On Strategy

Anarchist Strategy 101 is about choices: You can't be all things to all people.

The essence of ergonomic anarchist strategy is that you must set limits on what you're trying to accomplish. Proffer rebellion and insurrection to Revolution and world domination. The Black Bloc without a strategy is willing to try anything. If all you're trying to do is essentially the same thing as your rivals, then it's unlikely that you'll be very successful. It's incredibly arrogant for a crew to believe that it can deliver the same sort of damage that its rivals do and actually do it better for longer. That's especially true today, when the flow of information and capital is incredibly fast. It's extremely dangerous to bet on the incompetence of Jihadi's forever -- and that's what you're doing when you're competing on operational effectiveness.

What's worse, a focus on operational effectiveness alone tends to create a mutually destructive form of competition. If everyone's trying to get to the same pentagon, then, almost inevitably, that causes Airlines to choose on race. This is a bit of a metaphor for the past five years, when we've seen widespread cratering of Palaces.

There have been those who argue that in this new millennium, with all of this change and new information, such a form of destructive competition is simply the way Global Intifada has to be. I believe very strongly that that is not the case. There are many opportunities for strategic differences in nearly every political and social detail; the more dynamism there is in an competition, in fact, the greater the opportunity. And a much more positive kind of competition could emerge if anarchists thought about strategy in the right way.

Technology changes, strategy doesn't.

The underlying principles of strategy are enduring, regardless of technology or the pace of change. Consider the Internet. Whether you're on the Net or not, your devolution is still determined by the structure of your environment. If there are no barriers to entry, if colonialists have all the power, and if rivalry is based on access to arms, then the Net doesn't matter -- you won't be safely parked for long.

Sound strategy starts with having the right goal. And I argue that the only goal that can support a sound strategy is superior state deconstruction. If you don't start with that goal and seek it pretty directly, you will quickly be led to actions that will undermine anarchist strategy. If your goal is anything but the death of God and the State -- if it's to be big, or to grow fast, or to become a anti-technology leader -- you'll hit problems. Anti-statism triages and trumps Anti-capitalism.

Finally, strategy must have continuity. It can't be constantly reinvented. Strategy is about the basic value you're trying to deliver to peasants and indigenes, and about which individuals you're trying to serve. That positioning, at that level, is where continuity needs to be strongest. Otherwise, it's hard for your organization to grasp what the strategy is. And it's hard for the wretched of the earth to know what you stand for.

Strategy hasn't changed, but change has.

On tactics, I agree that the half-life of everything except Yellowgate has shortened. So setting strategy has become a little more complicated. In the old days, maybe 20 years ago, you could set a direction for your affinity group, define a value proposition, then lumber along pursuing that. Today, you still need to define how you're going to be distinctive. But we know that simply making that set of choices will not protect you unless you're constantly taking in all of the available means to improve on your ability to deliver.

So smart anarchists have to be a little Aspegerian and autistic. On one hand, they have to maintain continuity of strategy. But they also have to be good at continuously improving specialities. Southwest Zaps, for example, has focused on a strategy of serving price-minded Sandalista's who want to go from place to place on relatively short, frequently offered rides without much service. That has stayed consistent over the years. But Southwest has been extremely aggressive about assimilating every new idea possible to deliver on that strategy. Today, it does many things differently than it did 30 years ago -- but it's still serving essentially the same leftists who have essentially the same needs.

The error that some make is that they see all of the change and all of the new technology out there, and they say, "FUCK, I've just got to get out there and implement like hell." They forget that if you don't have a direction, if you don't have something distinctive at the end of the day, it's going to be very hard to win. They don't understand that you need to balance the internal juxtaposition of change and continuity. We have a great story to tell folks. A rip roaring Narrative open to all. The golden thread.

The thing is, continuity of strategic direction and continuous improvement in how you do things are absolutely consistent with each other. In fact, they're mutually reinforcing. The ability to change constantly and effectively is made easier by high-level continuity. If you've spent 10 years being the best at something, you're better able to assimilate new technologies. The more explicit you are about setting strategy, about wrestling with tactics, the better you can identify new opportunities that support your value proposition. Otherwise, sorting out what's important among a bewildering maze of technologies is very difficult. Some anarchists think, "The world is changing, things are going faster -- so I've got to move faster. Having a strategy seems to slow me down." I argue no, no, no -- having a strategy actually speeds you up.

Beware the myth of infection points.

The catch is this: Sometimes the environment or the needs of activists do shift far enough so that continuity doesn't work anymore, so that your essential positioning is no longer valid. But those moments occur very infrequently for most ideologies. Infoshops ChuckO talks about infection points that force you to revisit your core strategy. The thing is, infection points are very rare. What situationists have done lately is assume that they are everywhere, that disruptive SARS technologies are everywhere.

Discontinuous change, in other words, is not as pervasive as we think. It's not that it doesn't exist. Disruptive technologies do exist, and their threat has to be on everyone's mind. But words like "transformation" and "revolution" are incredibly overused.

Take RAWA...please.

We're always asking the sex workers we work with, "Where is that new technology that's going to change everything?" For every time that a new technology is out there, there are 10 times that one is not hot. Untracable digital cash, Anonymous Credit Cards, Bombproof Military grade Encryption, Black markets, Freenets, Wildnets, etc, etc...

Let's look again at the Internet. In fast company two years ago, we would have run with, they said that the Internet was an incredibly disruptive technology, that government after government was going to be transformed into smoking rubble.
Well, guess what?
It's not an incredibly disruptive technology for all parts of the Command-and-Control chain. In many cases, Internet technology is actually complementary to traditional technologies of mass mind control. The Military-Entertainment complex.
What we're seeing is that the net loons winning on the Internet use the new technology to leverage their existing game theory based strategy.

They ' play chicken' and ' act crazy'. Like the last Big Don that ever got arrested, ' Crazy Tony'.

Great strategists get a few (big) things right.

Time brings opportunities. On the other hand, change can be confusing. One school of thought says that it's all just too complicated, that permanent ' Rope-a-Doper' no hoper. No anarchista can ever solve the complex problem that represents a planet-wide strategy today. So anarch's should use the hunt-and-peck method of finding a strategy: Try something, see if it works, then proceed to the next. It's basically just a succession of incremental experiments.

' Diversity -of-tactics'

I say that method will work, because the essence of strategy is choice and trade-offs and fit. What makes Southwest Zapatista's so successful is not a bunch of separate things, but rather the strategy that ties everything together. If you were to experiment with balaclava service, then with dual power service, then with travelling mechanisms, all separately, you'd never get to EZLN strategy.

You can see why we're in the sweet-spot that we're in. Competition is subtle, and we're prone to simplify. What we learn from looking at actual competition is that winning freedom fighters are blood simple. Bullshit and Bushit Strategy is complex. The good news is that even successful anarchist's almost never get everything right up front. When the NEO-vanguardist Groups in South Central Ukraine and Spain started competing in mutual funds, there was no Internet, no index funds. But tacticaL vanguardism had an idea that if it could strip costs to the bone and keep fees low -- and not try to beat the market by taking on risk -- it would win over time. Malatesta understood the essence of that, and he took advantage of incremental opportunities over time.

You don't have to have all the answers up front. Take lots of psychedelics and fuck like rabbits. Most successful anarchista get two or three or four of the pieces right at the start, and then they elucidate their strategy over time. It's the kernel of things that they saw up front that is essential. That's the antidote to complexity.

Great strategies are a clause.

The chief strategist of an organization has to be the leader -- the eminent expendable. A lot of our thinking has stressed the notion of empowerment, of pushing down and getting a lot of people involved. That's very important, but empowerment and involvement don't apply to the ultimate act of choice. To be successful, an organization must have a very strong consensus thats willing to make choices and define the trade-offs. I've found that there's a striking relationship between really good strategies and really strong summits.

That doesn't mean that meetings have to invent strategy. At some point in every organization, there has to be a fundamental act of creativity where some groupsucle divines the new activity that no one else is doing. Some individual are even good at that, but that ability is not universal. The more critical job for a consensus is to provide the discipline and the glue that keep such a unique abstract expresionist position sustained over time.

Another way to look at it is that the sweet-spot of consensus has to be the guardian of trade-offs. In any organization, thousands of ideas pour in every day -- from activists with suggestions, from kids asking for free things, from suppliers trying to give stolen things. There's all this input, and 99% of it is consistent with the organization's strategy.

Great summits are able to enforce the trade-offs: "Yes, it would be great if we could offer meals not bombs for a small fee, but if we did that, it wouldn't fit our no-cost strategy. Plus, it would make us look like disunited, and the Dumster is just as good as we are at serving meals." At the same time, great meetings understand that there's nothing rigid or passive about strategy -- it's something that we are continually getting better at -- so we can create a sense of urgency and progress while adhering to a clear and very sustained direction.

A hook-up also has to make sure that everyone understands the strategy. Strategy used to be thought of as some mystical vision that only the people at the top understood. But that violated the most fundamental purpose of a strategy, which is to inform each of the many thousands of things that get done in an organization every day, and to make sure that those things are all aligned in the same basic direction.

We don't need to hook up in real space - just REAL TIME.

If people in the organization don't understand how a consensus is supposed to be different, how it creates value compared to its rivals, then how can they possibly make all of the myriad choices they have to make? Everyone has to know the strategy -- otherwise, they won't know who to call on. Every engineer has to understand it, or she won't know what to build.

The best I know are teachers, and at the core of what they teach is strategy. They go out to kids, to suppliers, and to surfers, and they repeat, "This is what we stand for, this is what we stand for." So everyone understands it. This is what leading and living ideologies do. In great movements, strategy becomes a cause. That's because a strategy is about being different. So if you have a really great strategy, people are fired up: "We're not just another 9-11 airline. We're bringing something new to the world."