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Don’t forget the cost of insurance. That’s the big one. If it stops being possible to insure fossil fuel infrastructure, then investments shift to renewables that can be insured. It’s pretty simple economic math.
Edit: that also works in all levels of the economy. Pipeline constitution vehicle get torched every time there’s a pipeline built? Uninsurable therefore reduce or stop investment. Cas in cities always get flat tires and vandalized? People won’t buy cars they can’t insure.
You do what you would do anyway: organize, build community, build dual power, undermine the state. Any specific politician doesn’t matter. The right will pull the rug out from under people, they’ll do whatever evil thing they’re gonna do, but the left will set up the rug in the first place and give people a false sense of hope.
Authoritarianism is bad at disasters. The more autocraric, the worse they are at responding to dynamic environments. Build mutual aid networks, support people targeted by the state, prepare (collectively) for the collapse or withdrawal of the state.
It never mattered which puppet is pulling the levers, or how authoritarian or not a society is, the assignment has always been the same. If you don’t have the groundwork of dual power, any more radical action is just asthetic.
Edit: IMHO, the two most important things to organize around are anti-police terror and disaster preparedness. Authoritarianism is only tenable if the community believes that having the police is better than abolishing them. In times of crisis the state withdrawals. If people can provide for their own needs, they see proof that the state is unnecessary. Make the state unnecessary, there will be a crisis.
0·18 days agoI uploaded a more complete version that’s moving a bit more towards a zine. I created a community to discuss it, if needed: https://slrpnk.net/c/FractalAnarchism
Thanks, good call. Let me add a working definition here for now.
The definition that’s most applicable here is “a type of object that is isomorphic (has the same shape) at multiple levels.” I’m basically using the Hofstadter definition of “isomorphism” from “Gödel, Escher, Bach,” which is more loose than the strict mathematical meaning.
To say “fractal” here is really to say that something is a recursive structure (defined by itself, or repeating the same pattern at different layers) where metaphors that allow us to understand one layer can also apply to other layers with minimal loss.
The example of authoritarianism starts at interpersonal abuse dynamics, showing that those dynamics apply with similar rules in mass as authoritarian systems, but also within the individual. The authoritarian is afraid, dominated by their own ego, and compensating externally, oppressing others as the individual’s fragile ego oppresses their own identity.
I’m also cheating a bit in my definition of fractal here because a fractal is technically infinitely self-similar. We could probably enrich the metaphor (towards the macro) by talking about the relationship of social subgroups to a society, and the relationships of societies to each other. Since we don’t know any aliens, we can’t really go past that. Going the other direction, towards the micro, we could maybe talk about the relationships between neural clusters or individual neuros, but we run in to the limits of knowledge and maybe knowable things pretty quickly. Consciousness may be truly fractal, but we probably can’t ever know.
So I’m using the term to simply describe multiple iterations of self-similariry, where the domain of self similarity is the ability to losslessly apply metaphors from one to the other. A mathematician might be a bit upset at the use of terms.
One connection to psychedelics (as in the title) is that people tend to see fractal structures while hallucinating on high doses.
Edit: My definition may have made things more confusing.
Thank you!
There’s a bunch of context. I’ll update at some point in the future. Thanks for the feedback! :)
I’d love to collaborate. I’ll update with a link when I get it in to codeberg.
I think this is exactly it. Let the liberals be liberals. They’re only going to learn by failing and seeing other possibilities.
We should be there to say, “yeah, it would be cool to tax billionaires but what if we abolished them? What if we abolished money? Let’s work together until our ways part naturally.”
We don’t racialized them by demanding something we can’t figure out how to get, or by criticizing the things they think are victories. We do it by showing them better ways and offering hope.
I’ve worked with a lot of liberals who’ve become more and more radical because I tell them what’s going to happen next and then it happens. That’s just what an anarchist analysis gives you. Eventually, they want in on it.
I also think there’s subtle opportunities to show where boundary of reformism’s usefulness is. For example, we want to abolish the police and liberals want to reform them. Offer reforms that appear completely rational but are absolutely impossible. E.g. “cops should have to retire if they shoot someone, regardless of if the shooting was ‘justified’ or not”, “police officers should be banned and immediately fired if there’s any evidence they have been involved in any white supremacist group”, “internal affairs investigations should all be made public within 6 months of an initial complaint, and complaints should be made public after PII related to everyone but the officer is scrubbed”, “police should have to go through background checks to make sure they have never been a member of any group identified by the SPLC as a ‘hate group’”, etc. Almost any normal liberal would agree with these and be surprised that they are completely impossible to implement without functionally abolishing the police.
We have so many opportunities now. We also know that reformism will not work. We can articulate why it won’t work. We can help them find the wall. We can continue to organize outside of the political system and help them join us when they realize it’s time.
Exactly.
The problem with protesting is that it’s begging people to kindly do ask you ask. In the case of oil, you’re the “people” you are asking are a social cancer. The people doing the work are literally destroying their children’s future for money today. They couldn’t possibly care about anything you could do or any argument you could make. Very few relationships are really zero sum games, but this is one.
They exist or we do, there can be no common ground. There can be no negotiation. These are corporations we’re fighting, not people, and corporations don’t care about anything.
I’m glad people are waking up to the fact that there can be no rational dialog. It’s life or death, for humans and oil companies. They must be stopped, and stopping means death for the oil companies. They will not, and cannot, listen. They must be forced to stop or we all die.