Now we're _really_ not gonna take it. Cause we can't.
The old Industrial Era deal was pretty straightforward: you gave up a chunk of your autonomy, followed the hierarchy, and in exchange, you got a predictable, stable world.
But as we frequently discuss, here and elsewhere, that deal has officially expired.
In the post-Industrial, Fusion Era—a world that is Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous (VUCA) — the top-down, command-and-control structures that defined our parents’ careers, and their political landscape, are falling apart in new ways every day…
Promises made by employers fall apart at the first minor crisis,
Establishment media aligns with pompous, bullying and very fragile power,
Assumptions about who to trust, who to listen to, who to believe, seem quaint — and come back to bite those who replaced a news anchor with a podcaster “who gets it.”
We are starting to realize that we can’t wait for a gatekeeper or a leader to tell us what to do. In all sorts of arenas, we’re learning to self-organize, shifting from cogs in a machine to nodes in a dense network. It’s messy, it’s complicated and it leads us down some dead ends. But that decentralizing happened at the same time as we developed the technical capability to collaborate with almost anyone, almost anywhere.
We’re still not very good at it. As evidenced by the number of us who latch onto conspiracy theories, proclamations of “winning,” or who do what we’re told without anticipating how what we’re told, and what power wants, are not the same thing.
This shift isn’t just about working from home or using Slack; it’s a profound mental and operational change in how we solve problems. In a strange way, this new capability is the fulfillment of one of the key missing pieces to the old anarchist vision - the power to work in concert, in collaboration, across large groups and big spaces, without a leader. Anarchists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries saw the potential, but they didn’t have the tools, and their decentalized, equity-driven visions collapsed under dictators and charismatic leaders.
Learning how to live and work in decentralized networks may be the biggest challenge of our lifetimes. So many of us have learned nothing so far except for doing what someone else tells us to do - and now, that not only means helplessness to change our own direction, but it puts us under greater risk than ever of getting scammed by a false prophet. Or worse.
Because pretty much any supposed prophet — even if we’re the prophet ourselves — can’t deliver what’s been promised. It’s all too VUCA for that.
When power is distributed, the responsibility is distributed, too—and that’s the part that makes most of us squirm. It means we have to own the outcomes, manage the scenarios (from Plan A to Plan D), and stop looking for a “boss” to save us.
It’s a move from being “self-sufficient cowboys” to being interdependent collaborators who understand that our survival depends on the health of the entire ecosystem we’re embedded in. It’s not an easy transition, and our Industrial-era education definitely didn’t prepare us for it, but the payoff is a level of resilience that no hierarchy could ever provide. We’re not just watching change happen; we’re learning to be the ones who shape it.
Here are a few examples of how people like you are doing the work of learning to self-organize right now:
Obran Cooperative: A Worker-Owned Conglomerate
Summary: The Obran Cooperative in Baltimore has established a worker-owned holding company that acquires and supports diverse worker-owned enterprises across the nation to build collective economic power. This project demonstrates self-organization through a “team” approach where multiple businesses collaborate on joint hiring, purchasing, and branding to improve sales and sustainability.
The Green Belt Project (Pau, France)
Summary: This initiative organizes small-scale farmers into a supportive “hive” network that provides affordable land, shared technical advice, and direct connections to local markets. It illustrates a move toward decentralized agricultural systems that prioritize collaborative success and lower the financial barriers to entry for new food producers.
Kpop Fans: The International Freedom Force
Summary: Broad networks of Kpop fans have repeatedly used social media platforms to self-organize and mobilize for political and social justice causes, such as impacting political rallies and coordinating mass fundraising for civil rights movements. This movement illustrates how decentralized digital ecosystems can bypass traditional institutional leadership to coordinate mass action and achieve significant real-world influence with breathtaking speed.
