Recombination, Discovery, and the Shape of the Initial Population

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

Discovery at a small scale can be a difficult problem. We’ll talk about some approaches to mitigating it in a bit, but first let’s jump ahead. If you start taking people out of capitalism, at a certain point it’s hard not to notice. When you’ve liberated hundreds or thousands of people, people are already paying attention. Once other groups are aware you exist, then they just need to be able to adapt what you’re doing to their own situation.

This brings up the importance of transparency. Transparency is the key to systemic recombination. How can a system combine elements of different systems if they simply don’t know what they are? How can a system adapt one model to another situation if it has no information at all to adapt from?

And what about threats from the dominant system? If the system is defined in opposition to the dominant system, then the dominant system has an incentive to attack it. In some cases, such as especially authoritarian regimes, it could be dangerous to broadcast what you’re doing.

If we prescribe a solution here it may be suboptimal, or worse. An authoritarian intelligence service would find a consistent signal extremely useful. Discovery can go both ways. Fortunately, we can also think about this in terms of evolution and fitness functions.

Any system that produces a good solution for discovery will be discovered. Others trying to implement the same strategy are likely to copy this mechanism. Perhaps this strategy won’t work, it will be identified by an adversary. Then another, more discrete, mechanism can evolve.

But the problem of discovery isn’t a new one. Every organization that developed under threat has had to solve this same problem. Christians under threat of death in Rome adopted pagan symbols that gave them plausible deniability as part of their discovery solution.

Because this is better solved evolutionarily, we won’t prescribe a specific way to do things in all situations. We will, however, include both discovery and transparency later as we provide an example blueprint for our first population.

There is another way to manage discovery though, and this is worth talking about also: mitosis. Mitosis is an asexual reproduction process carried out by cells. If a single organization splits in to two or more organizations, they can, at that point, create a connection that allows them to share information back and forth. Like cells, they will start with the same set of rules. Unlike cells, they can change those rules over time and can feed adaptations back and forth between each other.

If a single organization splits in to multiple organizations, they can maintain a connection as a “federation.” If a federation becomes too large to manage, that can split and the split federations can federate. There will be an amount of natural variation within federation members. Simply by having people who are different, and recognizing the value of this diversity, each organization will adapt it’s own strategy and tactics. At the federation level, report backs can fulfill the “information sharing” function. And with a simple recursive structure, we can fulfill all the basic requirements of a genetic algorithm.

Sets of isolated federations focused on maximizing the number of people they can get out of capitalism would necessarily need to do this through scale. They would be incentivized to solve the discovery and transparency problem. If each group within a federation autonomously tries to solve the discovery problem, there will be many variations. The first one to solve the problem could then report their solution to the federation, which would likely lead to it being inherited by most or all other members. Discovery of new groups or federations would lead either to the inclusion of new groups in existing federations or the creation of a new federation that links distributed groups.

How large should these groups be? How large should federations be? How should we organize these groups? What do they need to do? All of these things, and a few others, can ultimately be solved genetically. But we also don’t need to invent everything ourselves. There are models we can already look to, things we can already leverage, to build our initial population and begin this process.

The framework of disaster preparedness gives us a huge advantage in a couple of areas: It is already oriented towards solving the right problem, by default, and it is plausibly deniable (for situations where that is, or will become, especially important). But that doesn’t mean it’s the only way to solve this problem.

While a disaster preparedness group is one potential vector for systemic escape (one that we will talk about in more depth as we continue), there are many more. As I mentioned, I lived for a little while on a commune that was run as a religious retreat center. (It was originally purchased from the Baháʼí, which is itself a somewhat interesting subject. They had also run it as a commune and retreat center.) The commune had resident houses and guest houses, and made money primarily through renting out space for events (such as local burning man meet ups), as well as occasional donations and services. Residents worked for housing, and sometimes food, by maintaining the space (taking care of animals, housekeeping for guest houses and public space, and general maintenance). This included both priestess working in service to the head priestess (who owned and controlled the land) as well as non-believers who lived there for other reasons.

Land was available to grow food on. Some people focused on permiculture and maintaining the garden, which provided some food for people. Anyone working “full time” on the land, in service as a priestess, otherwise had no income and lived primarily off government assistance and other odd jobs, though some could get along without the government assistance. “Full time” tended to be between 2-4 hours per day, though not really every day. Work was done on an as-needed basis, which meant that there were often days with no work at all.

There were, of course, a lot of problems. The primary being that centralized land ownership meant that there was a massive power imbalance. The priestess was occasionally abusive and manipulative, sometimes throwing people off the property for some petty reason or another. But even in this, she was not much worse than any normal land lord. When “the lady” wasn’t present, folks generally got along well. It was an escape from capitalism (if into another authoritarian structure) that gave a lot of people room to heal.

Residents were often people who struggled to exist under capitalism, or came there specifically to resist it. There was a fay herbalist who I chatted about soda recipes with, one of the only male priests at the temple, who occasionally worked as a figure drawing model at the local college for extra cash. There were a few folks who came there after coming out of prison. It was a calm space away from the demands of capitalism that gave a lot of room to heal. There were various priestesses, some focused on their faith, some recovering from addiction or mental health issues, some just burner butterflies just passing through. My neighbor was a writer, William Kotke, who introduced me to permiculture and Kombucha and who I introduced to Linux in exchange. Two of my best friends were an old rockabilly punk English major who lived in a yurt next to the drive way, who was unable to work under capitalism at the time (we all miss you Miles), and an ex-cable installation business owner who decided to leave everything behind and drive across the country after coming to the conclusion that his financial success hadn’t made him happy and it was time to figure something else out.

There was such a richness there that’s hard to find elsewhere, and my experience isn’t actually that unique. My partner also lived a couple of years in a similar place: a non-profit retreat center. While these places often use legal loopholes to evade taxes and exploit workers (my partner later got back pay for work that had been paid under minimum wage, back pay that only came after legal threats), they can also, paradoxically, be a sanctuary from capitalism. Places like these operate under different rules. I was also aware of other, similar places. Folks at the commune I lived at would occasionally move from there to a Buddhist commune near by, or talk about plans to move there. Another friend who left prison found his way to a Christian monastery which, even though he was not religious, provided him a place of structure, peace, calm, and healing.

There are also such places that are not abusive. When William finally got sick of arguing with “the old lady,” he moved to a commune somewhere in rural Oregon. Home, Washington was founded initially as an anarchist intentional community. I’ve visited other anarchist rural land projects in distant parts of rural Washington. Such places can be invisible, because rural America is full of such strange things.

Heavily armed cult compounds up in the hills tend to be left alone, local gossip but places that police avoid (unless they cause really significant problems for locals). Even then, as evidenced by the Rajneeshpuram, they can threaten local sovereignty and even stand against the federal government (go watch Wild Wild Country and ask what would have happened if federal agents weren’t extremely lucky). If cops tend to ignore even neo-Nazi compounds , quiet anarchists can easily fly under the radar as “weird hippies” that don’t cause problems. Live in a rural place long enough and you’ll find out about at least one of these little communities.

These land projects may be especially fertile ground for escape, especially when paired with religious exemptions. There are significant exemptions carved out, not simply eliminating taxes but also limiting or eliminating other regulations such as health insurance requirements for members of religious communities such as monasteries. Insular religious communities, such as the Amish, have their own exemptions to maintain their religious freedom. Suffice it to say, there’s a lot worth exploring here, but such an exploration is beyond the scope of this text. The subject could probably be it’s own book.

Secret societies are another interesting area that has come up when talking about these things. Acéphale may spring to the mind of any weird antifascist philosophy geeks (and thanks for the rabbit hole friend). But it’s not simply these obscure corners. Secret societies were common at the dawn of what tends to be recognized as European anarchist thought. Erica Lagalisse documents this hidden tendency, not only of anarchists but of the left, in “Occult Features of Anarchism.”

Houseless camps are their own autonomous zones. They are, by their very nature, illegal. They are, by their very nature, a form of being external to the regular rules of capitalism. This is exactly the reason they are targeted. In the lead up to the (first?) American Civil War, maroons were similarly illegal spaces populated by the most marginalized people. These spaces had huge revolutionary potential, ultimately becoming the launch points for raids against plantations. Their work in freeing slaves ultimately forced the Civil War.

The Revolutionary Abolitionist Movement wrote an entire text, Burn Down the American Plantation, on the overlap between the pre-civil war movement for the abolition of slavery and the current era.

All these opportunities and many more opportunities may present themselves, and may be more or less applicable at any given time or situation. There is no need to restrict oneself even to a single strategy. Diversity of tactics is not simply a good thing to respect, but is an essential element of any evolutionary resistance.

However, the next section will focus on the concrete elements of a disaster preparedness system with the potential to transition to revolutionary dual power. Others are welcome to take up the task of following alternative threads from here.