Anarchoccultism

Kairos

Mon, 05 Jan 2026 11:29:20 +0000

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

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

A Solarpunk Fractal: Creating A Viable System

Tue, 16 Dec 2025 13:00:00 +0000

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

A Solarpunk Fractal: Microservices

Mon, 01 Dec 2025 10:56:52 +0000

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

control over violence (sovereignty)

control over information (bureaucracy)

and charismatic competition (politics)

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

A Solarpunk Fractal: Structure and Purpose

Wed, 26 Nov 2025 10:53:47 +0000

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

Recombination, Discovery, and the Shape of the Initial Population

Thu, 20 Nov 2025 11:03:30 +0000

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

A Fitness Function for Liberation

Mon, 17 Nov 2025 12:11:49 +0000

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

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

The Coordinated Swarm

Sun, 16 Nov 2025 06:50:30 +0000

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

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

A Vision

Thu, 13 Nov 2025 08:55:40 +0000

Any sufficiently advanced disaster preparedness program is indistinguishable from a revolutionary movement. There is no limit to which types of disasters for which one can choose to prepare. In this time of escalating climate change, one should, of course, focus on short-term preparedness for natural disasters.

Fires, floods, and hurricanes will all be more common and more severe as the years go on. Melting ice shifts the weight distribution of the Earth, which can increase earthquake frequency (I bet you didn’t expect that to be related to climate change). Climate change can allow or force migration of animals to different areas, leading to interactions between species that had previously not interacted. These interactions increase the probability of inter-species disease transmission, which increases the probability of pandemics. It’s unlikely COVID-19 will be the last, or even the most deadly, pandemic that most of us will see in our life times.

A Cyber-Memetic Model of Revolution

Tue, 11 Nov 2025 14:24:53 +0000

While the VSM was developed primarily to assess viability of systems within capitalist markets, authority is one level of abstraction removed from that. Whereas the money is a primary factor of the fitness of an entity within the market, the currency of authority is in the memetic space: legitimacy. It is belief about the relative viability of a system, rather than a quantifiable measure of the viability of the system, that determines the success or failure of a revolutionary project. Perception is a function of viability, assessed within the VSM, but perception is not itself VSM viability.

Disaster Anarchism (An Argument Against Insurrection)

Tue, 11 Nov 2025 14:23:13 +0000

It is at this point that we must discuss important two facts:

It is easier to raise an insurrection to defend systems people want, than it is to build systems that people want during an insurrection.
A sufficiently advanced disaster preparedness and response program is indistinguishable from a revolutionary counter-power.

The United States military is, first and foremost, a logistics machine. The combat capabilities of military forces universally relies on providing soldiers with what they need to continue fighting. This has been true for more than two thousand years since Sun Tzu said, “The line between disorder and order lies in logistics.”

Collapse, Competition, and Dual Power

Tue, 11 Nov 2025 14:14:13 +0000

Speculative fiction has, again and again, imagined worlds where Fascism was not defeated, where Hitler did not lose. But these worlds were always impossible. The nature of authoritarianism leads to it’s own collapse. As climate change increases the probability of natural disasters, hierarchal organizations will be less and less able to grapple with the consequences.

As the Syrian Civil War showed us, if regimes will fail to adapt then counter-power can replace them. Assad’s government was incapable of adapting to the drought and subsequent events that lead to the civil unrest that marked the beginning of the Syrian Revolution. When the state failed to ensure the supply of bread, alternative institutions stepped in. Both liberatory (Rojava) and oppressive forces (ISIS) were able to seize power. Assad’s government, though it took more than a decade, ultimately succumbed to the limitations of its own authoritarianism.

The OODA loop and Turboparalysis

Tue, 11 Nov 2025 14:10:14 +0000

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

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

With Cybernetic Eyes

Mon, 10 Nov 2025 18:58:49 +0000

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

Ursula K. Le Guin

While Le Guin reminds us what is possible, this quote is not a strategy. But there are tools we can use to derive a strategy to pull the boot off our necks and bring the body behind it to the ground. What is that strategy? To use the terminology of cybernetics, the strategy to collapse a system can be stated as, “create sufficiently complex situations that they surpass the attenuation capacity of the system, and do so at a rate that is faster than the relaxation time of that system.”

The Competitive Masculinity of Revolutionary Violence

Mon, 03 Nov 2025 10:07:39 +0000

What do we do with a system so toxic and oppressive that we cannot survive under it? When we cannot change it, we have been told, we must destroy it.

“Star Wars: Andor” is rich in the cultural zietgiest. As we grapple with the growth of fascism, it captures a clear picture of how fascism operates and an inspiring message of resistence. In this moment, it is impossible to miss one of the most popular quotes on the Internet.

The Duality of Privilege and God-Man-Child

Thu, 30 Oct 2025 14:36:41 +0000

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

The Continuum of Privilege within Fractal Cult

Thu, 30 Oct 2025 13:00:51 +0000

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

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

Cults and Control

Thu, 23 Oct 2025 20:21:26 +0000

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

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

The Cult of Capitalism

Thu, 23 Oct 2025 20:08:19 +0000

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

Through the Looking Glass, Without a Pill

Thu, 23 Oct 2025 20:07:04 +0000

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

A Psychedelic Cosmology

Sat, 20 Sep 2025 19:19:30 +0000

“I had to live a while before I understood that a lot of things can only be said joking and not joking at the same time.” - Always Coming Home, Ursula K. Le Guin

As the surface around the letters you are reading emits or reflects electrons, the rods and cones in your eyes receive that light and emit signals down their dendrites to other nerves. These signals cascade from neuron to neuron, neural cluster to neural cluster, down the optic nerve and into the brain. The brain transmutes raw signals about the presence or absence of light in certain areas, hues, shapes of light and dark areas in to meaning1.