Re-Architecting Resistance

I’ve been writing a series of essays about social movements and revolutionary social movements and how to organize them. 

The Left in America is a total wasteland. The other side is preparing to unleash all kinds of debt, housing crises, health care deprivation, economic disaster, job instability, web 3.0 psyops and whole new levels of surveillance on us, and oh, they’re talking more and more about going to war again. They literally just launched the Matrix. Everything is gig work now. They’re building a cop city, literally. They’re building weapons again. 1 million of us died so far in the pandemic while the enemy doubled its power and wealth. Roe v Wade is gone.

WE ARE LOSING 

 We must discuss the failure of the Left in order to move forward. 

Here is one thing I think is a root cause:

We have NOT put thought, as a body or movement and even as small collectives, into what kinds of *fundamental design patterns* we can use to orchestrate our activity, and what is the ARCHITECTURE of our movement, most importantly. We have not been consciously developing and owning and — importantly —  iterating a design pattern for revolution in our lifetimes; much the opposite, everything has been done extremely piecemeal, extremely chaotically, extremely disjointedly, wasting incalculable man hours and terrific sums of money, and leaving us no inheritance for future action, and no enduring infrastructure and financial strategy. A near-total loss in these area. 

What we have been doing hasn’t been working and it’s been not working at a very deep level. We have had a huge amount of resources flow through social movements in the last 10 years; enough to cause a revolution several times over. These resources have been misallocated to the basic design strategy we have used; as a result, we are faced with a resource-depleted movement, one is strapped for momentum, money and a chance. 

In this post I want to zoom wayyy out and talk about the design principles and formations we have been using in resistance and the problems with it. In a future post, we will take a look at other options for how to design movements, that take these lessons and analyses into account.  

It is time to start thinking about the architecture of resistance because in order to take control of our destiny we need to take control of the core direction of our movements and their core architecture. A root cause of the mass-scale failure of leftist organization that we see, is that we have not been deliberant about a fundamental design path, there has been little thought built in the level of community consciousness on how to design and follow a path forward from a meta level and from a foundational level. 

Having a design plan, means we can scale resistance more easily, act in lockstep with each other, be deliberant about how we function, and increase our productivity and success rate, as well as retain more of the movement as attention passes from moment to moment. Organization that happens within these moments tends to be transitory; the engagement often doesn’t accrue ongoing resistance. Because of our design pattern, we don’t know how to operate outside of what we will call for our purposes, brief moments of political chaos. 

Importantly, a model where we have responded primarily to outbreaks of disaster, inherently means that we are in a defensive position. They are the first movers in the arena. While it is important to play defense in some cases, we have skewed far too far in this direction. One of the biggest design mistakes we’ve made, is adopting a defensive manner and operating with a defensive mentality and MO. 

My suggestion is that we need to fundamentally recalibrate for an active, proactive, and aggressive architecture. 

The way resistance has worked for the past ten years, is that they hit us, and THEN we react. Most of our activity occurs around some particularly egregious behavior of the enemy, which generates a great deal of social energy. 

In these moments, we see a material embodiment of the underlying system taken to an extreme, catalyzing response from us. This tsunami of public grief, anger and outcry, and the attendant media gorge, produces events and organizations and collectives that are formed in the shadow of the attack. It is WITHIN the context of these frissons that we are organizing; we are organizing in a defensive position. There is a lack of a meta strategy or design pattern to attach to these events.

 In the chaos and passion and grief we scramble to build an infrastructure for that moment; it becomes an infrastructure that is stuck in reaction mode, stuck in defense mode, that cannot survive without constant awareness campaigns, that often fails to bridge either to a larger movement or to another moment. Much of our efforts have been totally transitory as a result.

 While this is not universally true, this has dominated the movement. For example, in the tech justice movement, huge amounts of our energy and time revolved around REACTING to events like: a venture capitalist saying or doing something sexist or racist; union busting by major tech companies; release of diversity data and funding data showing massive wealth concentration; new reports about the state of gentrification in San Francisco and Oakland. And so on. We were constantly responding to the day-to-day of what the enemy was up to as opposed to developing systems attacks on the tech and venture capital system.

 We were sporadic, we were brief, we were caught up in the moment, every time. This was a major factor leading to the death of that movement. And almost all of the worst futures we feared are coming to pass. Again, the Matrix literally just launched and there isn’t even an impressive backlash. That is because our movement failed to form a resistance that could go the distance. 

It is likely that in the final calculation, it will be some act on their side that finally catalyzes us to a fundamental change in America. But the movement architecture is what drives us to that moment, what makes us capable of seizing on opportunities in capitalist disaster, what makes us strong and ready, what offers a true opening in space/time. In moments of energy, an architecture make sure that that energy flows into an EFFECTIVE formation, that resources are allocated in an effective way, that we retain as much as possible of the movement and not let is disappear with the migration of the attention economy. 

 Though it may sound cynical, we should look at every one of these instances as an opportunity to push forward the larger and sustained agenda, party or movement. We should never be caught unawares; we should never be constructing a strategy in the heat of passion. The strategy must already exist inherently in the movement. 

And with that comes victory. 

The defensive mode, I think, is tied in some ways to another huge fuck up. Reformism. 

Reformism. A defensive posture is the foundation of reformism — it reacts only to the grossest outgrowths of the system, acting on its edges to try to contain it. Structurally, reform is happening on nodes at the very edges of the system. This is something that we try to do school by school, startup by startup, corporation by corporation, local law by local law, a line item in a bill, relationship by relationship — the latter where we have seen a wayyyyy overemphasis on interpersonal matters, also very passive because it is in no way oriented directly at the material power structure. 

Reformism multi-furcates the collective energy into a billion little implementation details of capitalism, with limited connection to other efforts even within the same focal point. Multi-furcation is an element of the existing strategy that is resulting in massive and totally needless waste. The level of effort that goes into reform effort, split across literally millions of playing fields and millions of small initiatives that must each fight their own battle, is truly massive and frankly unthinkable and unconscionable when you consider how little reformism has given to us. There is also no reason whatsoever to believe that conditions will change that make reformism a viable strategy. 

If you don’t understand by now that reform doesn’t work, I can’t help you. 

 Reformism is a plague and in order to move to a new plane, we must also leave this behind. There is an imperative to reduce the extremes of human suffering, so I am not suggesting that we end reform efforts in totality (that would be my personal starting line but I go too far sometimes), but rather that this simply can’t be the central thrust of our strategy. 

15 years of focusing on reforms, has simply not produced results. How much failure must we experience before we go back to the drawing board? 

Yet, this allows us an advantage when we move to a more aggressive strategy. Their entire machine is dependent on the idea that we are running defense for reforms at all times. They don’t know how to defend themselves. They don’t have a plan for fighting us except over reforms; after all, the movement has been, to the extreme, reformist. They are not prepared for an aggressive, progressive onslaught or to fight on those terms; they have not had to. 

“Working within the system” has been another major design flaw that has infected resistance for farrrrrrr too long. 

And certainly it is easy to see how we came to the conclusion that this might work. It is definitely plausible that we could enter the establishment and attain stature in it, in order to influence things from within the corporate, the government, the non-profit industrial complex, tech companies and the mainstream media. Unfortunately, it turns out that this doesn’t work either. It folds dissent into the core. It cannabilizes.

“From within” is a very serious design pattern and a very serious decision, and it has easily been the biggest design error we made. “From within” is a complete different architecture than “from the outside”. And if we had been thinking about the architecture of resistance, this is something that could have been caught earlier, and changed. Part of the point of using a design/architecture model, is that we can actually connect results back to the model and we have a place for intervention; we are thinking about the model and we are thus able to change the model. 

The good news is, the problem is not that we don’t have enough people, energy, motivation, talent, intelligence. The problem is we don’t have a working design pattern, we do not have an architecture for resistance that is working here. Defense is not working. Defense is not a plan. Reform is not working. Reform is not a plan. Working from the inside, not working. 

Let’s walk through some of this thinking with a specific example since it is my main focus: the resistance to tech and venture capital. 

Venture capital knows how to attack. It is built to attack. That goes wayyyy into the center of how they operate and their DNA and who they are. Something that is built into them extremely deeply. Putting their hysterical hand-wringing about liberal reforms like “maybe we should give women founders more than 2% (literally) of technology funding”, the resistance that venture capital has faced has been exceedingly minor, polite, and ineffectual. Like many other movements, the movement for social justice in tech during Web 2.0 ended up in a defensive posture where a lot of the activity happened when there was a major event — perhaps a major public attack on a woman in tech, which was sending us into literal hiding and out of the country regularly, news of a sexual predator coming to light, or new releases about wealth, distribution or the effects of the technology, or most famously in cases of major leaks like Snowden and Manning. 

Overall, venture capital has been built to attack, like many of our other oppressors. They simply have very little experience with aggressive and proactive attacks on them from the people; because they haven’t had to face this, and because it isn’t in their DNA, this is an incredible weakness. And a weakness that we see across the board in our enemies: the only thing they know how to do is attack and eat and hunt and chase. And they have never had to deal with proactive, aggressive resistance, just defensive reformism. 

This leaves all of them… weak and vulnerable. Their organizations are brittle and entrenched in their ways; if we can adapt to a new type of resistance effort now, we will be doing something truly novel and can gain the advantage for the very first time. 

Close your eyes for me and imagine the tens of millions of Americans who have protested in the streets over our generation, for Ferguson, for Occupy, for MeToo. Add up all of the nonprofits we’ve started, all the meetups and events. Think of all the money that has been collectively donated to progressive causes in the past 10 years. Think of alllllll the DEI and representation efforts, and how much time, money and energy went in there, often with literally zero results. Think of all the campaign marketing, the voting, the machination of the political machine to get reforms. Podcasts. Book deals. Media platforms. Jobs. Representation in TV shows.   

If nothing else, what we have gotten from our generation of movements is a good assessment of what our available resource base is. The pool of things that we have access to and that we can organize and deploy as a movement or as a people, resources of time, energy, money, housing, care work, marketing/PR work, organizations, and so on… 

They are abundant. It is easy to feel resource-depleted and stripped when you look at the sad state of our Left now. It is easy to give into a scarcity mentality. And certainly, I am traditionally in scarcity mentality; that is how I’ve been fighting tech fascists for 10 years, and I realize even on a personal level, that is how I think about movements instinctually. But when I look at what we, materially, have as resources, it becomes clear that they are not only abundant but even formidable; something we have rarely been in our generation. 

We Have What It Takes

We Can Win With What We Have 

We Just Have To Change Our Design 

The issue is not that we are depleted in resources, but that these resources have not been managed and organized and developed and deployed appropriately. Functionally, this means that money, time and energy has not been directed effectively, when we see such a delta in between the possibility of a social movement and what it ultimately achieved. The question becomes HOW to leverage these resources in a new way. 

Our generational social energy is enough to have caused a global revolution of the economic system, the overthrow of capitalism, multiple times in the past decade. We failed then but we should, as a body, be able to realize the failures we have made and change our game up. 

That shit didn’t work, but that’s okay. Let’s build shit that works. 

We have all that we need. We truly do. The problem has been with how we design resistance, how we architect resistance, how we prepare for resistance, and how we operate or do not operate according to design principles.