Welcome to the Resi...lience: How to Resist Techno-authoritarianism and Grow the Regenerative Alternative

Now that the tech boys, with their slogan of “move fast and break things,” are huddled tight around Trump like he’s a trashcan fire in a snowstorm, the oligarchy alarm bells are ringing and the question of how to resist ungodly wealth and unparalleled surveillance are ripe on the mind.

One of the best ways to understand how to both resist their techno-authoritarian grip and build a regenerative replacement simultaneously is to think of everything as a living organism.

These men are at the core of what N.J. Hagens calls The Superorganism. These men don’t own the Superorganism, they are rather, inevitable, emergent products of it. But as actors fully subsumed by its machinations, they will do everything in their agency to prolong the life of The Superorganism. To thwart them, will require thwarting the entire Superorganism.

Meet the Superorganism

Hagens’ describes the Superorganism as a self-organizing, mindless, energy-seeking entity that emerges from collective human behaviors that prioritize economic growth and surplus extraction at the expense of ecological and social systems. A lot of people just call this “Capitalism” as a sort of all-encompassing term to describe the aggregation of all sorts of economic and social dynamics at play—to avoid ideological triggers, let’s call it Hagens’ Superorganism.

(left) Strangler Fig or banyan slowly taking over a host tree (right) Keith Haring, Untitled depiction of “Capitalism” or “The Superorganism”

Queer artist Keith Haring saw the Superorganism as an abomination, choosing to depict it as an “overtired pig suckled by little men born out of the creature’s own vomit. The spew itself is money-green and made of the machinery of production, acceleration, and increase. The cyclical image leaves no one in control and no way out." That is surely one view of it; I myself have compared it to a cancer.

Another is that, The Superorganism is a bit like a Strangler Fig that encases its host tree in a web that can eventually kill the host. In a similar but even more sinister way, The Superorganism has created a sort of cage around almost all human and ecological productivity. This cage, which is not external to, but a part of the Superorganism, forms the infrastructure of extraction it uses to sustain itself and maintain its dominance.

As an evolutionary biologist, I’ve learned some general rules about organisms that can help us exploit its weaknesses and relinquish its death-grip on our globe. At their most basic level, organisms must (1) use information to (2) extract energy and resources from the environment to (3) maintain a high level of structure or orderliness. In other words, organisms scavenge and eat to maintain their body. If an organism can do this, maintain its order, under all sorts of chaotic fluctuations we would call that organism resilient.

Here’s the good news: resilience has rules, and The Superorganism does not follow them. This fragility can be exploited. In general, resilience is created through diversity, redundancy, decentralization, self-repair, adaptability, and resourcefulness. In contrast, totalitarian power requires central control, homogeneity, and rigidity. Maintaining that type of orderliness requires an immense amount of energy and resources. I surprisingly found this so eloquently put in the rebel manifesto of Karis Nemik in the TV show Andor:

“The Imperial need for control is so desperate because it is so unnatural. Tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks, it leaks. Authority is brittle. Oppression is the mask of fear. Remember that.”

Our job is to exploit this brittleness to divert resources from the extractive Superorganism toward a regenerative, resilient alternative economy. As Michael Muyot posted in a recent inauguration post-mortem, this transformation is already underway:

“Economic transformation isn’t theoretical—it’s built, tested, and proven in real communities. Across the world, communities are shifting power from extractive systems to regenerative models that foster local resilience, ownership, and sustainable prosperity. By strategically redirecting capital, labor, and resources, we can starve exploitative economies and build thriving, community-driven ecosystems.”

To join in on this effort, our strategy will fall into three major categories: (1) Escape Surveillance by the Superorganism (2) Drain its Wealth, Test its Resilience, and (3) Create Independent Wealth Outside of the Superorganism.

Join the Resistance, Join the Resilience.

(1) Escape Surveillance by the Superorganism

Like any organism, but particularly in this case, the Superorganism is aggressively competitive. The Superorganism does not want competition and will seek to squash anything that challenges its extractive infrastructure. It will use its senses to surveil the landscape for competition, and its talons to punish or challenge threats. But, again, like any organism, it has innate sensory capabilities and blind spots. We must remember that, for example, visual camouflage isn’t useful against a predator that hunts at night by smell.

All of that to say, for the Superorganism, digital surveillance is essentially free and largely owned by the agents at the core. Don’t make it so easy. Make the Superorganism deploy new, expensive, and analog resources; you will be most costly to it if you are difficult to surveil and difficult to regulate.

Someone who went through the rise of fascism in Poland recommended: “Speak up and be loud both online and offline. Print anti-fascist posters and stickers and distribute them so people know it’s not just online.” This will also help combat the propaganda that is already being spread on behalf of the billionaires. Remember to fight for the perception of what is real offline where it will be harder to censor you or drown you out with bots.

As we go on, you will see that all three of these strategies are connected and intertwined. This surveillance and regulation function of the organism is like a specific appendage that requires energy and resources from its finite pool. If the Superorganism is being drained of its vitality, busy fighting off a million other checks to its power, its ability to surveil will become strained and vice versa.

Our challenge to its power cannot be asynchronous or localized. It can easily squash small rebellions that stand against it alone. There are many examples in biology, especially across the bacterial world, where individuals play benign until a critical mass is achieved and they launch their offensive. I think it makes sense to grow strength and numbers under the protective guise of harmlessness.

Organize Strategically to Avoid Scrutiny:

Several years ago, I read Andrew Dana Hudson’s essay “On the Political Dimensions of SolarPunk” where he coined a counter-mantra to building power in the margins: “move quietly and plant things.” He explored the opportunity to seize initiative where the state has dropped it—to not ask permission from a state beholden to oligarchs but to instead grow alternative and decentralized wealth and power structures quietly. The idea is that by the time the apparatus notices what has happened, it will be too late and too disparate for it to wrest the power back.

Moving quietly and planting things might involve being a little more discreet about how we organize. If you want to print a target on your back by calling your group, “Anti-Capitalist, Billionaire Haters”, you might want to consider whether that’s strategic. For one, it might alienate potential local allies.

People who are bought into the ideology of The Superorganism are part of its Infrastructure of Extraction; they are also our potential allies. It would be wise to free these followers by turning them against the billionaires instead of further entrenching them by falling into the quagmire of red/blue identity politics.

One of the most disciplined communicators on climate change I know, Katharine Hayhoe, observes that although climate change isn’t inherently a Left vs. Right issue, the number one indicator of whether someone believes in manmade climate change is which political party they support. If you approach the conversation of climate change or The Superorganism from that red/blue framework, you will lose. She counsels, if you want to organize a broader coalition, you must start with shared values, find common ground, use local examples, and focus on solutions and personal benefits.

We must pull apart their allegiance to The Superorganism by organizing under the initiative of local harms and benefits. Perhaps, make a coalition that is about saving money through local economies and worker power, or a coalition dedicated to building local resilience through supporting ecological initiatives and resisting polluting industries. Ultimately, if we connect to people on a personal level about local harms and potential benefits, we can organize around regenerative norms, and shift the blame from identity politics to a focus on class disparities caused by extractivism and structures of inequality. Doing so, serves the dual purpose of organizing more effectively, while not drawing scrutiny by calling your club Militant Anti-Capitalists for Anarchic Communism or something.

This is why we might want to say “Welcome to the Resilience”, instead of “Welcome to the Resistance.”

Whether it is smart to do this quietly or in open opposition, one thing remains true: we must focus on creating real alternative power while using guerilla tactics to drain the wealth and power of The Superorganism.

(2) Drain its Wealth, Test its Resilience

Again, maintaining the structure of the Superorganism takes an immense amount of energy and resources. The larger that structure gets and the more oppressive it attempts to be, the costlier it will be to maintain. We need to increase the cost of maintenance by attacking the infrastructure of extraction on both physical and ideological fronts; and decrease the amount of energy/resources it has in the first place by interrupting the flow of extraction and diverting it to The Resilience.

These two strategies have been covered before and are largely self-explanatory so I won’t belabor the point.

• Drain its Wealth: Siphon resources from the extractive machine // Add friction to its extractive flows

  • The 3.5% Strategy: How to Starve the Old System & Build a Well-being Economy

• Test its Resilience: Increase the cost of maintenance // Attack or slow the infrastructure of extraction

  • Conventional Activism (chaining yourself to a tree, blowing up a pipeline etc)

  • Make the work: Shove the Presidency Down Trump’s Throat

(3) Create Independent Wealth Outside of the Superorganism

• Create Wealth outside of the Superorganism’s Infrastructure

  • Reversing the extractive flow of wealth from your community

This is the other side of the coin of draining the wealth away from the Superorganism. This is what we’re channeling wealth toward. Again these steps are intertwined, draining the wealth is deeply connected to creating separate structures that create wealth. Listen to any school of resistance on how to build power. Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò’s book Elite Capture, documents a particularly successful effort from The African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC). The Bioregionalism movement also has developed many frameworks for creating local wealth and resilience. Ultimately, at the risk of sounding obvious, wealth creation depends on local control of resources. Land is the basis of pretty much all wealth, because on land you can create primary productivity that you can retain the value from. This is the basis of creating The Resilience; it must begin from the control and retention of productivity.

That’s why so much focus of the Resilience should be on what Keynes, as relayed by Kim Stanley Robinson, said was essential: we must “euthanize the rentier class” — not the actual people, but get rid of the idea, get rid of the ability of a class that makes income off owning land they don’t live on. This is why The Resilience focuses on Community Land Trusts, Local/Public Banking, Worker Ownership, etc.

These are guides. I don’t have strong opinions on the exact shape and functionality of The Resilience. As a biologist, I tend to embrace complexity and messiness. I am open to whether the alternative is completely differentiated or retains fragments or repurposes the structure of the Superorganism. I think being too rigid on what you will create does not do justice to the living nature of these systems. They will evolve like any other, retaining fragments of their history, building upon legacies as opposed to spontaneously spawning from a blank slate. The point isn’t to tell you what it will look like, but to have you experiment locally, and create what makes sense exactly where you are.

More Resources on Building The Resilience:

(1) Beware the Ineffective Allure of Social Media Organizing (Dr. Len)

(2) Insight from Robert Reich:

• Trump Will Overplay His Hand, Be Ready When He Does

• What you can do

(3) Support Bioregional Finance (BioFi Project)

(4) Left Organizing Is in Crisis. Philanthropy Is a Major Reason Why (Nina Luo)

(5) Alternative Cultures Are Beautiful and Important. They're Also Not Enough (Max Wilbert)

(6) We failed to stop the rise of fascism. What comes next? (Robert Evans)

(8) Shove the Presidency Down Trump’s Throat (Jason Linkins)

(9) Post-growth: the science of wellbeing within planetary boundaries (Kate Raworth)

(10) Almost all of my previous and future essays have revoked and will revolve around this topic. Follow Along ;)