Rob Cayman

"In this unfolding nightmare, anarchists must recognize there are no saviors coming from above. Our only reliable allies are those already locked in existential struggle against the regime."

open.substack.com/pub/anarcasp...

Image credit: @anarchistmemes.org

You Were Warned: How Liberalism Paved the Road to Trump’s America—Again

"Trump didn’t build this momentum alone. He was handed a system hollowed out by decades of liberal compromise."
open.substack.com/pub/anarcasp...

When have you felt most in sync with a group of people? What made that possible?

New Essay - The Hidden Architecture of Power

This week, I go though the history of the study of coordination, highlight a few key theories, and explain what Coordination: the Fabric of Power is.

Please enjoy, and share with anyone you think might be interested.
www.patreon.com/posts/hidden...

Over the next few years anarchist orgs are going to get a lot of new joiners.

I recommend developing analytical frameworks to inspect all new ideas and projects being proposed in order to be sure that crypto-authoritarianism and crypto-fascism aren't embedded in the language and ideas

funny how it took literal Tyranny for Liberal America to realize that the enforcement of the balance of powers between the judiciary, the executive, and the legislative essentially amounts to... *checks notes* "we trust each other to do things we tell each other to do"

The tragedy is not that domination exists. The tragedy is that we do not recognize it as our own power turned against us.

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In fact, much of the Partisan Politics we are presented with are little more than ideological support structures upholding the holographic façade.

Power dynamics within the core owners network affect day-to-day life for the majority of humanity far more than the partisan politics we are shown in the media.

Yes there is boardroom politics at play, and we can see those played out in the differential accumulation of power and capital, but the ideological politics we are presented with at the hologram level are just projections of the minute differences held at the core level.

But the reality is that these are just tools of Power. The State is a shareholder in the machine, and the competition is a circle of owners pretending to compete with each other in order to sell the hologram reality.

Capitalism is little more than a façade. It is a holographic projection of the underlying mode of power. What we see in the hologram is a system of competitive market exchange regulated by state agencies and legislators.

Liberalism as an ideology is built on support for two of the most violent and oppressive institutions in human history: capitalism and the modern nation state. So if you're a liberal who genuinely believes in peace and non-violence, then I suggest you find a new political belief system.

A lot of people focus on equitable distribution of wealth. Meanwhile, I'm sitting here just repeating, if we change our approach, wealth can be a thing of the past, and everyone can just get what they need when they need it.

We can support 10billion people at 1960's US standards of living.

All power is just an emergent phenomenon of different configurations of coordination. How you coordinate determines the type of power that emerges.

90% of money isn't even paper with pictures of dead guys.

It's just numbers on a spreadsheet that get shifted from one ledger to another

"gotcha" discourse is so damn boring

I won't claim to know much about much, but I know that attributing single causes to complex phenomena is usually going to be fallacious

S@bot@ge of the war machine's infrastructure has so many beneficial knock-on effects.

Including undermining state security's ability to screw with the people resisting the war machine

This is how the powerless can gain non-corrupting "Power Through "community

Of course precluding domination internally for a community does not preclude external domination of that community over another individual or group.

For that preclusion, we need a horizontal inclusivity bringing those without, or with less power, into the community.

A horizontal coordination configuration provides those with the power to act in the interests of the community, with the mechanisms to do so.

And since the configuration precludes internal domination, the "Power With" community does not corrupt the internal social relations.

Not all power corrupts.

And by this I mean that it is not power itself that corrupts.

What corrupts is the configuration in which power is coordinated.

Specifically, it is domination, ie. "Power over" other people that corrupts. This is a hierarchical coordination configuration.

It is so important that we make the distinction between the different kinds of power. Otherwise, people will fear claiming their own power. They will fear that it might corrupt them, and when they don't claim it, it will be usurped by others and wielded over them.

I am now 1 month away from being unemployed (by choice) so that I can focus on my writing and looking after my doggo.

It's terrifying, but I'm sick of renting my labor out to capitalism for peanuts.

So I guess I get to see if what I have to say is worthy of support. At least enough to survive on.

Until people realize that the state of capital is functionally about sabotaging and enclosing access to all of the fundamental resources required for existence, we will perpetually resist it along incorrect lines, and our resistance will simply be absorbed, sabotaged, and enclosed.

Experimenting with new socials is always a little weird to start with.

This time I'm going to actively work on curating the space to reflect my ideas and values, rather than as a random conglomeration of semi-related voices that say things similar to my ideas and values.