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Title: Inhabit Author: Inhabit Date: 2018 Language: en Topics: autonomist, post-left Source: Retrieved on 2020-04-13 from https://inhabit.global
For Clark
There are Two Paths:
The End of the World or the Beginning of the Next
You have to choose
IT’S OVER.
BOW YOUR HEAD
AND
PHONE SCROLL
THROUGH THE
APOCALYPSE
Watch as Silicon Valley replaces everything with robots. New
fundamentalist deathcults make ISIS look like child’s play. The
authorities release a geolocation app to real-time snitch on immigrants
and political dissent while metafascists crowdfund the next
concentration camps. Government services fail. Politicians turn to more
draconian measures and the left continues to bark without teeth.
Meanwhile, glaciers melt, wildfires rage, Hurricane Whatever drowns
another city. Ancient plagues reemerge from thawing permafrost. Endless
work as the rich benefit from ruin. Finally, knowing we did nothing, WE
PERISH, sharing our tomb with all life on the planet.
TAKE A BREATH
AND
GET READY FOR
A NEW WORLD
A multiplicity of people, spaces, and infrastructures lay the ground
where powerful, autonomous territories take shape. Everything for
everyone. Land is given over to common use. Technology is cracked
open—everything a tool, anything a weapon. Autonomous supply lines break
the economic stranglehold. Mesh networks provide real-time communication
connecting those who sense that a different life must be built.
While governments fail, the autonomous territories thrive with a new
sense that to be free, we must be bound to this earth and life on it.
Enclaves of techno-feudalism are plundered for their resources. We
confront the dwindling forces of counter-revolution with the option: TO
HELL OR UTOPIA?
Either answer satisfies us.
Finally, we reach the edge—we feel the danger of freedom, the embrace of
living together, the miraculous and the unknown—and know: this is life.
Upheaval, polarization, politics as bankrupt as the financial
markets—yet under crisis lies possibility. This epoch forces us to
consider how each of us forms a kernel of potential, how individuals can
follow their wildest inclinations to gather with others who feel the
call. People learn lost skills and warriors return fire to the world.
Farmers and gardeners experiment with organic agriculture while makers
and hackers reconfigure machines. Models escape the vacant limelight and
break bread with Kurdish radicals and military veterans taking a stand
for communal life.
Those with no use for politics find each other at a dinner table in
Zuccotti Park, Oscar Grant Plaza, or Tahrir Square, and the barista who
can barely feed himself alone learns to cook for a thousand together. An
Instagram star whose anxiety usually confines them to their apartment
meets a battle-scarred elder in Ferguson, where they are baptized in
tear gas and collective strength, and begin to feel the weight lifted
from their soul.
People everywhere, living through the greatest isolation, rise together
and find new modes of life. But when these kernels grow to the surface,
they are stomped out in a frenzy of banality and fear. Openings are
forcefully shuttered by riot police, private security forces, and public
relations firms. Or worse, by the lonely ones—politically right or
left—who have nothing to gain but another Like on their crappy Twitter.
All this while smug politicians and CEOs hover. The revolutionary
character of our epoch cannot be denied, but we’ve yet to overcome the
hurdle between us and freedom.
Our epoch’s nihilism is topological. Everywhere is without foundation.
We search for the organizational power to repair the world and find only
institutions full of weakness and cynicism. Well-meaning activists get
digested through the spineless body of conventional politics, leaving
depressed militants or mini-politicians. Those who speak out against
abuse end up bearing witness to sad games of power playing out on social
media. Movements erupt and then implode, devoured internally by
parasites.
Cities become unlivable as waters rise and governments scramble to
maintain their legitimacy. Each disaster feels more and more intimate,
whether we scroll through it or receive the dreaded text did you hear?
Accidents feel like massacres. The names of the dead, an index of a
civilization in decline. We lose family and friends to addiction,
poverty, and despair. We watch the police exercise their freedom to
murder, at a loss for how to quench our rage. We hold each other through
it all and remain standing. We sense the present that has been stolen
from us, imagine the future we are fated. No one is coming to save us.
We have to give ourselves the ground on which a revolution will grow.
We wake up day after day, generation after generation, going to work in
order to recalibrate the same nightmare that forces us to work. We
hustle to get by, feel the stress of the commute and the sleepless
night, live paycheck to paycheck or one precarious gig to the next, all
just to keep the water on. Our labor made this world and keeps it
running, but not one of us feels at home. It’s not surprising that so
many people throw themselves into anything that promises it could be
better— movements, health trends, subcultures, militias, gangs,
whatever.
We want a dignified life. We desire the freedom to turn our calloused
hands to experimentation, to become so much more than our jobs. If the
potency of our time is any indication, it’s that we’re capable of more
than mere survival. The very labor we give—our strength, creativity, and
intelligence—can be our weapon. The possibility to endure is in our
capacity to strike, and in the seduction of our shared power. Our strike
will be the immediate practice of reconfiguring how we live, without
respect to our bosses, the rich, or the robots intended to replace us.
Together we have the know-how and the drive to build a better life, a
life on our own terms, and it’s up to us to create and inhabit new
worlds to replace this one. Our ingenuity, our passion, our
determination—we are the hinge on which every future rests.
Piece by piece, we are assembling the foundation of a revolutionary
force. We are building a life in common, combating the material and
spiritual poverty imposed on us by our epoch, and opening ourselves up
to immediate experimentation with different ways of living. Our goal is
to establish autonomous territories—expanding ungovernable zones that
run from sea to shining sea. Faultlines crossing North America leading
us to providence. These autonomous territories will open to new flows
for travel and resources, waypoints during ecological crisis, and the
ground to reclaim techniques and technologies of which we’ve been
dispossessed.
We envision our task with serenity and severity. We want territories
with infrastructure flexible to catastrophe, born of collective joy,
inhabited by a courageous and dignified way of life. Our time is
different from the past, and we will not wait for a senile radical
nostalgia to catch up. We don’t have every answer, but we share what we
know to be true.
Now is the time to exit this untenable way of life.
We’ve been raised in a culture of isolation and defeat, where our
potential is reduced to meeting the economy’s demands. Buried beneath
our own personal worries, our own bills, and our own fears, we are
forced to look out only for ourselves. But we are capable of a different
life.
To begin, eliminate isolation. Cut through the bullshit. Turn to those
closest to you and say you need a life in common. Ask what it would be
like to face the world together. What do you have? What do you need?
Take an inventory of your collective skills, capacities, and
connections. Make decisions that will increase your strength. Establish
the basis for a life in common.
Imagine a life that reaches past your individual borders. You change the
way you move through your environment to intentionally come into contact
with others. Fleeting encounters become real relationships. You wander
through your neighborhood, stopping by friends’ houses on your way to
the cafe. You meet up nightly at the park to work out. You walk each
other home. You share each other’s cars. You go camping and learn how to
start a fire together. You pool money for a collective rainy day. The
idea of private property gets blurred. You begin to understand
yourselves as something more DECISIVE than a group of friends.
Hubs are points of aggregation, centers of activity. Creating a hub is
the logical next step to finding each other. We need dedicated spaces to
get organized and to give ourselves time together. Hubs bring together
the people, resources, and shared spirit necessary to create the
foundation for a life in common.
Pool resources, target an area, and start a hub. Rent a space in the
neighborhood. Build a structure in the forest. Take over an abandoned
building or a vacant piece of land. No space is too small, or too
ambitious. Start with what’s at hand and then multiply. Use the hub to
ground all of your initiatives.
A repurposed storefront hosts WEEKLY DINNERS that turn into planning
sessions. A collectively-run cafe sets aside profits to incubate other
spaces, like a woodshop where carpenters work together to build more
than just bookshelves. In a forest outside town, a clearing serves as a
gathering spot for weekly fires and martial arts training. Nearby, a
small permaculture farm slowly expands to feed those living in town.
Our bodies are a mystery to us. Our health is out of our hands. If the
lights went out, most of us would remain in the dark. We’ve been
dispossessed of skills, passions, and knowledge. But we aren’t fragile.
When we learn new skills or overcome harsh challenges, we wrest back the
defining thresholds of our sense of possibility. We are capable of
incredible and improbable feats.
Reclaim skills, master them through practice, and share their power.
Reach out to people who have capabilities you want everyone to have. Use
hubs to experiment. Prepare for the new normal. Learn to hunt, to code,
to heal: increase your collective strength.
A hurricane tears through town—POWER’S OUT. FEMA is taking its sweet
time. A group establishes a hub outside of the flood zone. Cooking large
dinners together has given everyone the confidence to operate at scale.
Teams move out to gather food in a lawless environment, fighting off
racist opportunists who cling to an order of property which has been
revoked. One gathers medical supplies from hospitals and pharmacies
while another opens up water tanks in apartment buildings. A park
occupation brings even more people and resources together. Someone
scales a building to place a router powered by kinetic energy. The
router establishes a connection with a mesh network to call in
reinforcements from other hubs across the territory.
The time of isolated life is over. We all share the catastrophe; we all
share the challenges our epoch poses. We can protest the uneven
distribution of medical resources all we want, but care will only be
universal and dignified once it is rendered autonomous.
Create collective forms of care. Get organized with the next twenty
years in mind. Ask each other how your needs will change as you age,
have children, become disabled, begin to die. Make decisions based on
desire. Imagine how spaces can accommodate the dynamic nature of living
and fighting. Address the most difficult questions: how to face madness,
addiction, interpersonal violence, and traumatic loss. At all costs,
protect each other from institutionalization.
An intergenerational network forms to address the whole of living.
People think together about how to raise children, how to nurture their
agency, how to help them cope with the world as it changes. Care for the
aging is organized collectively and reverence for elders’ experiences
affirms dignity at each stage of life. Health collectives learn
ancestral methods of birth control and abortion to ensure AUTONOMOUS
CHOICE. Shared emotional intelligence aids those needing a break from
the fight and those returning to it. Partisan doctors, herbalists, and
shaman make a pact to provide care for the network. Everyone rests
easier knowing that the hospital does not have to be their first option.
The need for the services of government lessens. With a new orientation
to life and to death a historical weight is lifted. Without the
anxieties and stress of this civilization, sicknesses begin to
disappear. A new capacity for care becomes a common reservoir of
strength to face the future together.
Our society slanders people who stand up for what’s right. We are told
nothing can change, to keep to ourselves, and, above all, to not push
back. To cultivate a fighting spirit in our time, we must follow an
ethical compass in addition to developing strategic thought and building
physical capacity.
Become stronger. Make yourself capable of force. Learn the art of
striking, how anything can become a weapon. Learn to subvert the force
of the enemy—go from how a punch that harms a fascist is captured as
viral content, to how to collectively incapacitate the enemy by cutting
off his communication system. What stands in the path of a new way of
life? How can you overcome it, together? What strategic considerations
will keep you out of the hands of the enemy?
A network of FIGHTCLUBS connects every major city. Experienced members
teach grappling and striking alongside basic fitness and stretching.
Each club finds its space and builds ties with their community,
especially those being cast off from this world. One chapter in the
Midwest mobilizes with truckers to resist automation. Together they
paralyze I-70 with the help of a geotracking app, block the self-driving
trucks, and break open their cargo holds. What is useful is expropriated
and the rest turned to ashes. Smoke blinds police cruisers already lost
amidst makeshift barricades. The cargo yields a batch of mini-drones,
which are sent into defensive flight patterns via a reconfigured app.
The hacked drones infiltrate incoming police drones to transmit a virus
that freezes their propellers, dropping them harmlessly to the ground.
Acting with the chaos, the belligerent truckers and fightclubbers take
the offensive and make their escape.
We don’t need another organization to bring us together to talk about
problems, but ways to implement concrete practices to solve them. We
need a network that amplifies the power of each project, widens the
territory, and refuses to leave the future up to chance.
Find each other at an expanded scale. Look for the other people also
getting organized. Scout out nascent intensities and communal forms and
make contact. Reach out, establish communication, visit and meet.
Exchange stories and strategies, so our network’s cultural memory and
operational intelligence grows, building a greater power between us.
Create material connections, share or trade resources. Multiply this
gesture by thousands.
In one subversive territory, biohackers experimenting with new
techniques make innovations in WATER PURIFICATION, a group of indigenous
families resists an energy company’s enclosure of their sacred land, and
an autonomous hub redefines its neighborhood with a patchwork of urban
farms. Regular communication between these three projects addresses
their shared needs. Water treatment techniques spread between them while
autonomous food infrastructure gives rise to abundance. The network is
weaponized when the indigenous families call for reinforcements to
defend their land. Using encrypted communication to coordinate
logistics, thousands of people arrive with resources to aid the nascent
struggle.
We’ve been made to rely on paychecks and stores for our basic existence.
We’re dependent on the capitalist system which forces us to either
submit or starve. There’s no way around this fact: the material
organization of the present world is the problem we must overcome.
Deepen the reach of autonomous initiatives. Build the infrastructure
necessary to subtract territory from the economy. Answer questions of
collective, material power: how to feed each other, house each other,
heal each other. Leverage data and design without falling into the trap
that the internet will save us. Form collectives and cooperatives that
achieve strategic goals without buying into a vacuous economy. Develop
scalable solutions to the problems of energy, distribution,
communication and logistics.
A local food distribution hub opens a cooperative grocery on the other
side of town. Needing to expand capacity, the nearby farm that grows
their vegetables integrates into a bioregional network looking to share
a world as well as fresh food. A group of designers and engineers who
hate their jobs team up to create an app that coordinates a flexible
SUPPLY CHAIN among the farms and distribution points. These efforts lead
to an autonomous trade corridor springing up. The growth of the
network’s force and the utter disregard for regulations leaves the
authorities helpless, as food and people circulate freely along with the
spirit of rebellion.
We don’t want to improve life just for a select few—this is a mass
exodus from this world. That means addressing the infrastructure that
underpins this civilization and repurposing things as we see fit. Some
systems will have to be dismantled, like oil pipelines and nuclear
plants, while others can be broken open to serve autonomy.
Hack everything. Go from solving problems the current infrastructure
cannot address to requisitioning existing institutions and radically
changing their use. Occupy deadening spaces—city halls, schools,
shopping malls—and breathe new life into them. Anticipate and intensify
strategic fractures. Redirect communications systems. Commandeer supply
lines. Seize power without governing.
The proliferation of autonomous health clinics begins to influence the
world of medicine on all fronts. Nurses, doctors, and administrators
work together to clandestinely siphon hospital supplies to these
clinics. When veterans’ hospitals are federally defunded, the autonomous
clinics join up with patients and healthcare providers to occupy VA
offices around the country. Brutal repression at one occupation sends
dozens to a nearby state-run hospital, but when the police attempt to
enter urgent care to arrest the injured veterans, they are repelled by
sympathetic surgeons and nurses. Autonomous groups are joined by forces
overflowing from the occupations, and the hospital and its vital
resources are seized for the unfolding insurgency.
Revolution is a line we trace in the present.
It means building autonomy here and now, making government and the
economy superfluous. Breaking out of being governed will mean more than
winning battle after battle and outmaneuvering political foes. It will
rest on our ability to create the lasting foundation for life in common.
Spread secession to all areas of life. Go on permanent strike, slowly
but surely, and take everyone with you. Refuse to be managed, or to
manage anyone in turn. Drive a wedge down the center of society. Disavow
a lifetime’s worth of cynicism and resentment. Believe that it is all
possible.
Strikes persist, and the dull weight of debt disintegrates as financial
capital collapses under growing hostility. Neighborhood assemblies
decide how to act in the state of emergency, rebellious soldiers refuse
to fire on their own neighborhoods, and “crime” is now relegated to
raids on the governed zones. In cities, every day is like a block party.
Confiscated cookouts on crowded streets herald a time beyond these
remnants of economic life, when shops are primed for a new use in
common. At night, bonfires illuminate the distance and the stars in
their wisdom reappear to protect us. In the suburbs, a Walmart is now a
hub for free goods and getting organized. Truckers and first responders
meet to coordinate aid to a flooded territory. In the West,
technologists outfit weather balloons with transceivers to amplify the
autonomous internet. Labor freed from the economy increases the yield of
autonomous farms, and children again learn how to be loyal to the earth.
There is no future emergency for which we must prepare.
We are already here—with every dystopian element, every means of
revolution. The horrific consequences of our time and its beautiful
potential are unfolding everywhere. We are resisting the end of the
world by proliferating new worlds. We are becoming
ungovernable—unbeholden to their merciless law, their crumbling
infrastructure, their vile economy, and their spiritually broken
culture.
We violently stake a claim in happiness—that life resides in our
material power, in our refusal to be managed, in our ability to inhabit
the earth, in our care for each other, and in our encounters with all
forms of life that share these ethical truths.
We need fighters, makers, thinkers— creativity, and ingenuity.
We need builders, healers, farmers, designers, and engineers.
We Need You
---
They tell us to wait as our lives
pass us by, hardly touching the
surface of what we could become.
They tell us to be peaceful while declaring
war on the earth, on our bodies, on
the very possibility of happiness.
They tell us heroism is dead, when
nothing is more disputed
by our century.