Thread by @rechelon

A lot of people gravitate towards "One Simple Trick" accounts of resistance and social change. In part because complexity doesn't make for potent narratives but also cuz folks want to be able to claim a monopoly on impact.

In contrast I believe in a diverse array of strategies:

1) Insurrection: compounding popular resistance that undermines the capacity of control systems through demonstrable effects via reproducible attacks (burning police cars and derailing trains carrying arms shipments can go viral)

2) Hacking: context-dependent exploits found and implemented by those with distinct knowledge or situatedness. (pulling a heist on your employer, breaking a critical infrastructure component you have access to, PhineasFisher style attacks on important corporations, etc)

3) Development: investing in pursuing certain paths of technological development over the others that would otherwise not get invested in by capitalism (fuck Moxie but the crew behind Signal significantly improved shit, see also certain solar tech etc)

4) Contestation: applying what pressures are available to shift the everyday balances where possible (protests scare adminstrators into not dismantling a department run by radicals, an anarchist on a protocol committee raises hell to keep them from implementing NSA suggestions)

5) Prefiguration: developing alternative modes -- whether technological stack, social protocols, etc -- and both shaking out through application the problems as well as demonstrating the successes / alternative possibilities (gnusocial, cooperatives, cultures of consent, etc)

6) Erosion: making the economy and society more decentralized, more competitive, more responsive, more finely accurate, more deterritorialized, etc. (think the Carsonian decentralization of production rather than the MegaWalmartization of left accelerationists)

You might think this is an exhaustive list of modes of resistance, but it's really not. It doesn't include building mass organizations (party, union, or NGO), and it doesn't include anything remotely like electoral investment or revolutionary seizure of systems of control.

(Nor does it include "wreck everything, kill everyone" or "attack meaninglessly for the moral virtue of attacking alone", which are sadly not entirely unfair characterizations of certain corners that took wildly inane conclusions from insurrecto theory.)

What I want to emphasize is that social change:

A) can only emerge from individuals on up because only individuals have any real agency, originality, insight, etc

B) can happen by incremental degree rather than abrupt changes (although the latter are also possible)

and

C) there are traps whereby some measure of progress in the immediate serves to constrain future progress, thus we must keep a broad futurist frame that evaluates many paths and avoids getting trapped in miserable but locally stable optima (eg social democracy).