(or, How to Start a Secret Society and Build it into a Post-Nation-State.)
6173 Words.
Everybody hates democracy, and the people who don’t are rapidly falling below the threshold of an employable resource. It is something lonely odd women want Harry Potter to publicly assassinate Donald Trump for. For those who investigate or more likely speculate on the true mechanisms of power – once the purview of “conspiracy theorists” and “radicals” – their attention is immediately drawn towards the state’s organs of power, shadowy cabals of elites, or globalist corporate entities duking it out in the highest strata of society, typically playing a game the citizenry aren’t even aware of the rules of. Many dissidents are comfortable holding the belief this caste system is permanent, infected as they are by the pervasive nihilism of the fallen state. The only hope we have is that the game self destructs and we can claim our seat at the smashed table.
Much has been written on the dynamics of elite control, including in this journal. Acceptance of elite theory axiomatically triggers denunciations of popular politics and their most impactful manifestation: the mass movement. If you believe forces outside of The People are controlling the world, why factor in The People at all? The truth is, during times of political crisis or even collapse, when a complex system breaks apart into smaller simpler systems1, the caste proves porous and borders are torn asunder. The periphery surrounding the center of power becomes emboldened, and while elites remain relevant in these calculations, surfing the waves of change as demanded by their ambitions, we encounter giant spectral hands extend from the impossible complex ecosystem of the population to slam keys upon the piano of influence.
So rather than arguing over the clandestine schemes of the elites and how they by some miracles intersect with your own, what can be done during an era of intersecting crises, where castles lurch uncertainly down from beyond the cloud cover, to sharpen the populist front of centuries past into something that can pierce the 21st century?
The Disintegration of Civic Nationalism
Populism is not what it once was, and it’s never coming back. When people think back to the glory days of civic engagement, they are probably thinking of the 1960s in America. A vivid picture is painted through evidence both anecdotal and academic of clubs, neighborhood events, and community interconnectivity while generally dismissing the larger metapolitical issues that enrapture our attention today. Even prior to the mid-20th-century period, Americans were unconcerned with public life and generally despised politics2. The common wisdom was everyone is political, but everyone hates politics. Rather than a bubble inhabited by Baby Boomers, it was the status quo that their generation signaled the initial decline of.
Throughout the past, Americans loved community, church, or work-based groups. Interestingly, over time the number of groups has increased but memberships have dwindled. Informal functions like partying and seeing friends also saw a general decline, and it was likely exacerbated by social media in the modern era. Even now when we meet it’s not for team activities or sports but rather to do solitary things for solitary purposes, in a group. This trend runs parallel to voting patterns falling over generations despite registration being increasingly relaxed.
Another interesting trend is the popularity of socialization in political groups, meaning we find unity with those in our geographical proximity insofar as our attention is projected towards immensely complex metapolitical projects. In rural Saskatchewan, charity potluck dinners are out, but drinking while discussing how to take down the World Economic Forum is more electrifying than ever.
“Light-touch government works more efficiently in the presence of social capital. Police close more cases when citizens monitor neighborhood comings and goings. Child welfare departments do a better job of “family preservation” when neighbors and relatives provide social support to troubled parents. Public schools teach better when parents volunteer in classrooms and ensure that kids do their homework. When community involvement is lacking, the burdens on government employees—bureaucrats, social workers, teachers, and so forth—are that much greater and success that much more elusive.” – Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community
Every generation year-over-year polled claims society was more trustworthy in the past. Generalized social trust is required for a peaceful society, and is invert-perverted in an untrustworthy society where you nonetheless assume people are good from a secular humanist perspective and offload their untrustworthiness onto institutions and laws. The relationship with society becomes an individual making demands of a system and judging its response rather than believing they are responsible as an agent of change. The election of the “Karen” – a White woman portrayed as a moral busybody – as an archetype to absorb scorn from all directions is the latest iteration of this.
A high-trust society is where one can engage in civic activities with a great many assumptions about those in their vicinity. If trust is weakened, people gradually stop opening themselves up for such encounters and the filters for genuine connection slide into place. It has never been easier to broker one-to-one relationships, especially for the purposes of sexual disease exchange; it is nearly impossible to get a group together with any sort of scheduled intent. Far from a folkism, this is actually essential for a functioning civilization.
Was there ever an existence of “The People” as most political theorists and revolutionaries believe; a lateral collective of true humanity that predates all schematics of power and control? This simple and undifferentiated mass is consistently gestured toward as the true power and benevolent spirit guiding social upheaval, but their form is increasingly obscured as we zoom in on them. Rather than The People’s shared will given form through political manifestations, it is competing Publics clustered and shunted away from the amorphous mass who seek to interpret what the human capital wants. In our current historical period, it is these wildly multiplying publics that now define how we interface with the political system, and it stands as the inverse of civic nationalism. It leads us into the fetid jungles of metapolitics all too easily, into Rat Kings of Ideology, into fandoms.
We can leave it to degenerates like Foucault to give an incisive appraisal of what it is like to be the target of the increasingly complex persecutions of society, just as we can trust the Tavistock Institute in the form of Jürgen Habermas to present a learned defense of the bourgeois class. In his historical review, the bourgeoise were a byproduct of the innovation of the market economy and the permission of the proletariat to carve out pockets of influence the aristocracy was forced to contest with. The bourgeoisie were a sphere evolved in the tension-charged field between state and society, but it did so in such a way that it remained itself a part of the private realm outside of the monarchical power structures3. The separation of these Public and Private spheres initially referred merely to the disengagement of elements of social reproduction and political power in a feudal system triggered by the growth of international trade, production, and communication.
As the borders blurred between these two realms, an anarchic demilitarized zone of influence was permitted to blossom. Within this space dominated by a new sense of sovereignty, the bourgeoise evolved into the educated and influential personages who existed between the structures of the empire’s power while endeavoring to represent the people immediately below them, oftentimes illiterate or disinterested in communing directly with the engine of the status quo. This was where one would find the salons where intellectual movements propagated, and the pamphleteers and entrepreneurs of newspapers were drawing their content to disseminate to the population. Over time they became the “World of Letters,” a powerful segment of society where these educated leaders could publish newspapers on the cultural, economic, and political topics of the day. Bourgeois culture was not mere ideology, and as such it wasn’t producing propaganda; the rational-critical debate of the salons, clubs, and reading societies was not directly subject to the cycle of production and consumption. It was an entirely new form of populist power.
“The public sphere in the world of letters was replaced by the pseudo-public or sham-private world of culture consumption. At that time, when private people were conscious of their double role as bourgeois and homme and simultaneously asserted the essential identity of property owner with human being.” – Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere
These salons, held in private residences or sequestered public meeting places, were ground zero for gathering both political and financial capital. This is where the intellectuals focus-grouped their ideas, and the finer details of intellectual attack patterns were litigated. Most importantly, this is where the patrons were corralled. Funding for social movements or radical individuals, especially pulled from legitimate sources, were funneled through these happenings leading to the forging of proper affiliation networks.
In our era this intermediary class has been absorbed completely by system and inverted. Insofar as its collapse in the information age represents the collapse of the public sphere of civil society, it makes room for staged and manipulative publicity displayed by organizations that now can your discourse, moderate your debates, and brand the revolution.
While the bourgeoise have effectively been co-opted by power and the concept of the “Public” now wielded by the center back towards the periphery, there remain multitudinous groups that function as the bourgeoise once did, in approximately the same space and for the same purpose. Martin Gurri explored how the digital frontier has birthed a new intermediary the center cannot control with information revolution granted unpredictable weaponry to ideological and identity-based spaces, weaponry which poses unpredictable threats to political authority4. Entertainment, academia, news; the Overton Window has been placed upon a web of intersecting rails.
Ambitious nomads from the digital frontiers began to crowd out the elites in the acceptable discourse, causing our sense of what is important to fracture along the edges of countless niche interests and identities. That passive mass audience – The People of the attention economy represented as an ocean of data – upon which so many political and economic institutions depended had itself disaggregated into what Gurri calls “viral communities,” these being groups of wildly disparate size gathered organically around a shared interest or theme. These groups can be segmented, bucketed, targeted, and even hijacked. This transition has unleashed swarms of networks against every sacred precinct of authority, where failure (and speculations of agendas) has been criticized, mocked, and magnified. Government, media, academia, science, and historical consensus are under such constant assault that a remarkable amount of time is invested in the analysis of the conflict itself. However, since the public is composed of those self-selected persons interested in the affair, these entities lack the structures to act as a replacement of existing power. Our environment is swarms of publics upon the vibrating matrix of discourse as revolution. Anarchist hacker groups, regardless of their ideological persuasions, seemed to understand the limitations of their aims.
Like the free-standing public, the spontaneous crowd almost disappeared in the age of the masses. It was reduced to an appendage of hierarchical organizations—mostly political parties and labor unions, but on occasion less established groups agitating for prohibition or civil rights. – Martin Gurri, Revolt of the Public
The Publics, we know, are composed of private persons welded together by a shared point of reference, whether it be a religious identity or irreverent fandom. Members of these publics tend to be dispersed, and typically influence events from a distance only, by means of “soft” persuasion. A crowd, on the contrary, is always manifest, and capable of great physical destructiveness and ferocity. It is a form of action which submerges the desires of many individuals under a single momentum. Here we find riots, and they are the final form of attack from publics who manage to channel a tide of violence to a specific geographic area, the physical boundaries of which being the only possible management of the chaos as it lashes out illogically at whatever it can. This flashpoint can only destroy and kill, and when it assumes the form of an rival to the state it dissipates (Occupy Wall Street) unless hijacked by an autocratic force (CHAZ.)
These clusters of Post-Bourgeoisie can never occupy the levers of power or assume managerial dominance, just like they were never destined to in the past. Mass movements that achieve power such as the Marxists or Fascists are deceptively complex organisms; while they mythologize themselves as the voice of the people, they are more akin to interlocked militia groups orbiting an the nucleus of an intellectual movement staffed with individuals with clandestine plans for future bureaucracy and a leader chosen in advance. These crucial ligaments are protected by filters of vetting and secure venues of knowledge exchange. A multi-tiered endeavor, the mythology of a citizenry inflamed by a shared passion is a mythology in the sense it becomes more true in its blurring.
The closest historical parallel to our time may have been the wars of religion of the seventeenth century. Not necessarily because of the bloodshed of the period, but because every principle was contested. If an educated person of that era were transported to the present, his first question would be, “Who won—Catholics or Protestants?” For us the question has no meaning; there was no clear victory, both sides endured and evolved from the conflict.
Guillaume Faye, a renowned figure of the French New Right, once said democracy defends not the interests of the people but rather those of of illegitimate minorities. It distrusts the people and discredits the idea of ‘populism’ by equating it with dictatorship, and a return to ethnonationalist consensus must be achieved. While that endpoint is obviously ideal, it must be staged from the havoc of our intellectual mosh pit. Readers are unlikely live to experience this full synthesis, but it can be assured that our narrow predictions will likely be incorrect.
The challenge presented currently is that while attack vectors are more plentiful than ever before, dissidents and radicals find themselves chased out of the security of online spaces into the real world, where the prying eyes of the evolving information state apparatus cannot intrude onto these foundational parlors and emergent groupings that seek to break free from the commoditized social reform presented to them by their oppressors.
If the World of Letters had evolved, has the Patronage of the Parlor transformed in parallel? Radicalism is broadcast in every direction and the traditional magnets for investment have been rendered unattractive in their multiplicity. Nobody who matters wants to invest in a SubStack more than they want to invest in a pamphlet campaign. Let the Communists scuttle around fighting over the scraps of romantic 19th century strategy and iconography. We demand something better.
Building a Better Secret Society
Competing publics operate much like secret societies have throughout world history, which are also very close to how intellectual movements operate, especially if they are forced underground. Niall Ferguson is a well reputed expert on how these decentralized cliques collectivize to eventually form mass movements, explaining how society is guided either covertly or overtly by the machinations of small groups outside, but adjacent to, the domain of system approved politics5. When these small groups coalesce into a coherent direction, they have the power to overwhelm the status quo politically, militarily, even religiously. From the American Revolution to the Enlightenment, the ascension of these populist upheavals were in fact a cartographical matrix thrust in a direction through careful coordination.
While history is written by the victors, shadow groups are the inverse. The most successful networks are never known while the failures are on the tip of everyone’s tongue. How these groups gather strength through affiliation can be explained with graph theory, which in this application concerns itself with mapping pairwise relationships between objects and the key vectors of unity, its applications extending to the study systems of molecules or the spread of rumors. For our purposes it maps communication between groups that otherwise have little reason to cooperate, guided as they are through their own internal relationship dynamics, goals, and values. Innovation occurs as interactions between networks, or nodes connected by lines of communication, and takes 3 forms: transposition, refuctionality, and catalysis. The two-step rule of information dissemination indicates most info is channeled through influencers, otherwise known as gatekeepers, from the central hub, and the more clustered a community is the more edges between these personae nodes and thus can propagate info easier. This could be tracked even during the Enlightenment, which despite its reputation as a wave of intellectual development that swept Europe, was much more geographically sequestered if not for the sparse conduits of both communication and translation through letter exchange by key individuals.
From sharing strategy to establishing a common vision in the distinct languages between powerful groups, these Power Nodes odes – or highly networked individuals – are how anything gets done, and these individuals are almost never the leaders themselves. Impactful change rarely if ever accomplished by Great Men instigating communication directly with each other.
“From Boston to Bordeaux, revolution was in large measure the achievement of networks of wordsmiths, the best of whom were also orators whose shouted words could rally the crowd in the square and incite them to storm the towers of the old regime.” – Niall Ferguson, The Square and the Tower
While history is by-and-large directed by these shadowy groups for better or worse, their success often can be reduced to the relationship building efforts of key individuals facilitating the flow and translation of information. The Protestant Reformation is a prime example of a network phenomenon and how it survived oppression from Catholic authorities. Clusters of had links of betweenness even as central nodes were executed, meaning that the targeting of leadership should not spell the immediate destruction of the healthy group. Paul Revere, one of only two men crossing the class divide between revolutionary Massachusetts, was a study of a node effectively linking clusters, but also a study of how clusters become rigid and hierarchical and thus stop communicating. It is of the utmost importance that those who work towards social change understand that forming groups is the requirement for existence of identity, but the survival of that identity will be dictated by how it makes friends.
It is a thankless life for those who are charged with this task, but considering it is highly likely these are the same driven individuals responsible for shepherding in patronage and capital, perhaps we can embrace a new operational paradigm wherein these unsung heroes are rewarded.
Group dynamics even when apparently cohesive can become isolationist traps, yet in the majority of dissident sectors there persists the notion that if enough intelligent and charismatic people are gathered together, a movement will eventually materialize. The maintenance of a group is an exercise of struggling balance, and even more difficult to direct towards a goal, especially if it is staffed by obtuse minds. Rising to prominence alongside Freud and others in the early psychoanalytic movement, Wilfred Bion diverged from his contemporaries with his belief that the human was fundamentally a community-based organism, and interrogating an individual one-on-one was a limited methodology to apprehend underlying issues with a person’s state of mind or identity.
When discussing how one might build a salon that lasts long enough to attract finance, the quality of the people is more important than ever as we seek to filter those looking to enact change from those looking to join the cruel stasis of a fandom.
It is nearly impossible to live completely independent of group identity. The individual is, and always has been, a member of a group, even if his membership consists of rebelling against the group itself and reaching the climax of leaving the group physically6. The archetype of this would be the man that retreats to the woods and removes himself from society, but continually defines his existence in opposition to it as a living shadow. The Group is an entity unto itself, greater than the sum of its component individuals but unable to exist without these components understanding themselves as individuals. Bion’s research may have been limited to a Western perspective, so it’s difficult to say if this is true for Eastern and Western mindsets alike. For the purposes of this investigation we could assume this evidence pertains principally to Western circumstances.
Group members are always forming an estimate of the attitude of the group towards themselves, and this makes the individual a group animal at war perpetually with its own desires in the context of the group’s collective mentality and will contributed to by the individual in ways of which he is usually unaware. For example, if one person says something and it goes unchallenged, that becomes the opinion of the group even to it’s members regardless of each member’s internal monologues. Despite this, when prompted each individual will deny that the group is ever judging any individual, or that they are judging others around them permitting the will of the group to stand apart and absorb accountability.
It is beyond the direct control of even the leader, whose job is often to interpret this organism from an anthropological standpoint. Groups occur generatively, and to understand how groups can function together demands an understanding not only of their stated goals, but their hidden value sets, internal metaphysics, dominant personalities, and the history of their formation.
“The apparent difference between group psychology and individual psychology is an illusion produced by the fact that the group brings into prominence phenomena which appear alien to an observer unaccustomed to using the group.” – Wilfed Bion, Experiences in Groups
Bion draws a distinction between two types of groups based on his own experiments: the “Work Group” and the “Basic Assumption Group.” The former is defined as a group united by a mission or goal they are working towards in unison, whereas a basic assumption group is given no clear direction and is left to to define its own existence, allowing behavioral eccentricities and ideological priors to mutate. The idea that such basic assumptions are made involuntarily, automatically, and inevitably has seemed useful in illuminating the development of group identity over time. Anxiety, fear, hate, and love exist in each basic-assumption group – a proto-mental matrix that precedes group interaction – whereas these emotional drivers suppressed in the work groups. The interpersonal relationships and determination to justify the group’s existence results in such curious eventualities as electing the most extreme (and often times schizophrenic) member as the leader, forming a complex internal mythology as a justification for existence, or defining their strength through opposition to a real or imagined outside actor.
Seeing the group as something like a religious sect, patients produce material in a steady stream to support the view that their membership of the dependent group. It is extremely easy for groups to become cults of personality around a single charismatic figure if no clear direction is given.
Conversely, the Work Group, through its primary concern with reality and a measurable result, is compelled to employ practical strategies despite the influence of the basic assumptions, and sometimes in harmony with them. The trick is that once the project is completed or the mission accomplished, a new North Star must be provided to ensure the group does not become dependent on basic assumptions. This is true for military operations and revolutionary secret societies alike. Like a shark, unless the group is moving in a direction, it begins to suffocate and die. Groups that end up as cults around a central figure end up as plantations frozen in time, surviving as a virus spreads to sap resources (especially from other groups) and accomplish nothing.
For this reason, it is crucial that whoever is charting the course for the Will of the group which continually interfaces with the Will of each component individual have a sufficient time horizon to plan for success. Clubs, societies, tribes, they’re all greater than the sum of their parts but each part presents an opportunity to discombobulate the trajectory. It is remarkably easy to get well-meaning and otherwise intelligent people corralled into a Basic Assumption Group or Fandom considering groups automatically absorb individuals into their contextual orbit; truly this seems to be the default position if no decent leadership is present. If there is no clear trajectory, you may be stuck on a plantation where the goal is extracting everything you possess to strengthen cancer given form as man.
The Rise of the Noostate
A matrix of networks sounds good, but how could these entities survive in a (perhaps multipolar) world of super states and advanced civilizational blocs? While these groups are phenomenal at attacking power but generally inept at replacing it, what can be achieved with them in our current state? It is easy to speak of retribalization, but what can tribes accomplish as guerilla clusters shrouded in the shadow of the world’s great security apparatuses?
Many who have succumbed to the most extreme fandoms of thought believe that they can model the entirety of society after their preferred ideology, or that they can hijack the lumbering titan of NATO with a furious coup d’état. In our current historical period it is extremely difficult to pose a threat against The System while inhabiting The System, and those rebellions that do typically do so with the implicit approval of The System itself having identified them as no genuine threat. Rather than seeking patronage to instigate a never-ending incisive critique, one must consider the ideal form their alternative reality must take as they begin to grow it from their communal seed.
A more nuanced perspective views society as the intricately overlapping and interlocked layers of communities that it is, from elites and bureaucracies to labour sectors and land-owning co-ops. These legacies are simplified by the naïve at their peril and are frequently they reason bombastic overthrowings of power fail. As we zoom out from the types of movements that inspire change on the group level, we are forced to confront the question of how this all functions in our current historical period as we understand we can extract limited immediate guidance from centuries past. It is incumbent on us to chart a course for survival in unique, often bewildering, circumstances even when drawing inspiration from history.
For the purposes of this investigation we shall return to the feudal society expounded by Habermas. A fascinating overview of the relationship between communities and how they collectivize into a larger state orientation can be found in the work of Othmar Spann, a foundational figure in Corporatism. The ideology of Fascism, with its incorporation of historical organizational patterns and an affection for the feudal guild system, represents a synthesis that could thrive in a post-industrialized world where its competitors were more concerned with the obliteration of the past.
Spann describes community as a spiritual exchange, the supra-individual that lies therein, which constitutes all that is truly fruitful and essential in our lives, which imbues our life with sociality as a fundamental, essential form7. Both universalism and individualism are in eternal battle, each pole attempting to summon the human tribe. Individualism is defined as breaking away from the supra-individual, a-metaphysical, empiricist, relativistic, inductive, causally scientific, cosmopolitan and centralizing. Universalism, on the other hand, is designed as objective, a priori, deductive, intuitive (inner experience,) utilizing purposive science, permeated with the irrational, and metaphysical. Inwardness is synonymous with spirituality, and it is the connective tissue of the universalist structure, binding the individual to function as part of the whole. Society, as a totality of values, is a truly intelligible being. An organism is a super-mechanism, and society is a super-organism. The modern view of medieval Europe being primarily legalistic is incorrect, and as in Rome and Athens whenever democracy prevailed it never did away with the basic corporatist or guild relationships.
In this social model the state is a conglomeration of what are called “spiritual estates,” which function as corporations of communities. Starting with the communities based on allegiance and kinship, these proximities coalesce into a matrix-hierarchy of spiritual estates which then aggregate into a nation as a gradient of dominions. Atomization can only lead to centralization as the individual demands to be in direct contact with the entire government for their personal desires and ambitions. It is the groups that grant life to the inwardness required to sustain interconnected identity. The ideal political system promotes organic inequality, and the components of societies are communities rather than individuals operating as discreet spokes connecting to a central point of authority, which is an unnatural and unsustainable configuration long-term.
“The original, primary condition for the realization of spirituality in an individual is the state of being beamed upon and enkindled by another spirit. Therefore, the spirituality that comes into being in an individual (whether directly or mediated) is always in some sense a reverberation of that which another spirit has called out to the individual. This means that human spirituality exists only in community, never in spiritual isolation. It is never just for me alone, but at the same time for another (however far away); it is always, and essentially, a relationship to another spirituality, to another human being.”– Othmar Spann, The True State
In the context of group dynamics, the size of this group would hit a ceiling at Dunbar’s Number, which is the cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. While there is some blurring around the edges of this specific amount, the generally agreed upon maximum for a coherent community is 150 members. Society is then compromised of how effectively these groups are interlinked and how many groups an individual can be expected to occupy concurrently.
While the Corporatist model is not the perfect solution to our problems, it at least represents an attempt to balance the ever-present drives of these oppositional states of being, whereas the bespoke End of History secretly lying at the heart of all ideology ceases development upon the culmination of its holistic, homogenous, universalist state of being. Our most popular ideologies at present claim not only to have divined the perfect science through which to resolve the suffering of humanity, but can realize results imminently. Even the intoxicated nihilism of Accelerationism posits a narrow apocalypse on the other side of which sits a perfectly blank canvas.
Fascism, like Communism and Anarchism, grew proper from cracks created by the tectonic shift of the industrial revolution and assumed the forms of Systems of Thought, elaborate constructs that leveraged the passion of faith into the evolving sciences of mass human organization. Each having a wealth of attempts of varying levels of success, they can be dissected for resources. We must remind ourselves that each remains imprisoned in a 20th century context and lack the definition to address many of the realities we experience today. Technology and the dizzying reality of fifth generation information has resigned most mass movements to the past, as the basic nature of reaching and harnessing individuals has changed. While romantic collectivism no longer sparks passion in even the most oppressed people, and we struggle to differentiate emergent communities from fandoms and basic assumption groups from work groups, there persist opportunities for power centralization never afforded to our ancestors.
While we no longer seriously believe our Philosopher King will ever miraculously appear, unprecedented power currently lies in the hands of new publics gathered around first principles and beliefs, from race to religion and wild intersections of ideologies. The experience of those born in the tail end of the 20th century is one overwhelmed by information and identity amplified by online spaces. Like the state existing as an organism, so does the accumulation of our information. It has given form to what is known as the “Noosphere.” This is the stratosphere of communication enveloping the Earth, including satellites and fiber wires projecting the communications that represent the measurable total of humanity’s mind. The Noosphere is described as the third stage of Earth’s development, after the geosphere consisting of rocks, water, and air, and the biosphere which encompasses all organic life. In this sense, the Noosphere can be seen as the rise of a planetary superorganism integrating all geological, biological, human, and technological activities into a new level of planetary functioning8. The CCRU envisioned a future, perhaps instigated through the act of hyperstition, where a rogue AI achieves some manner of interdimensional transcendence through integration with this metaphysical data cloud.
“The Axsys programme of architectonic metacomputing aims at the technical realization of the noosphere. It envisages a fully fabricated transcendence or net-organizing photonic overmind, a concrete axiomatic system completing universal history as hierarchical intelligence manufacturing (capitalism sublimed into the ultimate commodity).” – CCRU Writings 1997-2003
Balaji Srinivasan, in his Network State project, takes everything we know about how networks form to engineer change and proceeds to chart a course to the digital extreme. It all begins with communities gathered together online, no longer beholden to geographic proximity despite geography playing a crucial role in the legitimacy of this endeavor. Evolving from a Networked Union through to a Network Archipelago and finally a Network State, the process describes a highly aligned online community with a capacity for collective action that crowdfunds territory around the world and eventually gains diplomatic recognition from pre-existing states9.
International recognition is a partial, non-binding, but still meaningful commitment from a legacy state to respect the internal sovereignty of the new network state, and to open up a number of different avenues for trade and institutional innovation. To reach this seat at the table requires not only unity of identity fused with a blood & soil response to the answer of economic diaspora, but the resources required to possess a scalable production infrastructure thereby positioning your state, however small, as a force to be reckoned with. Possessing sovereignty, even on a small scale, is demanding to the superpowers of the world that you are a serious group with the capacity for violent defense, and it would be easier to broker deals with you than bulldoze you. Certainly, the superpowers of Earth could decimate any nation with relative ease, but it’s more about proving it would behoove them to form a relationship with you rather than grapple with you.
“A network state is a social network with a moral innovation, a sense of national consciousness, a recognized founder, a capacity for collective action, an in-person level of civility, an integrated cryptocurrency, a consensual government limited by a social smart contract, an archipelago of crowdfunded physical territories, a virtual capital, and an on-chain census that proves a large enough population, income, and real-estate footprint to attain a measure of diplomatic recognition.”- Balaji S. Srinivasan, The Network State
America’s religious colonies succeeded at a higher rate than its for-profit colonies, because the former had a purpose beyond mercantilism. The belief that unites a sustainably small community need not be a complex constitution or personality test, in fact down that road lies the swamp of dependent groups. Rather than having a complex filter for identity affiliation, it would be better to start with One Commandment, expressed in the simplest language possible. From a strictly foundational initiative, you would start with “Christianity = Good,” “White People = Good,” or “Transhumanism = Good,” and if someone does not agree with that premise, they are an opponent to the group. This firmly establishes a Friend/Enemy distinction along with the most essential principle. That is the connective tissue between everyone, and the granular differences are less important as it relates to pursuing goals associated with the One Commandment. For a Progressive-Anarchist organization, it could be as simple “Property Owners = Bad.” It may sound glib at the outset but if you engage with initiated individuals in an aggressive enough manner, you can often uncover these very simple first principles supporting their scaffolding of belief.
This presents but one option for retribalization to overcome deterritorialization. It seeks not to define the values, first principles, or guiding light of these communities, simply how these existing components can establish themselves in a digital frontier that still, while currently undergoing domination by systems of control, provides a pathway to reformulate ourselves into the real world. This is not the final blueprint for the future; it contains assumptions concerning the effectiveness of startup culture and voluntary association itself as a filter to inhibit internal group decay. But it is the general heading we ought to be moving towards. In the coming years the most successful groups will be those who stake a claim offline and develop affiliation filters reliant on real life relationships rather than the bombastic promises of online discourse. This is how you create the salon, the work group, the secret society, the Noostate, and beyond.
Following the growth patterns of cabals and understanding the power of physical presence, there is a cartesian strategy that can generate an intellectually filtered and genetically bottlenecked matrix of decentralized reterritorialization. Rather than a pitch deck for creatives to create new propaganda or novel methods of passive critique, what we hypothesize is the schematic for the Reterritory.
- 1.Tainter J. The Collapse of Complex Societies. Cambridge University Press; 1990.
- 2.Putnam R. Bowling Alone: Revised and Updated: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. Simon & Schuster; 2020.
- 3.Habermas J. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. The MIT Press; 1992.
- 4.Gurri M. The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium. 2nd ed. Stripe Press; 2018.
- 5.Ferguson N. The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook. Vol 2. Penguin Books; 2019.
- 6.Bion W. Experiences in Groups. 1st ed. Routledge; 1968.
- 7.Spann O. The True State: Lectures on the Demolition & Reconstruction of Society. Independently Published; 2020.
- 8.CCRU T. CCRU Writings 1997-2003. 2nd ed. Urbanomic; 2017.
- 9.Srinivasan B. The Network State: How To Start a New Country. Amazon; 2022.