain spasms, rolling blackouts, and the occasional billionaire attempting to privatize air. Cities responded by installing more surveillance cameras; Fernvale responded by installing more communal gardens. Where governments debated emergency powers, Fernvale debated whether lavender counted as a “necessary herb” or merely a “deeply appreciated one.” No one outside fully understood how these enclaves survived without markets, police, or formal governance, and when asked, Fernvale’s residents usually shrugged, handed over a tomato, and suggested trying it themselves.

The town’s physical layout did little to reassure visitors. It sprawled across a green valley like a quilt stitched by a committee of enthusiastic improvisers, all of whom had different understandings of the word “geometry.” Buildings leaned warmly toward one another, linked by footpaths that curved like sentences written by someone who had forgotten halfway through what the point was but decided to keep going anyway. Every roof sported some combination of solar panels, moss, or small edible plants, depending on local preference and how much the resident trusted gravity.

In place of a central business district, Fernvale maintained a central rhythm. It pulsed around the communal bakery, the Repair Yurt, and an unassuming grassy clearing that residents dubbed “the Council Meadow”, where people gathered to address matters of collective concern, such as how to distribute the surplus quince harvest or whether the next full-moon gathering should include lanterns or just rely on vibes. Decisions were made horizontally, diagonally, and occasionally through interpretive dance, depending on who showed up and how caffeinated they were.

Life in Fernvale operated on a principle its inhabitants never bothered to articulate, mostly because articulating it made it sound implausible. But observers eventually noticed a pattern: when something threatened the community, whether that be shortages of resources, conflict, or uncertainty, the town absorbed the problem the way a sourdough starter absorbed flour, metabolizing it until it became part of the ecosystem. This was true of droughts, storms, bureaucratic threats from the collapsing state, and once even a particularly gloomy economist who arrived unannounced and left three months later inexplicably cheerful.

The animals appeared to be participating as well. The chickens organized themselves into loose foraging guilds. The bees pollinated with an efficiency some claimed bordered on unionization. Two elderly goats, Clementine and Eduardo, drifted through civic meetings with a kind of deliberate indifference, chewing on documents that looked too official and thereby maintaining, quite accidentally, the town’s longstanding ban on paperwork.

This was Fernvale. It was earnest, improvisational, and infuriatingly functional. A place where collapse was not feared but composted. Where community felt less like an ideology and more like a weather system. It was one small node in a growing constellation of places determined to survive the end of capitalism not by fleeing into bunkers, but by building the next world early and inviting anyone curious, or hungry, to stop by.

Steve, who within the confines of his own mind went by Steven Archibald Buchannon the 3rd, considered Fernvale a mistake in urban planning and moral philosophy. To his decidedly fascist leanings, it was the sort of town that seemed designed by someone who believed spontaneity could be achieved through committee. The streets curved in whimsical loops that went precisely nowhere, as if the mapmaker had been paid by the corner. Every building was adorned with some self-affirming mural, from bees in waistcoats, to vegetables holding hands, all with slogans like “Consensus Is Contagious.”

To an outsider, it was charming.

To Steve, it was hell.

He was, by temperament and training, a man who believed in flowcharts. In the old world, he had been a rising star in a declining federal government bureau that was responsible for allocating military cleaning provisions to those training bases that had fallen into disfavour when the national military boycotts had become serious enough that even the weapons manufacturers had joined the picket lines. Steve adored lines, boxes, and arrows that pointed purposefully from the top to the bottom, and preferably pointing to his name in bold. Yet in Fernvale, authority dissolved on contact, like sugar in tea. No one ever seemed to give orders, instead they made “requests for co-alignment.” As a result no one ever disobeyed orders that were not given. They simply “reframed priorities.” when there was disagreement. This frustrated the part of Steve that wished he could, just once, punish someone for insubordination,

Steve had once tried to convene a mandatory town meeting only to discover that in Fernvale, “mandatory” meant “very optional but with snacks.” Fifty-three people attended, ate all the snacks, and decided the topic was “too hierarchical to continue.”

The bakery was the final straw.

Bread was the heart of Fernvale’s economy, not because it was scarce, but because it was sacred. Flour was milled by volunteers that everyone except themselves called grain whisperers. The ovens were solar-powered and each one named after extinct species “as an act of apology.” Loaves came in every conceivable shape, including one inexplicably shaped like a Möbius strip that was “symbolically infinite but practically awkward.”

Steve watched all this with quiet horror. He saw not community but vulnerability. There was no oversight, no data integrity, no chain of command. Bread was everywhere, but no one controlled it. It was, in short, an unguarded source of power.

So Steve decided to fix Fernvale by breaking it.

He began politely. He volunteered for the Grain Coordination Circle, which was a highly informal group whose mission statement, printed in biodegradable ink on recycled fabric, was “To ensure everyone feels good about bread.” Steve offered to “streamline operations,” which was the sort of phrase Fernvale found irresistible because it sounded modern but could mean absolutely anything.

Within a week he had digitized their chaotic ledgers, replacing sticky notes and gossip with an algorithm he called The Grain Brain. It tracked harvest yields, oven schedules, and distribution routes. It produced charts so elegant that people assumed they must be democratic.

The commune loved it. “You’ve brought such clarity,” said Mira the carpenter, with her three piercings, a solar-tattoo that changed color with UV exposure, and a tendency to end every sentence with “in a good way.”

Steve smiled the smile of a man who could already hear the drums of destiny and the bugles of pomp.

He spent the next month introducing “efficiency adjustments.” He rerouted flour shipments, delayed yeast requests, and quietly consolidated supply approvals through himself. After all, a cohesive community required “data synchronization”, didn’t it? No one noticed because everyone was too busy writing songs about collaboration.

By the third week, slight shortages began to ripple through the network. Nothing catastrophic of course. Steve knew better than to boil the frog too quickly. And so he sowed just enough chaos to spark confusion. Households began hoarding baguettes. The rumor spread that perhaps some bread was “less community-aligned” than others. Someone coined the phrase loaf inequity and painted a mural about it.

Through it all, Steve remained calm, even sympathetic. “I’m only trying to help,” he would sigh, which was technically true in the same way that lightning technically helps forests.

When the chaos reached its peak, he proposed a solution: an Emergency Grain Committee. He would coordinate resource flows “temporarily” until stability was restored. The commune, relieved, applauded the idea unanimously.

For seventy-two hours, Steve ruled Fernvale’s bread supply. People queued politely outside his office to sign distribution forms that he had printed on official paper. It was the first official paper the town had ever seen. And the first time many of the children had even officially heard the word. He wore a tie for the occasion, which caused a minor sensation. Children asked if “official” was a celebratory time, and where they could get copies of his costume.

He felt magnificent.

And then, just as suddenly as he’d managed to wrest control from the collective, the counterrevolution arrived disguised as empathy.

A potter named Jules, who was known mainly for crafting teapots shaped like existential dread, asked a friend in the public square, “What happens if Steve gets sick?”, and was overheard by no less than 4 women from the community garden council. It was an innocent question, voiced with genuine concern. But in Fernvale, with its listening circles and culture of open curiosity, questions were contagious. Within hours, six committees had formed to explore “the sustainability of dependency.”

One of these groups created Backup Grain Brain, an open-source copy of Steve’s algorithm with community edit privileges. Another began a Bread Literacy campaign, teaching people how to read and adjust data directly. A third group, misunderstanding everything, organized a “Thank Steve for Helping Us Decentralize” parade, complete with banners that read: YOU’RE OUR FAVORITE WARNING SIGN!

By the end of the week, there were now fourteen autonomous bread networks. Supply lines were more resilient than ever. Mira proudly presented Steve with a certificate naming him “Inadvertent Innovator of the Year.”

The coup had succeeded so perfectly it destroyed itself.

At the celebration feast, long tables overflowed with bread. There were round loaves, braided loaves, rye rolls, black buns, and a focaccia somehow shaped like the concept of forgiveness. People toasted to “the gift of adversity.” A poet read aloud an epic titled “Steve and the Loaf of Learning.” Someone handed him a crown woven from wheat stalks and biodegradable glitter.

Steve tried to give a speech about vigilance, but the microphone had been repurposed into a “community listening stick.” Every time he spoke, someone else interrupted to thank him for “creating space for vulnerability.”

Later that night he returned to his small room overlooking the square. Outside, music floated on the air with drums, laughter, and the clatter of plates. He stared at the crown on his table, the glitter slowly dissolving in the humidity, and opened his leather notebook.

> Day 29: Bread Coup initially successful. Structural dependency achieved for 3 days. System self-replicated, neutralized centralization vector. Society celebrated failure as evolution. I believe I must attack more deeply. Next time, I will figure out how to outlaw dancing.

He paused, broke off a piece of bread left at his door, and tasted it.

Still warm. Perfect crust.

He hated it.

But he took another bite anyway, because resistance, he realized, was both futile and delicious.

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Yesterday I posted a note about the mainstream handling of the Epstein files. When someone suggested a people’s court in response to the note, I felt two things in relatively quick succession. The first was that familiar shrug, the reflex that said, “Yes, but it would be symbolic, a spectacle that cannot jail anyone or seize a single asset.” The second feeling was quieter and more interesting, because it gave me an opportunity to explore an idea I’ve spoken about on here several times but with very few entry points for demonstration of the idea (because it needs tangibility and is not a neat and tidy concept). If the official courts have spent decades protecting this entire ecosystem of harm, maybe symbolism is not the consolation prize I have been taught to see it as. Maybe it is one of the few tools we actually have left.

I have been circling this idea of metamorphic justice for a while. It came from a sense that the usual justice vocabulary feels like using the wrong set of tools on purpose. Retributive justice loves balance sheets and scales. Someone caused harm, the system inflicts harm back, the world is declared morally even again. Restorative justice, in its kinder forms, asks everyone to sit in a circle and speak from the heart, and aims to repair relationship and community. There are many that argue that both of those have their places. I would disagree, and am entirely open to discourse on the matter. But when we talk about Epstein, or anything on that scale, those frameworks start to feel strangely small. They lean on an assumption that the wider system is at least trying to be honest and fair. Here, the wider system is all over the crime scene, and not in the role it claims.

The United States government had detailed files on Epstein for years. The FBI investigated, wrote memos, drafted an indictment, and watched the case dissolve into that notorious non-prosecution agreement. Prosecutors and politicians shook hands around the edges of his world. Universities, banks, foundations, and media figures extended him legitimacy. Private jets, private islands, private everything. Then, when the whole thing finally burst past the point of containment, the same system tucked a mountain of evidence into sealed folders and called it complicated. This should not be a story about a monster slipping past the guards. It absolutely should be a story about the guards, and the systems that they claim are intended to guard us from the monsters.

If I take that seriously, then justice cannot just mean better guard work next time. It has to mean something more like a change in species. That is what metamorphosis is. The caterpillar does not get an apology and better leaves. Its entire body is taken apart and reassembled into something with different instincts, different ways of moving, different relationships to the world it occupies. Metamorphic justice is my attempt to point at that kind of shift, not only in individuals but in systems, institutions, cultures, habits of attention.

So I want to bring this back to the idea of a people’s court. Imagine a group of survivors, researchers, movement elders, legal minds, and ordinary people who refuse to be bystanders. They announce that, since the state has so clearly abdicated its own story about justice, they will hold a tribunal of conscience. They gather testimony, documents, timelines, financial records, sworn statements, expert analysis on grooming and trafficking and blackmail and power. They invite those implicated to speak, knowing most will not. They sit, listen, argue, and at the end they issue something that looks like a judgment.

On paper, nothing happens. No prison sentences follow. No bank accounts are frozen. The men whose names appear in the findings go on with their lives. It would be very easy to dismiss the entire thing as theatre.

But there is a difference between theatre that distracts, and theatre that reveals what has been hidden in plain sight. A people’s tribunal cannot compel a single witness, yet it can do something that official courts often avoid. It can tell the whole story. It can pull together fragments that appear in separate headlines and case files, and show them as a single pattern. It can name that pattern as a crime against more than one person at a time, and more than a list of particular victims. A crime against a generation, against bodies that were treated as disposable reproductive material for the fantasies of the wealthy, against whatever faint sense of safety existed for teenage girls in those circles. It can do that without needing to protect donors, alliances, foreign policy, or campaign optics (and I am sure many of you now can imagine this same strategy being used to lay bare all sorts of injustice).

This is where metamorphic justice starts to breathe a little. The point is not to pretend that an unofficial tribunal is secretly a real court. The point is to notice what happens when we stop waiting for permission to name what we already know. The state has a monopoly on legitimate violence. It does not have a monopoly on truth. It does not have a monopoly on moral language, or on memory.

Of course, naming is not enough. If all we do is write fierce judgments and let them float around social media, nothing fundamental has changed. Then we are doing little more than what is already being done by the existing Liberal virtue-signalling mainstream. Metamorphosis is not a new slogan pasted onto the same body. It is tissue work that is meant to be deep, slow, awkward, and contested.

Take the financial architecture that made Epstein’s life so easy. Private equity, offshore trusts, secretive banks that pride themselves on discretion. Philanthropic fronts that buy social respectability with a fraction of the money extracted elsewhere. For metamorphic justice, the question is not how to ensure the next Epstein files are released a bit sooner. The question is what needs to stop existing, or be radically reconfigured, so that a man with those desires and that money cannot spend decades moving through the world as a kind of invisible node of predation. When such institutions are named in a public tribunal, we have named that which needs to be metabolized.

That could point toward bans on specific secrecy vehicles, serious penalties for institutions that engage in willful blindness around trafficking, or entirely different ways of structuring wealth and property. It gets uncomfortable fast, because real metamorphosis always does. It draws a line between tinkering and transformation and asks which side we are actually on.

There is also the culture around masculinity and entitlement layered across this case. The ease with which powerful men can treat young women as status symbols, entertainment, and offerings to each other. The way “everyone kind of knew” becomes a shrug instead of a siren. Metamorphic justice wants to know how that shrug is produced, and how to interrupt it. Not just with campaigns and posters, but with changes to how boys are raised, what counts as a joke in certain rooms, how desire and consent get narrated in media, what counts as bystander courage in elite spaces.

Now, this all sounds large and abstract, and it is. But it also loops back into very simple, grounded gestures. A people’s tribunal is a way of saying: we no longer accept the “official” version of events as the only version that matters. Survivor led networks are a way of saying: we will not wait for courts to declare that harm happened before we believe each other, and we will not let institutions define what “closure” means if closure only serves their reputation. Community based accountability processes are a way of saying: prison is not the only imaginable response to harm, and sometimes it is not even an honest one, but doing nothing is not acceptable either.

Metamorphic justice would try to hold all of that without pretending it will snap into place as a coherent system any time soon. The starting goal is to notices that there is a hunger for clear endings. A conviction, a sentence, a feeling that the account has been settled. It does not shame that hunger. It does, however, refuse to let that hunger be the only measure of whether justice has happened. Sometimes the most important work is quieter. Changing policies at a bank. Defunding a particular surveillance unit. Creating a norm in a profession that says: if you are in the room when someone jokes about “young flesh,” you do not smile and walk away, you act.

What makes this difficult is that metamorphic justice will rarely give you a moment where you can say, “There, it is done.” It is more like tending to an ecosystem that has been poisoned in ways that are still not fully visible. You pull out one contaminant and discover another buried underneath. You plant something small, it fails, you try again with different soil, different companions. Meanwhile the old growth keeps trying to come back.

With Epstein, the temptation is to fantasize about the one decisive act that would finally count. The big trial. The spectacular leak. The complete release of every file with every name. The fantasy is understandable, especially when you watch the state perform sincerity while doing almost everything possible to limit exposure. But the longer I sit with it, the more I think that even the fantasy needs to be reframed. If a miracle occurred and every person who knew, enabled, or profited was dragged into court tomorrow, what then. Without deeper changes to finance, politics, media, gender norms, and the dynamics of Power Over, the ground is still ready for the next iteration.

This sounds like an argument for despair. I do not mean it that way. I think it is an argument for being more honest about scale and about direction. A people’s court, in this light, is not a rehearsal for the state. It is practice in taking ourselves seriously as moral agents who can generate our own records and judgments. Survivor-centered processes are not a footnote to formal prosecutions. They are experiments in building forms of accountability that do not depend on institutions that have already declared, again and again, that some lives are negotiable. Structural campaigns that target banks, universities, foundations, and media houses are not distractions from “real” justice. They are some of the only levers we have to reshape the habitat in which this kind of violence thrives.

I wish I could say that metamorphic justice is a coherent program we can implement if we just decide to. It is not. It is more like a direction of travel, a way to orient ourselves in the wreckage. It is a refusal to let justice be reduced to either punishment fantasies or tidy reconciliation ceremonies. It asks harder questions. What would have to change so thoroughly that a case like this would be impossible, not just embarrassing. What do we owe, not only to those who survived, but to those who will be at risk tomorrow if we settle for a smaller transformation because it feels easier to describe.

There is no neat way to end this that does not betray the concept. So I will leave it here, in the discomfort. Somewhere between the desire to see particular men actually face consequences, and the recognition that even that would be only a fragment of what justice could mean, if we let it become something metamorphic.

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I am in an unusual position. On one hand, I am working as a consultant on the construction and development of a new school facility. There are architects, engineers, investors, ministries, consultants, deadlines, and compliance frameworks. There are meetings about fire stair configurations and MEP systems and tender clarifications. There are standards to meet, contracts to respect, and budgets to protect. On the other hand, I carry within me a long study of what education could be when released from the logic of control, extraction, and industrial uniformity. I carry the Living Curriculum. This is not poetic language. It sits with me in every design review and coordination call. I look at the plans for walls and schedules and staff rooms, and I imagine groves, circles, gardens, ritual spaces, elders, apprenticeships, threads of inquiry, rhythm instead of routine, and belonging instead of compliance. It is like holding two futures at the same time. One still binds us. One wants to breathe.

Navigating these worlds has made the question of power impossible to ignore. Not power as domination alone, although domination is indeed present in most educational systems. Power as a spectrum of relational forces that emerge from the way we coordinate. Power Over, which structures so much of schooling as it exists today. Power Within, which most schooling accidentally stifles. Power To, which is too often confused with credentialism. Power With, which is treated as extracurricular rather than foundational. And Power Through, which few institutions understand at all, yet which cultures and ecosystems depend upon.

To work inside the old world while gesturing toward the new requires that I see all five forms clearly. It requires that I acknowledge the realities of Power Over without allowing myself to be consumed by it. It asks that I cultivate Power Within in systems that do not reward internal sovereignty. It demands that I build Power With even when the structures I inhabit are built to isolate, rank, and surveil. And it reminds me that the long arc of transformation moves through Power Through, the subtle weaving of aligned forces and shared meaning that slowly erodes coercive structures without recreating them in new forms.

So this essay (brief by my usual standards) is not only an argument. It is an admission. I am still inside the old world as I build the new one. And from that vantage point, the five powers reveal themselves not as abstract categories, but as the lived architecture of transformation.

Power Over: The Logic of Control in Industrial Schooling

To understand what we must transcend, we must name what is here. The dominant form of schooling is built on Power Over. It is visible in everything from classroom layouts to national testing regimes. It is encoded in age segregation, grading systems, standardized curriculum, bell schedules, surveillance technologies, and teacher hierarchies. It is justified in the language of safety, accountability, and excellence. It is rooted in the idea that learning must be managed, controlled, and measured for the sake of societal order.

Even the most caring teachers feel its weight. They are bound by mandates, evaluation systems, and compliance frameworks that make genuine autonomy risky. Students are bound by timetables, punishments, threats of failure, and competitive academic hierarchies. Parents are bound by fear of economic precarity, convinced that the system may harm their children, yet terrified of stepping outside it. Bureaucrats are bound by political pressures, budgets, public optics, and institutional survival.

Power Over is rarely malicious. It exists because the system is designed to reproduce itself. It rewards obedience, not imagination. It protects uniformity, not diversity. It privileges control over relationship, and predictability over life. It is the logic of a factory applied to the human soul. Even when its actors have good intentions, its architecture disciplines them into narrow roles.

Working inside a school project means acknowledging that this structure remains intact. There are regulatory constraints, budget constraints, accreditation constraints, cultural expectations, and administrative safeguards. I cannot pretend they are not there. I cannot bulldoze them through ideology alone. Instead, I have to learn to move inside Power Over without surrendering to it. And that means holding other forms of power simultaneously.

Power Within: Reclaiming the Sovereignty School Suppresses

Power Within is the quiet, steady knowledge of self. It is the ability to feel, discern, and choose from inner coherence rather than external pressure. It is cultivated through presence, curiosity, grounded embodiment, and attunement to one’s own volition. When a child has Power Within, they follow questions rather than instructions. They seek meaning, not approval. They listen to internal signals before external demands. They feel their own worth and do not rely on comparison or ranking to confirm it.

The traditional school system weakens Power Within by design. It rewards compliance. It punishes self direction. It rewards correctness over exploration. It punishes emotional truth. It teaches children to distrust their own impulses, defer to authority, and suppress curiosity when it is inconvenient. To survive school, many children disconnect from themselves.

The Living Curriculum reverses this. It treats internal sovereignty as the bedrock of learning. It creates rituals, rhythms, and relational structures that strengthen attention, emotional intelligence, narrative coherence, and somatic awareness. It sees the learner as a living field, not a vessel to fill.

In the current project, I cannot transform everything at once. But I can make decisions that protect and nourish Power Within. I can advocate for quiet spaces and reflective spaces, not just instructional ones. I can encourage design that honors sensory needs, neurodiversity, and somatic grounding. I can shape pedagogical conversations toward reflection rather than instruction. These may seem small, but they are footholds. Power Within grows in the cracks of the old world.

Power To: Agency Toward Meaningful Action

Power To is the capacity to act, to build, to initiate, and to create. It is the power of skill, practice, and capability. In industrial schooling, Power To is often conflated with credentials. But credentials are not capability. Many people leave school with diplomas yet little agency. They know how to pass tests, not how to shape worlds.

True Power To emerges when individuals believe they can influence reality and have the tools to do so. It requires trust, not control. It requires failure as learning, not failure as shame. It requires freedom to experiment, not fear of making mistakes.

In a Living Curriculum, Power To means children become designers, gardeners, researchers, storytellers, builders, mediators, scientists, and citizens long before adulthood. It means that learning is not rehearsal for life, but life itself.

Inside the existing system, Power To must often be smuggled in. I look for spaces where young people can build something real: gardens, community projects, design challenges, ecological monitoring, cultural archiving, and intergenerational mentorship. Sometimes it looks like science labs. Sometimes it looks like carpentry. Sometimes it looks like conflict resolution circles. The form matters less than the principle: capability emerges through meaningful doing.

Power With: Learning Through Relationship, Not Competition

Power With is the power of collaboration, mutual aid, co creation, and shared intelligence. Industrial schooling treats peers as competitors, or at best as neutral co occupants of a classroom. Group work is often superficial. Collective inquiry is framed as distraction. Yet human learning is relational by nature. We think together. We co regulate together. We unsettle and uplift each other.

Power With transforms learning into a communal act. It brings children, adults, elders, artisans, and families into shared learning fields. It invites difference as a gift, not a problem. It sees mentorship not as instruction, but as accompaniment. It builds social fabric, not academic isolation.

In my current role, this is where I intervene most subtly. Sometimes I propose common spaces designed for gathering rather than crowd control. Sometimes I suggest governance structures that include students and families. Sometimes I invite multiple disciplines to design alongside each other rather than in silos. Sometimes I simply bring presence, and in doing so remind others that we do not solve complexity through control, but through relationship.

Power Through: The Emergent Field

Power Through is the most subtle, and the most transformative. It is the power that emerges when internal coherence, personal agency, and collective resonance align. It is a field phenomenon. It happens in forests, musical ensembles, healthy communities, mutual aid networks, and ecosystems. It cannot be commanded, but it can be cultivated. It arises through deep trust, shared values, aligned intention, and relational presence.

In a Living Curriculum, Power Through is everywhere. It shapes how threads of inquiry emerge. It guides collective decisions. It animates ceremonies, festivals, rituals, and seasonal rhythms. It allows the culture of learning to become self repairing and self generating.

Power Through is almost absent in conventional schooling because the logic of control interrupts emergence. When every movement must be authorized, nothing surprising can happen. When every learner is siloed, no collective field can form.

Working within the existing paradigm, I cannot manufacture Power Through. But I can design toward it. I can create opportunities for community ritual, reflection, shared stewardship, and cross generational exchange. I can protect unstructured time. I can encourage fluid movement rather than rigid scheduling. I can seed the idea that systems thrive when trust and feedback coexist. These gestures, small as they may seem, create cracks through which living systems can breathe.

Holding Both Worlds

Working at the threshold between old and new requires humility. It is easy to criticize the system from the outside. It is harder to change it from within, especially when bound by contracts, regulations, and cultural expectations. I do not pretend that a single project will overthrow the legacy of industrial schooling. I do not imagine that architecture alone can liberate the human spirit. But I also do not retreat into purity and abstain from engagement. I believe transformation happens by weaving, not abandoning.

Every time I walk onto the site, I see two schools superimposed. One is the school of compliance, safety codes, inspections, standards, timelines. The other is the school of gardens, circles, rituals, apprenticeship, silence, song, and belonging. I stand between them. I do not reject the first, but I do not serve it blindly. I treat it as scaffolding for the second.

That means negotiating. It means knowing when to bend and when to insist. It means reading the room and feeling when a truth is ready to be spoken and when it must be held silently until the soil is fertile. It means building allies gradually, not by force but by resonance. It means remembering that many people inside the system secretly long for the same world I hold. They may not yet have a name for it, but they feel it.

The Patience of Ecologies

We are conditioned to think of change as policy, through formal acts of reform, eventually resulting in incremental social shift. But nature works differently. Forests do not overthrow meadows. They infiltrate. Mycelium spreads quietly. New roots take hold under old trunks. A sapling rises quietly beside a fallen log. The system shifts through succession.

This is how the Living Curriculum comes alive. Not through revolution alone, but through patient cultivation. Through small openings in rigid walls. Through spaces of trust in rooms of compliance. Through ancestral practices whispering beneath fluorescent lights. Through young people who still carry instinctive curiosity, waiting for permission to breathe.

Transformation is not a blueprint. It is a practice. And power, in all its forms, is the medium. Power Over still exists. It must be acknowledged without being obeyed. Power Within must be strengthened even when systems try to dilute it. Power To must be restored as agency, not credential. Power With must be seeded until it becomes the norm rather than the exception. And Power Through must be tended like a fire that does not yet have enough wood but burns anyway because the world needs its warmth.

I am helping to build a school. But really, I am tending a possibility. The building will open. Children will come. Adults will supervise. Schedules will exist. Bureaucracy will persist. And yet if we do this well, there will also be gardens, pauses, threads, rituals, laughter, silence, sovereignty, and belonging. There will be seeds of a different future carried in backpacks and remembered in fingertips. And one day those seeds will find soil where structure once stood.

That is how we move away from Power Over. Not by escaping the present, but by knitting the future inside it.

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In Chapter 19 of my book “The Living Curriculum” I make an attempt at discussing how we move from the current education paradigm, to a Living Curriculum. I intentionally leave the subject broad, because the specifics would vary depending on the context. Each region in which the transition is attempted is enmeshed in hierarchical schooling to a different degree, and in different ways. Some schools and communities might already have multiple aspects of a Living Curriculum implemented, while others might have structures that are antithetical to our ideal system. So what follows here is 1) a description of the principles and phases of the transition, and then 2) a practicable guide that suggests some concrete steps that can be taken in various contexts.

Disruption & Diagnosis

Every transformation begins with a moment of honesty. At some point, societies must admit that what once worked no longer does. Education has reached that moment. The system that was built to enlighten now functions to contain. It tests curiosity until it breaks, sorts children into hierarchies of worth, and measures growth through compliance. Reformers have spent decades changing surface details while leaving the foundation untouched. The problem is not the teachers, the policies, or even the funding. It is the architecture itself. Schools were designed to produce predictability. They were never meant to cultivate freedom. To move toward a Living Curriculum means to rebuild from the soil up, not to renovate the old machinery.

The first step in any true shift is recognition. We must see what has been normalized. Bells that divide time into fragments. Desks that reduce movement to stillness. Grades that replace conversation with ranking. Behind these details sits a deeper belief: that learning can be managed like a factory line. When we recognize that this belief is historical, not natural, we begin to reclaim our agency. What appears inevitable becomes a choice, and choices can be changed. Naming the problem is not enough, but it is the doorway to everything that follows.

Parallel Prototypes

Once this awareness settles, communities begin to look for places where they can practice something different. The Living Curriculum does not emerge from committees or ministries. It begins in small experiments, rooted in everyday life. A neighborhood might create an intergenerational learning circle where children, elders, and artisans share knowledge. A teacher might invite students to redesign their classroom around questions that matter to them. Parents might form cooperatives that treat education as a community responsibility rather than a service to purchase. These prototypes are humble, imperfect, and alive. They are laboratories for rediscovering what learning feels like when it is driven by curiosity instead of compliance.

In the beginning, these spaces coexist alongside the dominant model. That coexistence can be awkward. Teachers may fear stepping outside the boundaries of policy. Parents may worry that untested models will jeopardize their children’s future. The task at this stage is to build permeability between the two worlds. Let the walls soften. Schools can partner with local groups for place-based projects. Governments can create micro-grants for learner-directed programs. Educators can begin to shift their role from instructor to facilitator, guiding exploration rather than delivering content. Each of these gestures chips away at the rigidity of the system, proving that coherence does not require control.

Repatterning Institutions

Change on this scale requires patience. Institutions are designed to resist transformation, not embrace it. The closer reformers get to the roots of the system, the stronger the resistance becomes. Bureaucracies are expert at absorbing change until it loses its power. That is why it is vital to protect the core principles of the Living Curriculum. Legal frameworks must evolve to recognize diverse pathways of learning. Public funding should follow the learner, not the institution. Communities must be allowed to define their own standards of success, grounded in thriving, belonging, and ecological responsibility. Policy, at its best, becomes a shield for plurality, not a mold for conformity.

Even with supportive policy, culture shifts more slowly than law. Many people have internalized the idea that authority equals safety. They may crave freedom in theory but feel lost without structure. This is why transformation must address not only governance but also emotion. It calls for spaces where educators, parents, and learners can process their fears and learn new habits of trust. Community reflection circles, restorative practices, and trauma-informed dialogue are not extras. They are the social technology that makes lasting change possible. Without them, the old patterns simply rebuild themselves under new names.

Full Emergence

Over time, the built environment of schooling also begins to transform. Empty classrooms can become community workshops. Cafeterias can serve as collective kitchens. Playgrounds can evolve into gardens. The physical structures we already have hold immense potential for renewal. When we stop treating schools as closed systems, they become porous, adaptable, and responsive. A gymnasium might host dance nights, skill exchanges, or local assemblies. A library might double as a storytelling space or a studio for oral history. The boundaries between learning, living, and community life begin to dissolve.

This shift cannot happen without economic imagination. Education and labor have long been bound together through the myth of employability. Schools were built to produce workers for industrial economies. To free education, we must also free livelihood. That means valuing the kinds of work that sustain communities but rarely receive compensation. Caregiving, mentoring, growing food, and tending to ecosystems are not side projects. They are the foundation of collective wellbeing. A Living Curriculum aligns with this by recognizing every person as both learner and contributor. When public policy supports universal access to time, space, and basic security, people are able to participate in education as a shared civic practice rather than a private investment.

Take chances, make mistakes, get messy!

Transitions are rarely clean. As new systems emerge, contradictions multiply. A teacher might want to embrace learner autonomy but remain bound by standardized testing. A parent might celebrate creativity while worrying about university admissions. Governments might praise innovation yet demand quantifiable results. These tensions are inevitable, and they can even be useful. They reveal where the old and the new still collide. Communities that treat these conflicts as opportunities for reflection rather than defeat are better equipped to move forward. Feedback loops, transparency, and relational accountability become essential tools. The measure of progress is not perfection but responsiveness.

Eventually, as enough communities find coherence within the new pattern, something subtle begins to shift. The paradigm of schooling as we know it starts to lose its gravitational pull. The alternative becomes the reference point. The Living Curriculum does not replace the old system through decree. It outgrows it. Learning becomes recognized as a social process that unfolds across a lifetime. Schools are no longer the sole guardians of knowledge. They become one node among many in a vast network of mutual learning. This is the moment when education ceases to be a preparation for life and becomes indistinguishable from life itself.

This transition will look different in every place. A rural cooperative in Kenya will not mirror a community learning hub in Norway. A project grounded in Indigenous land stewardship will differ profoundly from an urban makerspace. That diversity is not a weakness. It is the strength of the Living Curriculum. Just as ecosystems thrive through variation, learning cultures flourish through pluralism. The goal is not to replicate a model but to cultivate an ethic: to nurture the conditions in which people can grow together in resonance with their surroundings.

Examples of this future already exist in fragments. In Canada, land-based education programs are restoring ancestral knowledge. In India, community schools are blending craft, ecology, and literacy. In South America, popular education networks link art, politics, and daily life. These initiatives remind us that the Living Curriculum is not a distant dream. It is an ongoing reality at the edges of the mainstream, waiting to be recognized and supported. The challenge is to weave these examples together without erasing their differences. What unites them is a shared refusal to separate knowledge from life.

The hardest barrier to overcome may be psychological. For generations, people have been trained to believe that learning must be administered by an authority figure, that expertise flows from the top, and that credentials define worth. The Living Curriculum breaks that spell. It reawakens the understanding that learning is innate, relational, and alive. Children know this instinctively. Adults remember it only when they step outside the routines of institutional life. The work, then, is partly a work of remembrance. We are not inventing something new so much as returning to what human cultures have always known: that to learn is to participate in the unfolding of the world.

Such a transformation cannot be rushed. It unfolds through seasons of experimentation, retreat, and renewal. Some communities will move quickly, others slowly. Some initiatives will fail, and those failures will teach us more than success ever could. What matters is persistence. The Living Curriculum is not a movement of perfect models. It is a practice of continual adaptation. Each step forward creates new questions: How do we sustain trust? How do we hold boundaries without domination? How do we ensure that inclusion does not become dilution? These questions do not weaken the vision. They keep it alive.

Ultimately, the transition to a Living Curriculum is about redefining what we mean by education itself. It is not a reform, a policy, or a trend. It is a reorientation toward life. It calls us to see learning as an ecological process, as interdependent as a forest. In a forest, each tree grows at its own pace, yet all share the same air, water, and soil. Their health depends on their relationships, not their competition. So too with human learning. When we align education with that rhythm, we create conditions for regeneration instead of exhaustion.

We stand at the edge of that possibility now. The old system is fraying under the weight of its contradictions. Test scores rise while wellbeing falls. Budgets grow while curiosity shrinks. The promise of stability has turned into a cage. The Living Curriculum offers a way out, but not through revolution or decree. It invites a quieter courage to tend, to listen, and to build together. The courage to replace control with care, and efficiency with belonging. If enough of us take up that invitation, the shift will no longer seem impossible. It will simply be the next natural step in our collective evolution.

The Practical Guide

1. Begin With Landscape Mapping

Every context has its own ecology of learning. Before building anything new, map what already exists. Identify your learning assets, which might come in the form of: elders, craftspeople, cultural spaces, natural sites, and local stories that carry knowledge. Then identify barriers such as laws, funding patterns, property restrictions, or social norms that inhibit shared learning.

Start small. Walk the land. Host conversations with parents, teachers, and youth. Ask: “Where does learning already happen when no one calls it school?” The goal is not to impose a model but to discover the conditions already fertile for change. Document these through community mapping, story-gathering, or participatory research circles. This becomes your baseline.

2. Form a Transition Team

Assemble a small group of trusted individuals who represent different sectors of the community. This should be varied and would almost certainly include educators, youth, caregivers, local officials, farmers, and artists. This group becomes the Transition Team, responsible for weaving together insight and action.

Establish clear values early. For me, this would have to include, but not be limited to: Mutual respect, Transparency, and Learning through Experimentation. The team should include people capable of bridging systems so it would be useful, and even advisable to have someone fluent in local policy, another connected to grassroots networks, and others skilled in facilitation and design. This cross-pollination is key to moving from talk to practice.

3. Prototype Living Practices

Avoid starting with buildings. Begin with rituals, relationships, and rhythms. Pilot a single project. This might be something like a storytelling circle that links oral history to ecology, or a shared garden that integrates science, health, and art, or a mobile makerspace that visits neighborhoods. Keep the focus on real participation, not performance.

These prototypes should be open, observable, and iterative. After each cycle, the transition team and as many participants as possible should ask: “Who felt included? What conditions enabled flow? What friction arose?” Document outcomes, not as data points but as learning stories. Over time, these become the evidence base for shifting local policy and funding.

4. Build Shared Infrastructure

Once the first prototypes take root, build the physical and administrative infrastructure around them. This could mean repurposing a disused classroom into a community workshop or negotiating access to municipal land for outdoor learning.

Think modularly. Use temporary structures such as canopies, mobile libraries, foldable furniture, so that the environment can evolve. This flexibility protects against premature institutionalization. Simultaneously, you can begin exploring legal pathways for recognition through cooperatives, trusts, or community-benefit societies. These can give formal protection without replicating bureaucratic rigidity.

5. Integrate Social and Economic Supports

A Living Curriculum cannot thrive in isolation from livelihood. Partner with local businesses, cooperatives, and health agencies to weave mutual benefit. For example, learners can contribute to ecological restoration projects, food cooperatives, or artisan networks in ways that blend education with meaningful work.

Ensure caregivers and mentors are supported. Advocate for stipends, food access programs, and cooperative childcare arrangements that free up time for community learning. Economic security is the soil from which educational innovation grows.

6. Design for Relational Governance

Hierarchical decision-making is fast but brittle. Relational governance is slower but resilient. Create circles of accountability rather than pyramids of authority.

• A Core Circle handles daily coordination.

• A Reflection Circle includes learners, families, and facilitators who meet regularly to evaluate wellbeing.

• A Stewardship Circle ensures ecological and cultural integrity.

Establish protocols for urgent decisions before they are needed. Clarify how to act swiftly in cases of conflict, harm, or abuse without reverting to punitive logic. Transformative Justice councils and transparent communication are essential. Speed can coexist with care when everyone understands the process.

7. Create Legal and Policy Pathways

As the network of prototypes grows, formal systems will eventually need to adapt. Start cultivating relationships with local policymakers, legal experts, and sympathetic administrators early. Prepare policy briefs that demonstrate the social, economic, and ecological value of your initiatives.

Push for flexible accreditation that honors portfolios, apprenticeships, and community-based assessments. Advocate for funding models that support learning ecosystems rather than single institutions. If possible, form alliances with other initiatives nationally or globally to amplify legitimacy.

8. Embed Regenerative Evaluation

Traditional metrics cannot capture relational learning. Develop community-led evaluation frameworks that track wellbeing, belonging, and ecological contribution. Use storytelling, visual mapping, and participatory data collection. Over time, these narratives can influence public perception and funding priorities.

Invite learners to co-design evaluation tools. The act of reflecting on learning should itself be a learning experience. A Living Curriculum is measured by vitality, not by numbers.

9. Guard Against Co-optation

As the work gains recognition, institutions will attempt to absorb it. Protect your autonomy by keeping governance distributed and by foregrounding values rather than branding.

When new partners arrive in the form of universities, NGOs, or funders, ensure alignment through clear ethical covenants. This can be as simple as asking: “Does this partnership deepen community agency, or does it extract legitimacy?” Keep decision-making close to those who are affected by it.

10. Cultivate the Long Arc

Transformation moves through seasons. There will be times of rapid growth and others of quiet dormancy. Create rhythms of rest, celebration, and reflection. Hold annual gatherings to reconnect with purpose and renew shared commitments.

Celebrate the local. Document the journey through art, film, and story so others can learn without copying. Over time, neighboring communities will begin to plant their own seeds. The role of early pioneers shifts from building to mentoring, from directing to listening. The Living Curriculum spreads not by replication, but by resonance.

Contextual Adaptation Checklist

1. Cultural Context: What traditions, values, and languages shape local meaning-making?

2. Ecological Context: What resources, climates, and ecosystems define your place?

3. Economic Context: How can livelihoods, care work, and learning interweave sustainably?

4. Political Context: What laws or policies constrain or enable community-led education?

5. Technological Context: How can tools support transparency and participation without surveillance?

Adapt each strategy to these five dimensions. The same seed will grow differently in different soils.

Closing Reflection

A Living Curriculum is not a single model to implement. It is a pattern of attention that grows wherever people decide to live and learn differently. The guide above is not a checklist to complete, but a scaffold to hold experimentation. Begin with what is near and real. Invite others in. Listen to what the land, the children, and the elders are already teaching. Over time, the landscape itself will show what the next step should be.

The most important principle is not perfection, but participation. When people begin to learn together as if their collective future depends on it, a new kind of education (and a new kind of society) comes into being.

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