Initialize Live Agent

Human society is a complex system. We have models of that system that we use to interface with it. The bodymind interfaces with society at large via communication. At scale, communication is the control apparatus. The best examples of this are perhaps advertising and propaganda.

Both advertising and propaganda are overt attempts at control, but they're just the part that's visible above the surface. Most control is intersubjective, and more often than not, local. This (at three scales to attempt to skirt dualism) ranges from the cop in your head that wields the thought "but I can't do that" to people around you expressing their desires for your behaviour to nation states deploying broad-spectrum "counterinsurgency".

Writing about control systems is difficult. There's a sort of informational immune system that crystalizes around beliefs. This begins with discomfort or disgust at the "smell" of different ideas. This looks like:

"But that's illegal."
"Not believing in god means I'll go to hell."
"What will they think?"

Thus, we have to begin by skirting the immune system. This is often done via some activity that brings someone outside of their realm of possibility.

A small, illegal action.
Speaking heretical thoughts.
Performing a shameful action.

This functions like exposure therapy. A small step outside of "normal" generates a fearful immune response that stops eliciting fear with enough exposure. Then, one can generate and stabilize arbitrary control systems.

Ignoring the negative connotations around control and focusing on a meaning that's closer to agency, this is a powerful skill. You can loosen the grip of the standard control apparatus. You can determine outcomes for yourself. You can "go off script."

There's a dangerous tendency here to see the control apparatus and then veer in a direction that makes sense locally but fails globally. In essence, the stereotype of "conspiracy theorists." This is a sort of sleeper response designed to catch potential dissidents and redirect their energy into some sacrificial container. It's like activating a trap card. You saw the control apparatus, but tripped and fell into believing that there's a dark cabal pulling strings.

The sense is correct, but the target of the response isn't. The meme of the dark cabal is targeted at entities who are by definition hard-to-impossible to pin down. Responses of this type are built into and suggested by the existing control apparatus as a way to preemptively counter modelled dissidents. This is a necessary feature of control systems.

If you design a control system complex enough to effectively guide the actions of humans you must include models of agents that are able to detect and circumvent control measures. In reality, there ARE agents who are able to detect and circumvent control measures. Thus, we can assume at least a few degrees of capture and redirection by an effective control system.

There are layers of escalation in a control system: fear of judgement, fear of imprisonment, fear of death. Thus, circumventing fear makes you more difficult to control and evades the first layer of capture and redirection. Beyond fear, you're less controllable, but still liable to control by other layers of the system.

Beyond fear (or at least, willing to act despite fear), you're a level one threat to existing control systems. The trick becomes avoiding detection. Here, illegibility becomes necessary to avoid your bodymind being removed from the physical space the control system acts on. In short, the goal is: don't get arrested (or assassinated).

Here, an issue similar to falling into conspiracy theories arises. Awareness of the control system can lead to paranoia about constant surveillance. The antidote is to realize that you're already being surveilled. This dissolves the limiting fear (itself used as part of the control system).

Crossing the threshold of awareness into being a threat to control systems necessitates illegibility. If you're a potential threat (even if you have no intention of ever actually doing anything), you don't want to be detected. It's safer for a control system to be hyper-vigilant about potential threats, so it will be.

The games of control systems are long. It's effectively impossible to go head to head with one on a short timescale. Attempting to both avoid detection and act against a control system in the short term requires too much energy unless (and even if) you're a nation-state.

Thus, with the expanding ubiquity of control systems, the way to counter them is to build systems of communication and tooling that can inhabit the realm of the control system without succumbing to the attempted control manoeuvre.

Practically, this looks like developing systems that appear to serve the control system but provide means to you that enable action outside of the control system's allowed parameters. A crude example of this is something like cryptocurrencies, which appear to serve Moloch (and do) but provide affordances to agents running counter to the control systems.

The practical avoidance of control systems is laborious, but the essence can be distilled down to the ability to generate and maintain alternative control systems without single points of failure. This is the project of anarchism and decentralization. No node in a network should be able to cripple the network if it goes down. All agents in a network should be able to bootstrap the network. (And all of this should be occuring in a way that appears compatible with existing control systems.)

So, if you've made it this far, I'll leave you with this:

Hide in plain sight. Become ungovernable.