hex

Raised by wolves until I was old enough to know better. XML weapons specialist & digital locksmith.

I know things are bad, but we can make them better.

Half of what I post is just me repeating what QTBIPOC comrades have said in my whitest cisthet voice.

Fuck fascism and cars.

Typo catches and clarifying questions always welcome.

searchable via tootfinder.ch

pronouns: he/him
interests: solar punk, gardening, fungi, resilience, community self-defense, low tech engineering, hacking, cryptography
Website: https://write.as/hexmhell/
Politics: Cybernetic Disaster Anarchist

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Last Notes

2026-01-20 14:04:33 GMT

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I mean, yeah, and also it's working way better than it should. We better make sure it doesn't work, or it's 100% on us.

2026-01-20 08:58:30 GMT

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Economic pressure has always been the most powerful weapon in our arsenal. There's already a general strike being organized for this Friday.
https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2026/01/20/18883119.php
(Original release https://minneapolisunions.org/system/files/2026-01/press_release_-_january_16_2026.pdf)
This has moved quickly, and it can keep moving quickly. The more people organizing, the faster the regime will back down and (I think quickly) collapse.

2026-01-09 21:07:32 GMT

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The thing that Renee Good now knows, that Tortuguita knows, that Heather Heyer knows, that I only know because I glimpsed for a second, is that when you die fighting oppression you live forever in that memory of resistance. When we carve their names into a monument, along with all the other names of the murdered and disappeared, that will stand, perhaps, across from the statue of Willem in the park where the Northwest Detention Center once stood, they will always be reminders of what it looks like to sacrifice everything in order to be on the right side of history.
The names of those who resist live as ghosts, summoned by name to haunt future oppressors, summoned by name to awaken our own conscience to the call. Martyrs, whispered like the White Rose or yelled as a threat like John Brown, cannot die so long as any of us with a bit of spine carries even an ounce of humanity.
It is possible to die knowing you did the right thing, and I have felt it. There is an acceptance that is impossible to imagine without being there, without feeling it for yourself. You have nothing to fear in resisting, even if it ends you. But you will never forget the shame of doing nothing if you fail to.

2025-12-29 15:54:16 GMT

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the US no longer has the leverage to make that work.

2025-12-26 07:42:24 GMT

The paradox of Nazism being both the most capitalist thing possible, defining itself as explicitly anticommunist, while masquerading as "socialism" is difficult to resolve until you understand one thing: fascism pivots around antisemitism (and its extension, conspiratorial thinking).
I'm, of course, not talking about the redefinition of "antisemitism" into meaning any criticism of Israel but rather an anti-Jewish conspiracy narrative rooted in Roman Christianity.
This is critical to understand as MAGA fascism pivots between capitalist and pseudo-anticapitalist with Trump in the middle. Hitler did the same thing. Strasserism helped the Nazis gain power by pulling in the Left. In the Nazis case they killed the Stasserists pretty quickly. Now, I think we're seeing an attempt to make the opposite pivot happen in MAGA. But it's all the same thing.
Fascism can infinitely fail to address the needs of the people while dismissing it's own responsibility for creating the problem by maintaining a permanent enemy.
This is why it's important to understand antisemitism and how to fight it. It's especially important now because the apparatus of violence in Israel is itself a tool of global fascism, and we finally have an opportunity to dismantle the whole thing. But we have to be aware of how fascists can pivot around to block this.
I've been reading Safety Through Solidarity, and I think it's especially relevant at this time.
https://www.akpress.org/safety-through-solidarity.html

2025-12-18 19:13:23 GMT

The #IWW #GDC as an antifascist organization was always kind of a hack. It was a beautiful hack and it worked well for what it did.
In 2016, as Trump was rising, I found info from the Twin Cities GDC. They were super organized, building an amazing community defense organization. When we (Seattle) went to set up our chapter, following their lead, they were extremely supportive. When I got shot, Twin Cities folks were at my house keeping my partner safe. They literally flew people out to support us. They very much remain in my mind when I think about what mutual aid looks like.
Unionism is an important strategy of a larger fight. But it's important to realize that it's not the other way around. The GDC was built to defend the union, because there wasn't something larger to do that work. It filled a gap.
When we organized against Trump, we tried to make the GDC the greater thing. We tried to make the GDC into the vehicle for social revolution against the fascist threat... And it sort of worked. We were able to do a lot.
But that was never what it was built to do. It was always built as an appendage of the IWW. This contains its own problem. If Unionism is the revolutionary movement, then it becomes impossible to build a truly revolutionary society. Unionism centers "workers" which implicitly decenters those who can't work in the traditional sense (the young, the elderly, those physically or mentally able to work). It also decenters care labor that hasn't yet been widely commodified. Sure, there are all types of hacks to patch the holes, but the fundamental construction starts from the wrong assumptions.
It felt, for a while, like things could go another way. Like that our ability to bring members in could shift things a bit, maybe set the GDC on more equal footing with the core focus of the IWW. But that was always an illusion, far less important to think about than the crushing terror of the regime we were fighting.
Now, I will absolutely trash talk the IWW on occasion but in the end I do think they're doing good and important work. Any criticism I have should be taken with a grain of salt... And I know I do have a lot of salt. Again, Unionism is an important strategy. It's useful both in improving immediate material conditions and as part of the most powerful weapon we have against the capitalist system: the general strike. It's important, I can't say that enough. But it's not sufficient.
I've been thinking about this a bit recently, and I wonder if there are any other GDC organizers or former organizers who might be feeling the same. Feel free to DM me. I'd like to get some more perspectives and see if my understanding from several years ago deviates significantly from what other folks are feeling right now.
I'd also like to bounce some ideas around that come from my own organizing experience.

2025-12-16 19:58:18 GMT

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Probably also worth mentioning copy levies as (at least) tangentially related:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy
I'd be interested in knowing how much global taxes on media just goes directly into the pockets of American IP holders.

2025-11-21 10:08:16 GMT

It's Interesting today that the popularization of @npub1fdr…lvhs's concept of "enshittification" is leading us to really think hard about how various methods of vendor lock-in enable corporations to abuse users. We see how first there's lock-in then quickly abuse follows, and recognize that the only way out of this trap is to build systems where users can leave at will.
But it's interesting that in this time of rising fascism no one is making the connection to fascism, as both increased lock in and enshittification of government. And no one is making the connection between the need to make systems optional to avoid enshittification, and libertarian socialist arguments against the systemic lock-in (and following abuse) of capitalism and the state.

2025-11-07 19:46:47 GMT

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You can bring down a government, smash a dictatorship, you have the power. This is an excellent strategy. But if you can go this far, if you can win this much, how much farther can you go? Is it enough to get back to the "normal" polycrisis, to return to microplastics and ecocide, to every open space filled with tent camps while luxury apartments continue to sit empty? Is it enough to be one injury or diagnosis away from unending debt?
What #SolarPunk future could we build instead? I expect it's whatever one you dream about, talk about, organize for, and fight for.

2025-11-07 19:38:13 GMT

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What's especially interesting, and dangerous to capitalism, is that there are a lot of opportunities that come out of this.
Corporations are destroying everything. We actually don't need them. We can build mutual aid networks, guerilla gardening, library socialism... When we stop with consumerism, we can find the joy in actually living, creating, being a creative human rather than simply a consumer. With a bit of momentum we can bend the system to our will. With enough momentum we can shatter it completely and free ourselves from this trap.
Things can go a lot of different ways. I'm excited to see how things go.
Edit:
I'm specifically excited about this...
https://www.blackoutthesystem.com/about-mutual-aid
This is cool. This is really fucking cool.

2025-11-07 19:30:14 GMT

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This is also a good way to make the protests actually valuable. The #NoKingsDay protests let people see how big the resistance was. It informed a section of the elite that their best bet was to resist rather than comply. The shutdown is already hurting the economy. The an economic blackout could be enough to break it... and we're all still waiting for the AI bubble to pop. It's gonna get really hot, really fast.
The great thing about the economic blackout as a strategy is that they don't have a mechanism to compel people to buy stuff. So it turns out that "make the economy scream" is a two player game. Go fucking figure.

2025-11-07 19:24:59 GMT

Economic boycott of everything and general strike Nov 25th Dec 2nd. When I was talking about #NoKings / #50501Movement needing to having an escalation plan, this is an excellent escalation. Hitting US retail on #BlackFriday and #CyberMonday coupled with a #PeoplesSickDay during that time could actually be enough to force the invocation of the 25th. There's already been an elite fracture. The government shut down is not the well calculated coup that I think Trump and co thought it was.
This whole #BlackOutTheSystem thing has a lot of potential....
https://www.blackoutthesystem.com/
#USPol

2025-10-30 15:57:16 GMT

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N Korea is propped up by continuous support of China.

2025-10-30 12:59:11 GMT

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The American Democratic Party, and the concept of "Democratic Socialism" within the US, comes largely from an authoritarian political tradition where the state offers services in exchange for the population allowing elites to continue parasitize the system. Then it is critical for Liberals to consume and destroy popular mutual aid, because real mutual aid undermines their carrot.
Democrats tend to imagine that anarchists want to destroy "all the good things" that governments do. The reality is that we want to build those good things ourselves so that we can reject the offer of those same good things, less well managed, with all the bad things attached.
Anarchists want to build pro-social systems (what if we didn't *need* snap, but just made sure everyone was fed?) while eliminating anti-social ones (do we really *need* to kidnap children, or could we just kind of stop doing that?).

2025-10-30 10:05:59 GMT

The fracturing of the Dutch far-right, after Wilder's reminded everyone that bigots are bad at compromise, is definitely a relief. Dutch folks I've talked to definitely see D66 as progressive, so there's no question this is a hard turn to the left (even if it's not a total flip to the far-left).
While this is a useful example of how a democracy can be far more resilient to fascism than the US, that is, perhaps, not the most interesting thing about Dutch politics. The most interesting thing is something Dutch folks take for granted and never think of as such: there are two "governments."
The election was for the Tweede Kamer. This is a house of representatives. The Dutch use proportional representation, so people can (more or less) vote for the parties they actually want. Parties rarely get a ruling majority, so they have to form coalition governments. This forces compromise, which is something Wilders was extremely bad at. He was actually responsible for collapsing the coalition his party put together, which triggered this election... and a massive loss of seats for his party.
Dutch folks do still vote strategically, since a larger party has an easier time building the governing coalition and the PM tends to come from the largest party. This will likely be D66, which is really good for the EU. D66 has a pretty radical plan to solve the housing crisis, and it will be really interesting to see if they can pull it off. But that's not the government I want to talk about right now.
In the Netherlands, failure to control water can destroy entire towns. A good chunk of the country is below sea level. Both floods and land reclamation have been critical parts of Dutch history. So in the 1200's or so, the Dutch realized that some things are too important to mix with normal politics.
You see, if there's an incompetent government that isn't able to actually *do* anything (see Dick Schoof and the PVV/VVD/NSC/BBB coalition) you don't want your dikes to collapse and poulders to flood. So the Dutch created a parallel "government" that exists only to manage water: waterschap or heemraadschap (roughly "Water Board" in English). These are regional bureaucracies that exist only to manage water. They exist completely outside the thing we usually talk about as a "government" but they have some of the same properties as a government. They can, for example, levy taxes. The central government contributes funds to them, but lacks authority over them. Water boards are democratically elected and can operate more-or-less independent of the central government.
Controlling water is a common problem, so water boards were created to fulfill the role of commons management. Meanwhile, so many other things in politics run into the very same "Tragedy of the Commons" problems. The right wing solution to commons management is to let corporations ruin everything. The left-state solution is to move everything into the government so it can be undermined and destroyed by the right. The Dutch solution to this specific problem has been to move commons management out of the domain of the central government into something else.
And when I say "government" here, I'm speaking more to the liberal definition of the term than to an anarchist definition. A democratically controlled authority that facilitates resource management lacks the capacity for coercive violence that anarchists define as "government." (Though I assume they might leverage police or something if folks refuse to pay their taxes, but I can't imagine anyone choosing not to.)
As the US federal government destroys the social fabric of the US, as Trump guts programs critical to people's survival, it might be worth thinking about this model. These authorities weren't created by any central authority, they evolved from the people. Nothing stops Americans from building similar institutions that are both democratic and outside of the authority of a government that could choose to defund and abolish them... nothing but the realization that yes, you actually can.
#USPol #NLPol

2025-10-21 08:08:20 GMT

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It should also be noted that any society that recognizes the concept of territorial sovereignty cannot possibly be egalitarian by the simple fact that borders necessarily create at least two classes: citizen and foreigner. Even if we pretend that all other issues with government could be resolved, this alone makes actual egalitarianism impossible.
It gets much worse when protections only apply to the "citizen" class, because anyone can then simply be deemed a non-citizen and must prove their citizenship status (which is literally just guilty until proven innocent). If protections only apply to citizens, then no one actually has any protections at all... which is the problem with the US right now, and always has been.

2025-10-21 07:56:29 GMT

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It might also be useful to distinguish between "democracy" and "democratic." A democracy is a type of government. All governments have territorial sovereignty, and most of them include competitive politics (that is, they are republican).
A democratic institution is an institution/organization controlled by the people who do the work or are served by it (or both). Not all democratic organizations are good, but I don't think an organization can be healthy without also being democratic. There are lots of ways to organize democratically, and not all of them are actually very good at representing folks.
Something can be a democracy while not being democratic. I would argue that there are no democracies that are, in fact, democratic because capitalism is absolutely anti-democratic.
All of the organizing I've done is both directly democratic and anti-capitalist. Rojava (now more officially known as DAANES) is a directly democratic libertarian socialist society, but it is not a "state" and has no "government" in the sense that it lacks territorial sovereignty. It is a de facto autonomous zone within Syria. Similarly, there are several indigenous "governed" autonomous zones within Mexico of which Chiapas is one (and the most well known).
The biggest difference is that democratic libertarian socialism organizes egalitarian societies around people and needs, while governments organize hierarchal societies around land and property rights.

2025-10-21 05:44:30 GMT

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yeah, that's exactly why prefigurative politics is so important.

2025-10-20 21:40:06 GMT

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things have to be really scary right now. I also feel it.
I tend to oppose governments specifically because they have a tendency to try to exterminate people like me. Perhaps it's my imagination then, because I can't imagine a government that could exist now and not be on the brink of doing so at any moment. Governments, for most of the time they have existed, have tried to enforce homogenatety through violence. Meanwhile, anthropology is full of examples of non-government systems that have much more complex concepts of gender and no concept of race.
I find it hard to imagine a hierarchial system that wouldn't just reinforce white supremacist cis hetero patriarchy. Meanwhile, I don't have to imagine systems that oppose it because I've been involved in organizing them.

2025-10-20 14:05:10 GMT

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No capitalist government could prevent this. But there are also systems that aren't necessarily identifiable as government. Google Rojava and Chiapas. There alternatives to "government." We don't need to restrict our imaginations to the things we've been forced to believe.
Folks never imagined fascism could be possible in the US. Maybe we could try something unimaginably good instead.

2025-10-20 13:05:32 GMT

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this assumes a pretty restricted reality that I don't think is backed up by evidence. There's literally no reason we should have one person with so much power, except that this system just evolved from feudalism instead of from hundreds of other traditions that Roman/European tradition mostly extinguished and erased.
There are, and have always been, more ways to organize people than under a king or an elected king with extra steps.

2025-10-20 09:55:51 GMT

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all of those things happened under democracy as well. American democracy has always been poisoned by the Senate, the electoral college, the "winner take all" system, the inescapable influence of capitalism. I'm not sure how it could have ever produced anything different. How would "restoring the machinery of democracy" not just be setting up for the next time?
Today W looks smart, competent, and presidential compared to Trump. IMO, if you "restore the machinery" without radical change, you're just setting yourself to look back fondly on Trump.

2025-10-20 09:22:34 GMT

QQ for all the "Restore the #RuleOfLaw" folks out there: When militarized police crushed Occupy for daring to challenge the logic of bailing out the bankers who crashed the economy rather than the people they fleeced, was that "Rule of Law"? When militarized police maimed and brutalized water protectors, was that "Rule of Law"? When oil companies and tech monopolies fund both parties and just happen to get legislation that keeps them in power, is that "Rule of Law"? When your tax dollars go to fund genocide, to pay to drop bombs on children, is that "Rule of Law"? When the NSA was spying on American citizens, was that "Rule of Law"? How about the drone strikes on Americans, was that "Rule of Law"? When cops murder people and then use "qualified immunity" to get away with it, is that "Rule of Law"?
Y'all keep talking about how #NoKings is about "restoring rule of law." It's got a bit of a "Make America Great Again" feel to it: you're invoking a return to a history that never actually existed.

2025-10-07 20:18:08 GMT

It's worth remembering that the civil war was a slave revolt:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWiM00lCRTE
Slaves started liberating themselves and a few radical white folks decided to help. This challenged the very legitimacy of the state.
The Northern response was to neutralize the threat by killing or allowing the most radical elements to be killed, then compromising with the remaining resistance. The South thought that this strategy wasn't radical enough, so their repose was to increase violence against the oppressed. Because the North wouldn't also increase violence, the South first secedeed so they could increase violence without Northern restriction, then, not believing that to be enough, attacked the North.
The modern US is a synthesis of these two strategies. We saw this immediately after the assassination of Lincoln, with Southern slavers rolling back gains made during the civil war as far as possible. This became the second phase of American slavery, which lasted until WWII. As a reminder, we are in the 3rd phase of American slavery since it remains legal as long as a person can be compelled to admit to a crime.
Every 4 years we get to choose a government that exercises one of these two strategies: eliminate radicals and compromise with moderates, or unrestricted class warfare on the population. The slave revolt was a third option: direct action.
It turns out, direct action gets the goods.
#USPol

2025-10-07 02:34:55 GMT

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Joseph Campbell has done so much damage to our concepts of what can and can't be an important story. This essay, specifically, I think helped me unwind that a bit also: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Carrier_Bag_Theory_of_Fiction
But reading Always Coming Home also really helped me in thinking through what a story could even be.

2025-10-07 02:28:22 GMT

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this is kind of the thing I realized about Joseph Campbell, that the "monomyth" is exactly the problem. It's the type of story that elevates and justifies the oppressor... And the type of story that comes from oppressive cultures. It's not just that Campbell's analysis was patriarchal and eurocentric, but that the monomyth itself is the memetic package of white supremacist patriarchy.
The conquest of Europe by the Romans, and the subsequent genocides across Europe, basically annihilated other stories in the collective imagination of the people who became white. Those that took on the memetic disorder they inherited from the Romans then turned around to inflict it on others.
Fortunately, Ursala K Le Guin was explicitly opposed to Campbell and the "monomyth." Her work, and Octavia Butler's, are some of the stories I go to in unwinding these myths for myself.
But I also think there's more. This idea has been at the center of a lot of my writing projects also. A few of the early stories I published on my blog were focused on playing in the myth space:
https://write.as/hexmhell/on-the-economics-of-slaying-dragons

2025-10-03 07:32:35 GMT

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Hope and imagination aren't just a nice things. Authoritarianism is rooted in doom. Authoritarianism is naturally unstable. It's naturally weak. It's extremely complex and fragile. Authoritarian regimes often collapse rapidly and catastrophically. They keep people pinned in place by removing hope. They heap trauma on their victims because trauma destroys hope and reduces creativity. So hope and imagination are the most powerful weapons against authoritarianism.
The regime tells you that things can only get worse. The regime needs you to believe it. They want you to fight on their terms, so they can pick you off, or to run or freeze, so they don't have to fight you at all. Authoritarianism must kill the creativity of it's victims, because authoritarianism has already killed it's own creativity. When you respond with hope and creativity, the system cannot adapt.
It is not simply that we should imagine what could be because we may have the opportunity to create it. It is that hope manifests the opportunity to create what we've imagined.

2025-10-03 07:16:35 GMT

What are you going to do when the regime falls? After calling all your friends, after the great memes, after the parties, what are you going to do to make sure it never happens again? What world should we create?
Taxing billionaires is great and all, but we could build systems where billionaires are impossible. Is hoarding wealth and using it to control people even something we should consider part of a functional and humane system? Any system where one group of people doesn't have rights means that anyone can be stripped of their rights, like has happened with all the US citizens who've been illegally detained and deported by ICE. Does the concept of "rights" that must be defended with violence, that can be stripped away by people who can exercise more violence, even make sense? Or should the bedrock of a functional system be the obligations that we have to each other and to society, that cannot be severed or taken from us, that tell us we *must* defend regardless of whether systemic oppression will impact us or not?
Americans have been so restricted by the limitations of the two party system, only able to choose between options acceptable to different sections of the capitalist class. Would we even be able to imagine what we could do if those restrictions went away?
The fall of the Berlin wall was a surprise. The fall of Assad was faster than anyone expected. One day the government of Nepal was an unrepentant oligarchy, the next it was on fire. Everything can change in an instant, faster than anyone expects. No one can predict revolutionary change. Will you be ready if the opportunity presents itself?
The US cannot be fixed. The economic system is a ponzi scheme that has been patched again and again, but has finally run out of options. Racism, sexism, and Christian nationalism are baked into the system at every level. Trump gutted the system of soft power that held the US economy together, now there is only a slow decline. Even after he's gone, the damage is done. Once we let go of how to fix something that cannot be fixed, we can start to imagine something that cannot be achieved within the current system.
This is a time of opportunity. Do not burrow so deep in terror that you miss your chance to dream.
#USPol

2025-10-02 18:09:44 GMT

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I think the thing that liberals may not be able to actually integrate is that Trump and Musk already destroyed the critical institutions. More importantly, Trump destroyed the core of US soft power. It took 80 some years to build a complex economic and political system to siphon money from the entire world into American pockets... and now that's basically gone. It will take decades for the rest of the world to unwind itself from the US, but it will absolutely happen. Americans can't just expect the world to revolve around them anymore.
I don't think liberals (and *definitely* not conservatives) are ready for what that means. But as the money drains out, the corporations still have to feed their masters. As bad as everything is now, it's going to get a *lot* worse unless folks stop imagining "going back to normal" and start imagining how thingss could be radically better.

2025-10-02 15:22:00 GMT

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I'm not saying things are fine, but I honestly think Trump is running out of time.
The thing I worry about is what happens after Trump falls. If liberals go back to brunch again, then the next fascist will be able to push things farther.
I think people are failing to prepare for victory, and that's also a huge risk.

2025-10-02 12:28:47 GMT

Two things are worth noticing right now:
1. The military brass *did not* respond well to Trump and Hegseth.
2. The deployment to #Portland keeps getting delayed.
The military will never say "no" to the president (unless he's literally ordering them to open fire on unarmed civilians or something equally obviously illegal). But there are ways to not comply that don't necessarily involve refusal. Brass showing that they aren't aligned with Trump may weaken his billionaire backers, who might be realizing now that weak dictators who can't lead their militaries tend to get toppled... and their oligarch-backers tend to end up against walls.
If folks being ordered to send troops to #PDX don't want to comply, delaying until the there's an initial response from the lawsuit would be basically impossible to detect. The deployment to LA went far too fast, running into logistical challenges like troops sleeping on the floor. The delays we've already seen could indicate either a more careful approach or quiet resistance.
Trump will continue to escalate at every chance he gets. I would be surprised if PDX didn't give him a fight. I doubt the troops will become more interested in serving a guy who's stabbed them in the back and wasted their time at every opportunity.
It is still possible troops just won't deploy. Trump will make something up about how just the threat of an intervention was enough to make things safe or something like that. If we see that, it's 100% the military telling him to kick rocks because he's not competent enough to know when to back down.
Honestly, I think Trump wants revenge for the resistance PDX put up at the end of his last term. Any backing down from that is absolutely a big loss for him.

2025-09-27 21:34:17 GMT

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One of our most important projects was the "food security committee" which made sure that our members always ate. It expanded out and now members of that committee still can food and bring it to houseless camps (among other things).
This is disaster prep work. We are in a disaster, how do you prepare for it to get worse? How to you prepare to come out the other side?
The only way we survive this level of disaster is together. Organize around that idea and you'll already be building the world we want to see on the other side.

2025-09-27 21:23:29 GMT

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As anarchists, when we were organizing against Trump, in the lead up to and early in his last term, we recognized the potential for repression. Radicals have always been targeted, but now he's going after moderate liberals. This is going to keep escalating, so it would be a good idea for liberals to *listen to anarchists* since we've been doing this for years.
Anarchists have been kidnapped and held without charges for months at a tim (check out https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_grand_jury_resisters. Only for those folks, they were kidnapped and held without trial under Obama.) Radicals have been doing this for years. It's worth your time to listen so you know how to prepare.
We had a bail fund set up. Support your local bail fund and don't try to start your own (liberals in Seattle did that last time). We focused on basic survival for our members. When the regime cracks down it will be random (since they can't get everyone). How are you going to support folks? Bail funds are a nice first step, but the whole process can take a long time. People can (and often do) lose their jobs, even if they aren't convicted of anything. Are you going to make sure targeted people are able to pay rent and get food? Are you going to make sure families are taken care of when a parent is kidnapped?
Resistence is only a threat if it's sustainable, otherwise they can just overpower and wait. You have to be able to wait longer. Occupations are *extremely* expensive. If you can support each other through an occupation, you can win.
So what is your plan? How are you going to make sure that those who fight can keep fighting? The best time to think about that question was under Biden. The second best time is now.

2025-09-27 21:08:11 GMT

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Ref: https://crimethinc.com/2025/09/22/nepali-anarchists-on-the-toppling-of-the-government-an-interview-with-black-book-distro

2025-09-27 21:07:34 GMT

Really hoping to see some One Piece flags in the pictures from the next #NoKings Day protests. I also hope everyone has brotherd to check the notes from Nepal. Regimes can collapse faster than expected. Sometimes it can be a total surprise.
I know things feel impossible right now, but you need to have a plan for when you win because it might surprise you. The other good thing about having a plan is that it gives you something to fight for instead of just something to fight against.
#USPol

2025-09-22 08:10:46 GMT

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How? This is disaster prep. Imagine the US is collapsing (because it is). What do you need to do to keep yourself and your community safe when things shut down for 24 hours, 48, 72? What do you do when the government leaves and never comes back? Build that.
This isn't bunker and beans shit either. We all die if we try to live alone. The only way to survive is together. Once you build the thing that keeps you and your friends alive, expand... Go bigger.... Organize with more people.
That's a clear and actionable strategy that beats the hell out of "vote for the lesser of two evils until everything is evil."

2025-09-22 08:02:30 GMT

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And if you really want to push candidates left, you do what the Black Panthers did. You provide the service you want to see so the government is forced to play catch up. If you build the world you want to see, you force the state to follow you in order to remain relevant. You make enforcing unjust laws impossible while providing the service to believe should exist. THAT is direct action that wins.
Edit: and that is also shit that will get you killed. If you want to stop fascism, you have to do the real work. Voting can only matter if it's part of a larger strategy to force the system to do what you want. Otherwise you're just legitimizing the managed resistance.

2025-09-22 07:45:31 GMT

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The simple fact is that there are systems that are actually built to resist fascism. There have been a lot of advancements in the last couple hundred years.
We are at a breaking point. The political institutions of the US have been largely destroyed. Even another Democrat, even the best Democrat, even Bernie Sanders couldn't fix this. Every American instruction is rotten to the core.
It's time to face this fact, and figure out how to build something better. Stop believing in American exceptionalism and start looking for models of systems that are inherently resistant to fascism.

2025-09-22 07:38:36 GMT

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There is a giant mountain in the US carved with the faces of a couple of slavers, and two guys who tried to stop slavery. Now most Americans will stop right there and say, "wait, two? Lincoln did that though..." They'll say that because Americans don't know anything about their own history, including the fact that the practice of slavery remained central to the southern economy well through Roosevelt's administration. If this is not familiar to you (because, maybe, you were taught history in the US) and you'd like to actually learn about that, you might want to read "Slavery by Another Name."
But let's talk about half-slaver mountain for a minute. This mountain is functionally a sacred site for Americans, but it's literally a sacred site for Black Hills Sioux. Speaking of stolen land, did you know that JBLM (a military base in Washington state) is built on land promised the Puyallup in the Treaty of Medicine Creek before being stolen in 1918? I remember being taught that all the land was stolen a long time ago and now there's nothing we can do. Yeah, does anyone remember that DAPL was under Obama? In fact, unused federal lands are supposed to be returned to the tribes from which the land was taken but there's a whole site to auction off federal property... That's a whole section of the government dedicated to violating the Treaty of Fort Laramie.
They could just comply with the treaty, as they are legally obligated to do. These violations are ongoing. Slavery, again, is still legal. Slaves are still used by major corporations today, they just have to be tricked into confessing to a crime first. The sins that this country is built on remain fully active today... Because the system was built to preserve white supremacists patriarchy. How could the founding of the US not lead *directly* to Trump? How could this have been different, from the beginning?
But, please, tell me, how, exactly, are you going to fix that by voting harder in the mid terms. How?

2025-09-21 19:37:34 GMT

The US is a slave state founded on genocide that *still* hasn't actually abolished slavery. Nazi race law came from Jim Crow, but you won't find that taught in a single classroom in the US. The Senate and Electoral College are *explicitly* anti-democratic institutions... Like, they were designed to prevent democracy. The whole punitive legal system exists to suppress dissent and legitimize slavery. The genocide of indigenous folks *has not even ended* much less has there been any attempt at reparations.
How exactly are you going to fix that by voting harder in the mid terms, and finding a more acceptable candidate for 2028? Seriously, someone explain it to me.

2025-09-21 18:51:22 GMT

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literally no one said "Trump and Biden are the same." This is exactly the straw man shit I was taking about. You're fighting with someone who doesn't exist.
How much shit do you have on the line? If you're already risking your life just existing, then you're not who I'm talking about. I got shot by a Trump protesting against Trump. Then I got death threats for the next few months or so. I spent years organizing before I finally managed to get out of the US. The FBI visited a friend of mine at least once a year. Another friend of mine just had his door kicked in by feds. A good number of folks in my circles get harassed by the FBI regularly, and are getting extra attention now. One of my friends was shot at and hit by a car. Another friend was shot at and almost hit by a car. I don't know how many of those "anarchists who don't vote" (who, actually, mostly vote) don't have PTSD, because I can't think of any. I have friends who've been stabbed in various parts of their bodies by Nazis. I was on the phone with a guy when a Nazi threw a bomb at his house.
Our people were black bagged *last* time Trump was in office. A lot of people I know are at pretty high risk. All I'm saying is this: I'm voting, are you going to put yourself in as much risk as we've been putting ourselves in for generations to fight this shit?

2025-09-21 05:58:53 GMT

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5 years ago is exactly what I'm talking about. Fascists took the supreme court. Trump was never stopped. Most of his policies continued under Biden. Democrats mostly just took over his platform and kept running with it.
You know how Trump is renditioning people to other countries to circumvent international laws against returning people to counties where they'll be tortured or killed? Yeah, Biden started that.
Five years ago liberals stopped fighting because they thought voting worked, and here we are. Voting didn't work, you needed to keep organizing to make this impossible.
...and now they're much more entrenched. You have to *always* oppose bad shit, even when your president does it.
You have to *keep* paying attention and *keep doing stuff* to make sure bad shit is impossible, even when it's your party doing it.

2025-09-20 11:41:36 GMT

Hey liberals, I'll make you a deal. I'll vote, if you do something actually useful.
Fun fact, I've already voted in every election I've been eligible to vote in. So you're gonna organize to feed houseless folks in your area, protect trans folks, run ICE out of your neighborhood, film the police every time you see them....
No one ever voted fascists out of office, but we do know how to stop them. Make it impossible for them to govern. That's the trick. So maybe we can spend a little less time fighting straw men and a little more time being ungovernable.
Cool, glad we're on the same page.

2025-09-18 14:42:32 GMT

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the book "Farming While Black" mentioned Black women braiding seeds into their hair before being taken onto slave ships, to then grow so many of the food crops identified with southern cooking today. I imagine going from that to organizing the rebellions that lead to the Civil War, all while literally in slavery.
The scale of determination of just that is almost impossible for me to imagine. Yeah, this isn't something to take lightly but also the power of human resolve is hard to comprehend even when we can see it right there in (recent) history... And it's right there in all of us, if we're willing to tap into it.
Rojava was born from one of the most violent and oppressive regimes in history. Relative to so many resistance movements, to so many times in history (in *US* history) this things are so much easier now for so many folks. If we can (collectively) tap in to even a tiny portion of our potential, we will be unstoppable.

2025-09-18 07:03:39 GMT

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public records activism absolutely works, awesome!

2025-09-13 10:57:45 GMT

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it would be good to get a feminist perspective. I think a lot of urbanism content today misses things like the challenges around caretaking.
Digging in to mass transit is great, but perhaps it would be good to dig in to what it looks like to use mass transit with a stroller or a wheelchair. It's easy to miss the fine details of "this sidewalk on the way to the train is 2 feet wide" when that isn't a major problem for the content creator.

2025-08-30 11:22:43 GMT

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I do think it's worth pointing out that cities predate modern agriculture. There may well be much more creative ways to use cities without needing to decrease (or significantly decrease) density.
I mean, food forests are very high intensity food production systems with minimal overhead. It's unfortunate I haven't seen any here in the Netherlands, so far anyway. They could easily be in parks.
Edit: modern

2025-08-25 18:57:49 GMT

Ecofash like to claim that the earth is over its human carrying capacity. That's absolutely untrue for 99.9% of the population or so. But the carrying capacity of billionaires is zero.

2025-08-14 05:17:43 GMT

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Stolen from a chat...
https://kolektiva.social/system/media_attachments/files/115/025/420/051/416/854/original/ad4194371e820414.jpg

2025-08-14 05:15:52 GMT

Needs more sandwich...
https://www.rawstory.com/trump-dc-2673882863/

2025-08-07 20:43:46 GMT

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stabbing military folks in the back will definitely not come back to bite the administration in any way whatsoever, I'm sure.

2025-07-17 06:18:51 GMT

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this was part of his presidential platform in 2001. He also ran on "ban SUVs."

2025-07-16 08:02:28 GMT

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good luck on the escape plan

2025-07-14 07:09:44 GMT

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ICE has killed people as long as ICE has existed, mainly "unintentionally." That's already massively escalated.
https://thehill.com/policy/international/5374028-migrant-deaths-in-ice-custody-canadian-citizen-florida/
These camps are generally moving rapidly towards the English style concentration camps that were the inspiration for Hitler's camps. This Florida camp is exactly modeled in that style. Nazi death camps could be the next step, but they'll probably start hiding the death toll, if they haven't already done so, before they switch over.
English camps, and American death camps for indigenous people, were already pretty brutal. The slave camps they've already started talking about are similar to one of the most brutal Nazi camps: Monowitz.

2025-07-12 08:16:57 GMT

There are factories today making bombs to drop on children and aircraft to drop them. These factories could have been tooled to make aircraft to put out fires and could still be retooled to do so in the future.
People in power are making explicit decisions to end lives instead of save them, and that's not something that should ever be forgiven or forgotten.

2025-07-11 15:31:36 GMT

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this is completely valid, and also not in conflict with what I'm saying.
Though, I think it's worth saying that most (neurotypical) people tend to be really susceptible to group think. A lot of people don't actually have beliefs, they just go with whatever they're surrounded by. They can be just as easily swayed to commit atrocities as to support liberation. But one is clearly better than the other, one clearly *feels* better in every way. In the same way there is simply an inertia to the current machine, there can be an inertia of liberation where it's just hard to "un-liberate" free people.
The more people join that inertia, the harder it becomes to move things back. People definitely need to deal with their shit, they need to be held accountable for it, but I also think it's useful to welcome their weight to flipping the system if they realize it's better.
People leave hate groups because it sucks to be in hate groups. Capitalism is exhausting, and community just feels good.

2025-07-10 21:50:24 GMT

If you save someone from having their face eaten by a leopard, you have their ear and the beliefs that lead you to save them suddenly have weight. If you abandon them, you have nothing at best and an enemy at worst.
It doesn't matter if they voted to release the leopards or were simply caught by them, the two possible outcomes are the same.
Anarchists build systems to save people. That will always be our advantage. We should use it.

2025-06-15 14:19:43 GMT

Y'all were wondering which way the army would break. This is as clear an answer as you're going to get.
During drills they were perfectly in time. This isn't a mistake. It's a message.
https://kolektiva.social/system/media_attachments/files/114/687/802/409/349/310/original/597d90e3aa342eb0.mp4

2025-06-12 07:31:28 GMT

The liberal obsession with optics serves the right and persuades no one. There is literally an active ethnic cleansing happening in the US right now, and the only thing that matters is making that as hard as possible to carry out.
Anarchists destroying intelligence assets saves lives. Every escooter thrown at a cop car is one less escort for a goon too afraid to kidnap random brown people without being flanked by a branch full of bad apples. Spray paint is not violence. Vandalism is not violence. Community self defense in all forms is legitimate.
Make no mistake, these raids are about changing demographics. Demographic trends have been shifting blue for a long time, and the right has, for a long time, been blaming "white replacement." Conspiracy theory aside, Democrats have also been relying on the growth of black and brown voters as a block. The nuances of whiteness as an identity are lost on the current administration and their supporters. They see that "white people will be a minority by 2050" and equate that with the "end of Western Civilization."
The only way to "save Western Civilization" is to change those demographics. Forced birth and forced removal are two sides of the same white nationalist objective. Of course they can't have due process, because they need to be able to kidnap anyone who they see as a threat to their demographic future.
They don't care about optics. The plan is to murder away any threat and flood everyone else with propaganda. There is no mythical middle. There's no one unconvinced. They know this, but they win when democrats buy that myth and save the police the work of policing the protests.
If your protest is 90% "peaceful," they'll take pictures of the 10% that isn't. If it's 99% peaceful, they'll shoot rubber bullets and teargas until someone throws a brick and take 100 pictures from a dozen angles. If its 100% "peaceful" and no one can be provoked, they'll generate pictures with AI or photoshop like they did during the George Floyd uprising and the pictures from the CHOP/CHAZ. Do you have literally no memory?
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/06/13/media/seattle-fox-news-autonomous-zone-protest
You can't win on optics... And you don't have to. People trapped in Fox news will not be swayed by anything. They aren't necessary. There are more than enough people to stop this, if you stop policing each other and feeding people to the police in order to "keep it peaceful." A tiny amount of direct action is more than enough to completely collapse the ethnic cleansing machine.
There is not, and has never been, an unconvinced group. This is a myth the right uses to control you.
I'm not saying, "go loot 7/11." There are plenty of things that shouldn't be on the table. But I am saying that if someone is trying to flip an ICE van or police escort and y'all sit down so the cops can grab that person, you are murdering as many people as ICE can kidnap if those assets aren't destroyed. If you go tell the cops about someone burning a Waymo, you are helping ICE intelligence kidnap and rendition people to foreign death camps.
And you are doing it for nothing. None of your collaboration with the police will stop them. Look at Newsom. No matter how much you collaborate, you will always be the enemy. Just be the enemy and don't be afraid of it. Do what needs to be done to save lives, to save families, to save your neighbors. That's literally all that matters.
Genocide must be stopped by any means necessary and all means available. Anything less than that is collaboration with the perpetrators.
#USPol #FiftyFiftyOne #50501movenent #resistance #NoKingsDay #NoKingsDayOfAction

2025-06-10 16:49:29 GMT

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Coming from the US, it's easy for the US understanding of things to dominate everything. It's also historically been easy to excuse, since this all happened in the US.
But they were also anarchists, and we are (and should be more) internationalists. So there's interest in submissions from the rest of the world. If any #Dutch anarchists have thoughts on this, I would be interested in reading about if Sacco and Vanzetti influenced #Nethrlands.
There's also interest in #French and #German translations. (I'm sure a #Netherland translation wouldn't be unwelcome.)

2025-06-10 15:50:04 GMT

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"Some questions posed might include but not be limited to:
- What does the transnational campaign to save Sacco and Vanzetti show us about 1920s global political culture?
- What did Sacco and Vanzetti signify for Italians and non-Italians in the United States and for foreign populations?
- What roles did their Italianness and their anarchism play in transforming their cause into a global struggle?
- How was the Sacco and Vanzetti defense campaign used in the 1920s by various social movements outside the United States, and how has the memory of the two men been used since then?
- Why do Sacco and Vanzetti seem to remain relevant today in places they never lived in or visited?
What role have various forms of media played in creating their celebrity?
- What significance do Sacco and Vanzetti as victims of anti-immigrant sentiments and as holders of unpopular/radical political beliefs have for us facing renewed anti-immigration laws and political persecution today?"

2025-06-10 15:48:46 GMT

Hey #Anarchist #writers:
"The Italian American Review seeks essays for a special issue dedicated to a re-thinking and re-articulation of the meaning of Sacco and Vanzetti both historically and today."
https://calandrainstitute.org/call-for-papers-mobilizing-memory-sacco-and-vanzetti-on-the-centennial-of-their-executions-andrew-hoyt-guest-editor/

2025-06-08 18:52:05 GMT

Logistics is what wins or loses wars. Petroleum is the primary resource of oppression. It's just as critical to the MRAPs and Abrams that suppress foreign populations and protect oil extraction for the empire as it is to the MRAPs, armored vans, and police cars that protect the financial foundations of the empire and perpetuate the occupation of the imperial core.
Motonormitivity and Petro-fascism are two sides of the same coin.
So if you really want to undermine the occupation, the genocide machine, the system of global terror that has boomeranged back home, ask yourself how to separate the population and car culture. As you do that, you begin to separate the occupiers from their tools they need to maintain the occupation.
There are those who credit bikes with winning the Vietnam War. That may be an overstatement, but it's not that far off. The Ho Chi Minh trail was a set of bike trails that formed the backbone of a logistics network that the US spent the entire war failing to stop.
The primary lever of the occupation is itself logistical. How do you maintain a protest if the State can deliver soldiers anywhere it wants and can stop delivering food to supermarkets if "riots and looting break out"? What happens to the most marginalized in the world will happen to you. Do you think that if starvation works in Gaza do you think it won't be used to protect the integrity of other fascist states?
Expect escalation, and prepare for it. Good luck.
#USPol

2025-06-05 20:30:14 GMT

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Like, there's a world where a bunch of christian communists squatted their way to overthrowing the government of England, and I wanna see that shit again. They basically became the Quakers, who are fucking rad by the way, but like... I wanna see some Quakers get back to their roots and start squatting shit again.

2025-06-05 20:28:34 GMT

Bring back the Diggers.

2025-05-13 08:13:19 GMT

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heh, yeah, I have 2 kids so I don't have time unfortunately.

2025-05-04 09:36:39 GMT

When European explorers first saw the "new" world, they took it to be an "unspoiled" wilderness. In reality, many of these "natural" environments were actually highly advanced agricultural systems that were carefully tended by #indigenous people. The "natural" plenty that amazed Europeans was, in fact, the result of generations of careful tending. Europeans are only now, hundreds of years later, "rediscovering" these methods (and, in typical European fashion, naming it #permaculture , pretending they invented it, and profiting from it instead of sharing it). No only is it being rediscovered in the Americas and South Pacific, but European models are now being rediscovered.
Europeans could not believe the truth that indigenous people in the South Pacific and Americas had developed something so advanced that it took hundreds of years for colonizers to even recognize it as anything but "magic" (any sufficiently advanced technology, and all that).
What's interesting to me is that the Enlightenment thinkers that inspired #socialism and #anarchism, and many European inspired anarchists to this day, do exactly the same thing for the social technologies they observed in the Americas and argued to bring the same to Europe.
Rousseau thought that egalitarianism and liberty were just natural things, rather than things that had to be intentionally developed. The classical anarchist idea that "all we have to do is abolish the government" ignores generations of social evolution, of active development of social technology, by indigenous people. There continues to be an insurrectionary and adjacent trend within leftist thinking that still flows from this fallacy.
I've already talked about how the idea of a revolutionary as a man with a gun is patriarchal because it ignores the invisible labor of building and sustaining a revolutionary culture. This patriarchal element intertwines with Eurocentric/colonizer biases, in both cases I've mentioned. The European men who wrote about the thoughts of indigenous intellectuals in the Americas only recognized men as people in the societies they interacted with. Women who worked in agriculture were, therefore, invisible. Therefore, the entire systems they maintained *did not exist* to the colonizers. They, instead, happened naturally... Like laundry magically being folded and food magically being made.
As we figure out how to move forward from the failure of all elements of colonizer society (social, economic, technological), it's critical that we are aware of the omissions that have lead us to failure so many times in the past.

2025-05-04 06:19:57 GMT

Tell me again why we're supposed to venerate a "monarchy with extra steps" political system designed by dead slavers, and ignore the last few hundred of advancements in cybernetics and governance theory.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s44260-025-00041-3#ref-CR9

2025-04-29 05:42:40 GMT

We were traveling out of Barcelona when the #SpainBlackout hit. We were actually waiting in line for the train. Power went out and cell service cut around noon. I was able to get wifi from a nearby hotel (I hope room 123 doesn't mind). I found an outage map for the city, but the map was entirely down. I overheard someone say it was national and found an article about that, but there really wasn't any info yet.
After waiting for a while with no info, the train station was evacuated. My partner found a route by bus. So we took our kids and bags and started walking. Finding the right stop was challenging. #OrganicMaps doesn't seem to have bus lines and #CityMapper doesn't do great offline. The kids don't sleep well when traveling, so this was all compounded by several days of sleep deprivation.
Navigatng was difficult. We managed to find a hotel with a generator who let us use their wifi to update our maps.
So we traveled across the city. Trafic lights seemed to be the only things with power, though there were places those didn't work. Metro and tram were down. There seemed to be exra buses, all of them packed. The roads were packed with cars.
It wasn't posible to get a regional bus ticket since the ticket machines were all down. The bus we were looking for didn't seem to actually exist and none of the bus drivers could answer questions. My spanish is not great and I didn't focus a lot on improving it since I'm already overwhelmed with learning dutch.
After not being able to find the bus for a while, we were almost going to head back to the hotel and ask for a room. Then the power came back on. We got a regional bus ticket. After waiting for another hour or so, the bus never came. We went back to the hotel and were able to get a room.
Wifi at the hotel didn't work after power came back, cell service was still down. Duo is mad at me.
I have been off my disaster prep game for a bit, and was especially off while traveling. I have some notes...
1. Always have cash.
2. Download maps in advance (you can do this for google maps also, but you can't route without internet).
3. Download translation languages in advance.
4. Always have extra water and snacks.
5. Pack light so you don't have to haul massive amounts of luggage everywhere.
Traveling with kids is hard under normal conditions. It's funny, I'm actually more calm in a crisis. Our kids did really well despite walking for hours around Barcelona (or perhaps because of it).
It's interesting how the city prioritized cars by prioritizing power to traffic lights, but that just clogged everything with cars and made bus travel harder. The metro is generally better, imho, in Barcelona because it doesn't have the car problem. Barcelona appears to be deeply unprepared for actual emergencies. A lot of cities are.
This is a good reminder that solar power and distributed grids are really important. Dedicated power to mass transit like trains and metro would help evacuate the city. Better bike infrastructure makes it easier to get around when cars clog the streets. I can see how much work is being done in this area, but there's a lot of room to improve. Cars are basically the worst solution for several reasons, including that they caused the problem in the first place.
I hope Europe learns from this and continues to move towards greater resiliency. #ClimateChange is going to make things like this happen more often, and centralization makes small disasters larger and makes disaster response slower. Deploying a bunch of cops is not a solution to anything.

2025-04-08 20:28:14 GMT

Trump doesn't have a sense of humor. He doesn't joke. He knows what he says is absolutely illegal.
He's not good with money. He's not good at negotiating. He's not a business man. He has no skills that are valuable to any other person. But he is extremely good at getting away with fraud.
One of the skills required to get away with lots of fraud is knowing that you can trust your accomplices. How do you do that?
You can't just ask someone, "hey, wanna do some crimes with me?" They could be against those crimes. They could get your arrested. Even talking about some crimes is a crime itself. You also can't just ask someone straight out, "how do you feel about, say, tax fraud? You know, hypothetically... for a friend."
You have to understand where they're at. You have to explore their boundaries and beliefs in a way that's actually plausibly deniable.
Pretending to joke is invaluable to people like Trump. He follows mob rules when getting things done. Joke, test the waters, then imply directions but never explicitly give them. It should always be possible to pull back and claim you didn't say a thing or mean it "in that way." Ambiguity and plausible deniability are critical. This criminal skill translates perfectly to politics.
The far right has used this tactic for years to pry open the Overton Window. Legacy media has been complicit in the right wing tactic by perennially platforming fascists.
Trump starts by making a "joke." He'll keep making the "joke" until enough people around him think he can get away with it, then it stops being a joke and starts being a policy. Once you've become normalized to the "joke," the Overton window has opened enough to talk about the reality.
When he "jokes" about deporting American citizens, he means he's planning to use ICE to kidnap protesters like he did in Portland at the end of his last term. But he will send them to a death camp in El Salvador instead of just intimidating them. He is telegraphing his next move. Get ready for it.
#USPol

2025-04-06 10:18:33 GMT

"Move fast and break things" is "haste makes waste" restated as an objective.

2025-04-04 08:01:37 GMT

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"well regulated militia" meant "slave patrol" at the time. They were built to prevent slave uprisings, so *who* has the right to and chooses to bear arms is also an important factor in how all this works.

2025-03-30 18:34:20 GMT

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of course it would come out of Arcata. It's a pretty magical place, really forward thinking in a lot of ways. The sewage treatment plant is also a bird sanctuary.
I was born in Humboldt. It's always great to see good things come out of there. :)

2025-03-30 07:33:45 GMT

Just a worthwhile reminder for #TeslaTakedown folks: #Tesla was never a real car company under #Musk. It was always an unprofitable grift propped up by massive government subsidies. The bubble was always going to pop at some point. It's always been vulnerable. There will never be robot taxis, or robots, or any of the other bullshit he's always promised to pump up the hype. That was always a lie.
The work you're doing is great and important, and you will win. Elon will find more ways to dump money into Tesla to prop up the stock, but, in the end, it will collapse. Tesla should have died a long time ago. You are attacking the only thing Tesla has: image. Keep going, you will win.

2025-03-25 06:03:26 GMT

Some years back a friend of mine related a conversation about the game Prison Architect. Basically someone had figured out a way to maximize profits by creating an area with bad wiring so that prisoners would end up being elected. My friend pointed out, "uh, dude, you just built a death camp."
It's actually surprisingly realistic that the most profitable prison would be a death camp. In fact, Monowitz was a concentration camp (an extension of Auschwitz) run by the conglomerate IG Farben. It was one of the most brutal Nazi camps that regularly worked people to death. It was also very profitable.
After the end of the civil war, US slavery transitioned from chattel to prison slavery. The convict leasing system was similar to the arrangement between IG Farben and the Nazi government in that prisoners were leased for labor with no concern for safety. American prisoners were used for dangerous labor like coal mining. It's no coincidence that these slaves were explicitly used to break strikes by free miners.
It won't surprise anyone that almost all of these slave prisoners were black, but not *all.* That was part of why it became less popular. Convict leasing *mostly* stopped after a white guy was whipped to death while being leased.
But it never really went away and the private prison industry, who funded Trump and Republicans are heavily invested in, has been bringing back prison slavery bit by bit.
It would be really profitable if they could have a really large supply of labor that they could make money off of and then dispose of, before they had to spend money on things like basic healthcare. It turns out that keeping people alive really eats into those profits, you can make way more money if you just work people to death.
Turns out, that the most profitable prison is a death camp. Monowitz wasn't run by Nazis trying to kill as many "undesirables" as possible. It was run by business people trying to maximize profit. It doesn't take an evil or hateful ideology to drive people to commit atrocities. It just takes perverse incentives.
Take some time to think about the fact that there is a tremendous financial incentive to build death camps in the US, that the people who would regulate them are all invested in the industry, and then take another look at what's happening in the US right now. What's going to happen next?
Take some time to process this and think about this question. It's worth thinking through carefully.
#USPol

2025-03-21 17:49:55 GMT

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Let's break it down a bit more. Society isn't just a prison, it's a recursive prison. It's a prison where every prisoner is a guard at a lower level until you have people at the bottom being systematically exterminated. Whenever they're killed off, the next level up gets to be the target.
The lines of who is above whom are constantly shifting.
One of the hardest things to accept is that you are not actually safe, especially if you're comfortable. As all this shit accelerates, people who aren't targets now are next.
Now, one of the things working in our favor is that a lot of hackers *are* targets now. They (we) *are* next *right now*. It's becoming a lot easier to see.
But then what? What the fuck do you do with that information? Run, hide, or fight?
If you fight, how? And that gets to the heart of the problem...

2025-03-21 17:44:39 GMT

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The first season of Mr. Robot kind of said it. Pull off the biggest hack ever, and you'll just end up back in the same thing. You simply cannot hack or destroy your way out of this system.
You have to build, and there isn't enough dopamine in that to get most of us on it. That shit takes years and it's basically negative reward for most of that time. Hacking tends to be a lot higher dopamine because you can turn it in to tight iteration challenges.
It's incredibly rare to hear hackers in the industry think about how to hack systems beyond digital ones. Maybe you'll get crossover with social engineers, but that's just straight out of most contracts so it's not on the radar. Even when it is, it's always hacking small systems. Owning the shit out of an evil biz (e.g.: lulzsec or anons owning the shit out of whomever) doesn't ultimately change much, if anything. Why?
Because society is a prison. How many hackers you know talk about Foucault? Not a whole lot. Why? Because our checks depend on us not understanding how we are integrated into, how we protect and promote, these systems of oppression.
I think a lot of folks have woken up to that in the last 8 years or so, but it's still a slow process. Even when faced with the completely obvious reality that we are hitting a wall, it's hard to not just want to go right back to the comfort you were used to....

2025-03-21 11:33:59 GMT

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I have a lot to say about this subject, but not a lot that most of my fellow hackers want to hear.

2025-03-21 11:32:20 GMT

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IMO, we need to step up a few levels also. No point in technical attacks when the problem is social structures. But a lot of hackers never bother to think about systems that don't keep track of things in pure bits.

2025-03-21 11:31:02 GMT

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Probably some time after we face the fact that we all have a ton of money because our jobs are bullshit.
We have bullshit jobs because the flaws we expose would never have been produced by a forward thinking system. But more than that, we have bullshit jobs because we are paid primarily *not* to rise up. The huge sums of money the best of us are offered are the leashes that keep us tethered to those who are causing these problems in the first place....and those are leashes that we made by building the security industry in the first place, rather than burning the whole thing down the first chance we got.
But that's just my take, I could be wrong.

2025-03-11 14:37:39 GMT

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The article claims that it may actually be illegal to operate a Tesla in the EU because of the implicit GDPR violations.
"European Tesla owners should be aware of the associated risks before acquiring the car, as buying a product with illegal features presents a material deficit in the contract. The legality of using the car is in question, and this presents a problem for Tesla who may be withholding this information."

2025-03-11 14:36:29 GMT

Under GDPR, anyone in the EU has the right to request surveillance footage of themselves. #Tesla takes records videos but seems to kind of throw their customers under the bus in terms of compliance with GDPR.
https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/tesla-s-sentry-mode-is-a-privacy-8488081/
So how do we make this as big a problem as possible for Tesla and EU Tesla owners?

2025-03-05 12:30:48 GMT

Trump is creating multiple crises and making existing ones worse. I think that we, as anarchists, need to focus on how to respond to collapse and uprisings.
The empire is burning itself down. We no longer need to think about how to burn down the empire, we only need to figure out how to respond to its collapse.
#USpol

2025-02-18 19:45:51 GMT

One of the historical problems with monarchy is that after a bunch of generations the nobility would become so inbred that it was no longer capable of self-preservation and it would take the whole country down with it. Avoiding that was supposed to be the big selling point of democracy.
But here we are, with the oligarchy so intellectually inbred that they can't even keep themselves from blowing up their own life support machine. The USA was built to keep the oligarchy safe. The whole political system is built around abstracting away how power works so that oligarchs could control it to extract wealth in really obscure ways (like banks, rent, and debt) that just seem like the natural parts of the system.
These oligarchs have become so intellectually inbred that they're willing to blow up all that abstraction because they think they will be better off ruling with sheer violence. Like... the whole thing was built so these goobers can rule from cocktail parties instead of fortresses and they completely lost the script.
I will never not be amazed by the drive of these elite lemmings to follow their greed off cliffs when they could simply not. Perhaps it's the same drive that leads cult leaders to apocalyptic ends.

2025-02-17 18:32:46 GMT

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IMHO, demanding Vance remove Trump would actually play into existing fissures in the alliance. I think Thiel sees Musk as a dispensable asset, and Trump as a risk. If Vance replaced Trump, it would prove Yarvin wrong (at least for now) but it would give Thiel more direct access to power that he could probably play to take Musk's assets. So by playing them against each other, I *think* we can win without mass violence or revolution.
But that's my armchair assessment of these Machiavellians. I could be wrong.

2025-02-17 18:24:44 GMT

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it's important to point out that, under the constitution (article 8 and the 16th amendment), only congress "shall have power to lay and collect taxes" and spend them. If the executive is asserting the right to choose how taxes are spent then they are also nullifying the right to collect taxes.
Feelings about the legitimacy of the US government may vary, but you can't even argue that it's legitimate if it's in violation of the most basic elements of the constitution.
It's also important to remember that, to remain a protest, you would have to save that money and pay it back as soon as the 25th amendment was invoked and Musk was arrested and charged. Otherwise you're just full on crashing the federal government. That's beyond the scope of this suggestion.

2025-02-12 06:30:22 GMT

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oh fuck yeah, I sent Spokane a PRA years ago and I think they illegally redacted shit. Now I can check. Awesome!

2025-02-11 11:23:09 GMT

Luigi has accepted the $300k raised by the December 4th legal defense fund!
https://youtube.com/shorts/RJXFxkCEtBk
#FreeLuigi #LuigiMangione #freeluiginow

2025-02-09 19:54:30 GMT

#50501movement folks should watch this to understand what makes a movement work:
https://tube.rebellion.global/w/4f1b099a-e0bd-4e7a-8b6a-123dfbb9c254
IMHO, if 50501 let's itself get consumed by the DNC and non-profit organizer Industry, it will do absolutely nothing. We saw the same thing happen with the Neighbourhood Action Council in Seattle. Liberals put together something that was actually really interesting, it saw massive interest, thousands of people showed up, and then it ended up doing nothing.
Recuperation into the system will ultimately kill any movement that initially threatens the system. Protests can be safely ignored, unless they actually impact someone's wallet. The resistance that worked the first time targeted capital, and that's what works every time.
Demands need to also be specific and achievable if you're making demands. Narrowing the scope, to removing Trump and arresting Musk, may actually exploit a weakness in the current coalition.
Musk owns Trump via his coup, which pushes out Vance. Vance is Thiel's puppet. So Musk has outmanoeuvred Thiel to assert power. But Vance is in a position to invoke the 25th amendment and remove Trump, on the basis that Trump is too senile to notice the coup. This would put Thiel in power via Vance. But Vance can't really pull that without popular support. A lot of people don't realize that Thiel hates Musk, so there's some power dynamics going on here.
So it may be possible to sew chaos among our enemies by giving them the opportunity to begin eating each other. Since they *want to do it anyway* it should take a lot of pressure to break the alliance.
Just some strategic thoughts, for what they're worth.

2025-02-07 22:00:11 GMT

Hey Americans!
Now that the IRS is completely backdoored and will be occupied for the next absolutely forever unfucking itself, now might be a good time to think about a #TaxStrike. Like, maybe the #50501movement should organize some kind of tax strike until the 25th amendment is invoked.
Protests are nice and all, but you have to hit them where the money is or they can ignore you. Maybe y'all could use a nice hashtag like #TaxStrikeTo25 or something like that. ;)
#uspol

2025-02-07 12:11:27 GMT

Hey anarchists and general leftists organizing in #RuralAmerica and deep red territory! I know you exist, but a lot of folks don't. This might be a good time to share your experience so others doing similar things can learn from them.
What strategies have you used?
What lessons have you learned?
What successes can you talk about?
How do you talk about your ideas and frame your conversations?
What's your best story?
What organizations exist to make that type of organizing easier?
#USPol

2025-02-06 10:19:14 GMT

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The US is not a democracy. Some, such as myself, might point out that it has never actually been one either. The US is an oligarchy, as the oft-cited research study suggests. Successful movements have always targeted capital rather than political power. Capital controls political, so targeting political power is largely useless. Target capital if you want to change anything.
There are two types of capital that support fascism: opportunistic and mandatory.
Opportunistic do not need fascism to continue to exist, but believe that they will profit from fascism. They also may believe that if they do not conform to fascism, they will be sanctioned by the state and their profits will suffer. Tech is a big example of this. Government contracts are highly profitable. Resisting the state risks such contracts, so they benefit from ingratiating themselves to fascism. However, if it becomes unprofitable to continue to support fascism (or profitable to resist) then they will withdraw support and could even switch sides.
Big tech is critical to the modern military industrial complex. Google, Microsoft, and Amazon all vie for military contracts. But they also sell other things, and it's unlikely that any of them could transition to government contracts entirely without causing a shareholder revolt. Boycotts, protests, occupations of offices, and other actions can create an economic disincentive that can split them away from the fascist core. Capital seeks stability, and may do so even over short-term profits. Fascism is not stable. Tariffs and trade wars significantly increase operating costs and may even sink some companies. If these rifts can be exploited and widened, capital will force the political system to comply with any demands that allow it to go back to making money.
The mandatory set is a different beast. Fossil fuels and the auto industry will either be killed or make complex human society impossible. This is a zero-sum game. We exist or they do. Grifts like cryptocurrency and (most) GenAI products would collapse without massive financialization. They will never be self-sustaining. As such, they attach themselves to fascism (which is itself a type of grift) in order to get what they need to survive as long as possible. These industries must be destroyed.
Oil is not profitable, even at this point. It requires massive government subsidies to stay afloat. Anything that increases the cost of operation or decreases the investment takes us one step closer to the collapse of this industry. There will be no "electric transition" of the auto-industry. It is not possible from a resource or grid perspective. In that way, the auto industry (even with electric cars) is an extension of the oil industry. It's no coincidence that used car dealers are one of Trump's big funding blocks.
Push for mass transit, protest all highway spending, occupy car dealerships, protest gas station construction, protest all drilling and pipeline construction, protest fossil fuel extraction shareholder meetings, block roads and occupy highways. Shut this industry down by making it too expensive to operate and by making alternatives viable. Destroy oil or die. #JustStopOil
Attack grifts by calling them out. We have mounting evidence that GenAI cannot possibly fulfill its promises. Larger models become less secure, but the smaller the model the less useful it is. We've been promised that more data will lead to exponential improvement, but instead data shows us that there is an exponential drop-off in effecacy as data grows. Anyone investing in GenAI is either a grifter or a mark.
We've seen the same with cryptocurrencies. The cryptocurrency bubble has become a mechanism for fascists to loot the treasury under the guise of legality. Divest from these, call out those who do invest, make involvement in these industries unprofitable. Pop the #GenAI bubble (or help it finish popping) and pop the cryptocurrency bubble every time it starts to inflate again. Demand GenAI safety and security regulation (which will be impossible to meet because GenAI cannot be safe or secure). In this case, sunlight is the best disinfectant.
Force opportunistic capital to shed grifts like GenAI and cryptocurrency in order to maintain investment. Split them from oil in order to salvage what they can of capitalism. Make them choose between supporting fascism or continuing to make money.
Companies love money more than any political ideology.

2025-02-06 09:00:28 GMT

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The #50501movement has already articulated at least two such demands:
1. Arrest (and possibly deport) Elon Musk
2. Impeach and remove Donald Trump
I would recommend adding at least one more:
3. Impeach and remove compromised Supreme Court Justices.
Now this leaves JD Vance with basically unlimited power, which is still fascism but might force him to pretend to be a normal president.
In order to actually make progress (instead of slowing regression) without completely tearing down this system, some bigger things would have to change:
1. Abolish the electoral college
2. Replace the Senate with permortional representation
3. Replace "winner take all" with #InstantRunnoffVoting
4. Guaranteed universal suffrage
This starts to get into the realm of revolutionary change because both parties rely on not having any real completion. Both the Democrats and Republicans only exist because the other exists, anything that offsets that balance threatens them (meaning, threatens the entire power structure).
One more thing would be needed that's also difficult, since no existing legal mechanism exists:
5. Immediate new presidential elections

2025-02-06 08:46:32 GMT

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First, it's critical to distinguish a protest movement from a revolutionary movement. These are two different things and must have different sets of demands. The two can coexist at the same time. One can turn into the other based on political conditions. But they are not the same.
The goal of a protest movement is incremental change. The goal of a revolutionary movement is radical/total change.
#Occupy failed because its goals were revolutionary but its means and strategies were incrementalist. It thought like a revolutionary movement, but it *acted* like a protest movement.
If you know me, you probably have a good guess where I stand on incrementalism, but I will save that critique to the end. If people are aligned behind incrementalism, then even an insurrectionist (which I also am not) would be better to push to transition protest to revolution than to escalate directly to insurrection and break momentum.
One could argue that insurrectionary escalation during the 70's helped usher in the reactionaries who laid the path to our current crisis. We can also look to the "urban guerilla" movements of this era as examples of the opposite: thinking like a protest movement but acting like a revolutionary movement. They kidnapped and assassinated political leaders and CEOs, then demanded things of those with political power. In some ways #J6 was a similar thing, but I digress in my digression.
A revolutionary movement does not need to articulate demands at all. It demands nothing of the dominant system because its goal is the complete annihilation of that system. Its methods are direct action that creates the new world and destroys the old.
A protest movement does not build a new world, but reshapes the existing one. It demands things from those in power. But in order to do that, it must maintain at least some of the existing power structure. It must play a non-zero sum game where both sides have a chance of not losing. Either side can lose a bit, or even a lot, but both sides must exist in the end. If the demands of a protest movement are "cease to exist or we will destroy you" then the system will fight because it's going to die anyway.
So a protest movement is necessarily limited in scope as to what it can do and what demands it can make. These demands must be possible within the framework of the dominant legal system. These demands must leave the power structure mostly intact.

2025-02-06 07:57:53 GMT

In order to work, the #50501movement will need to do the following 3 things:
1. Articulate clear and politically achievable goals
2. Target the capital that supports fascism, not just their representatives in government
3. Scale and escalate
#50501protests
IMHO, it should also message itself as a "pro-democracy" movement, since Trump and Musk are both profoundly undemocratic but also the US electorial system that lead to Trump/Musk is profoundly undemocratic.
🧵

2025-01-24 08:26:20 GMT

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I know this is scary, but I think it's important to point out that it won't work. This is a combination of grift and bluff.
There's an exponential dropoff in the effectiveness and accuracy of models as they grow. There's also an increase in attack surface. In terms of signal intelligence, it will be insanely leaky.
So this thing will lie and hallucinate, make it easy for people to tell they are being investigated, and be trivial to evade. It will also burn insane amounts of electricity and money. It will never match expectations, but that's unlikely to stop investment.
The more work they do to avoid evasion, the more vulnerable it will be. They won't be able to make it more accurate because they're going to run in to the fundamental limitations of the technology.
Let me get in to some concrete examples to make it clear what I mean.
Let's say some people are taking, say, on Mastodon, about something. First, the system has to scrape. It's already leaking information about itself just by doing this. We can know how often it runs and may even be able to fingerprint the technology stack. We can use this information to poison the data set.
Ok, let's say they're just getting stuff from phones via company installed backdoors. How do you know how someone is communicating? What platforms are they using? Simply using signal increases the complexity of getting at this data, even on a backdoored phone, a bit. This is more true at scale than for individually targeted attacks, but I'm not going to get in to the details there.
Ok, so let's say this thing is going through every text you sends, every message that goes through a FAANG owned messaging app. You send a link to someone. There are three options for how to handle this link:
1. Ignore the link. The model loses information.
2. Follow the link immediately. The model is vulnerable to a DoS. Basically a bunch of people send links to poisoned data to each other, the AI ingests this and poisons their data set. You also leak data about how often you scrape.
3. Follow the link only on investigation. The model leaks information about who is being investigated and is also vulnerable to a DoS. So, if you want to know if you're being investigated you occasionally send links to resources you control (that's not easily found any other way, like a url with a UUID that's not indexed) to people but ask via external channels not to follow those links. If the link gets hit, your communication channel is compromised. Now you poison the data set anyway.
So URLs let you circumvent it or attack it. But there are a bunch of other ways too. The more a model is focused on English language, the worse it will do on other languages. This is especially true of rare languages, and even more true of niche cultural slang. So even if this thing reads every single text you and everyone else writes, it may have no ability to know that you're planning to "🦆 thr d474 alle ∆." That's just garbage to an AI, but a human can probably figure it out.
But even in English, you can just send your text inside a file. Now they have another choice:
1. Ignore the file and lose data.
2. Parse the file.
Which do you think management is going to tell them to do? So they parse the file. Now they're vulnerable to trivial DoS and almost definitely vulnerable to RCE (remote code execution, or "getting owned the fuck sideways" in simple terms). How are they going to get around compression bombs? Fingerprinting? Sure, but there are infinitely many of these.
That brings us to steganography (stego). Stego is the forgotten cousin of cryptography (crypto). Crypto (in this context) is about keeping a message confidential by making it impossible to read by anyone but the intended recipient, even with the text. Stego is about hiding the existence of the message in the first place. It has largely been ignored because cryptography works pretty well and can be easy to detect.
But this equation changes when you're dealing with mass surveillance like this. Trivial stego that would be easy for a human to crack becomes a huge problem at scale. A simple example is just putting text in image metadata. Ok, so the surveillance folks write a parser for that. Great, now hide data in the low order bits of an image. Write a parser for that. Now just put it in the text, ok so OCR it. Ok, create a doc file that has an XML bomb in it so that it crashes but put the raw text you want to relate inside... There are infinitely many ways to evade, many of them are trivial to detect and parse, but that means you're essentially writing infinite parsers. There are also *much harder* problems to solve, but I'm not even getting in to that.
Yeah, basically, this shit is *way* harder than they think it will be and someone still has to build it. Now they have to decide on hiring for competence or loyalty. Good luck with that shit. Maybe some comrades should go work at Oracle for a bit to make sure that doesn't even happen in the first place. ;)

2025-01-21 19:30:08 GMT

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is someone told me half of people above middle management in any major company was trying to tank the company by using this strategy, I'd have a hard time arguing otherwise (both from internal experience and external observations).
This shit is invisible because it's already happening... Only thing is that most of it comes from the top and everyone below mid managers spend at least half their energy trying to fix it.

2025-01-21 14:37:37 GMT

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People may say, "it's not possible to debug memory issues with Wireshark. That doesn't even make sense. What the fuck is wrong with you?" That doesn't mean you shouldn't try, repeatedly. Sure it's impossible, but don't let reality get in the way of your vision! It's not like leadership ever has!

2025-01-21 14:32:10 GMT

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Also, get randomized. If you have anything else, do that instead. Only work on whatever evil thing if you are explicitly asked to prioritize it above everything else. Then, if you're asked for anything after that point, drop the evil thing and take whatever new request. Add several days of delay for "task switching" when asked to come back.
One reason to feign compliance is so that the task doesn't get assigned to someone who might actually do it.

2025-01-21 14:24:11 GMT

Hey fellow tech folks. We might get asked to do something terrible. I'd like to start a bit of an open discussion about how to deal with such requests.
The first thing I might recommend is enthusiastically agree to do whatever it is then forget about it and do something else. If asked about it in the future, pretend this is the first you've heard about it. Play as dumb as you can for as long as you can.
Now, if you can't get away with delaying by not doing anything anymore then find the absolute most complicated way to do whatever it is. This is actually a great time to use an LLM. Have an LLM write all your code then just run it. Ask the LLM to fix anything that's broken. Take some extra steps to force downgrade or upgrade libraries to incompatible versions. Write all of your own interfaces by hand. Write your own date parsing library. Write all of your own SQL without any abstractions. Add an LLM in the middle some how. Use libraries that haven't been supported for 15 years. Ever want to write code in Python 2.0? Now's your chance! Debug everything with Wireshark, no matter what it is. I bet there's a VB script library to do what you need to do, and if you can just write a C wrapper around that it'll interface perfectly with perl, as soon as you can get that old FoxPro program running in wine. I bet it would be easier without that commit hook that changes every zero to a capital letter O. "I'm getting the craziest error. It works on my system!"
There are a million ways to make things insanely complicated, and most of us have seen people legitimately do these things out of pure incompetence.
Now, if you end up against the wall and think you might get fired package everything up and hand it off to someone else, but make sure you make it clear that you're almost done and it should be super easy to finish. Leave behind some fun puzzles for the next person to figure out.
"How strange...the output changes when I change the whitespace, but not when I change the text. What is that?"
Who's got some other fun suggestions for extremely malicious compliance?