#title Infrastructure of Attack
#subtitle To Kill and Sustain
#LISTtitle Infrastructure of Attack
#date May 2026
#lang en
#pubdate 2026-10-21T03:01:43.213Z
#author Schplinky Donkanov
Whatever is most enduring is ultimately overtaken in the ceaseless transformation of things.
*Roger Ames*
In the cycle of life and death,
One third are the companions of life,
One third are the companions of death,
And one third again are people who, because of their preoccupation with staying alive,
Move toward the execution ground with each and every step.
Now why do they do this?
Simply because of their preoccupation with staying alive.
I have heard it said that those who are good at holding on to life
Do not steer clear of rhinos and tigers when travelling in the hills,
And do not hide behind armor and shields when entering the fray.
For the rhino finds nowhere to gore,
The tiger nothing to sink its claws into,
And the soldier nothing into which he can lodge his blade.
How can this be so?
Because there is not a whiff of the execution ground about them.
*Daodejing, Ch. 50*
*** Coping With the Trouble
I started writing this zine with one question in mind: “If the state is toppled, where the fuck am I getting my hormones?” Its stupid to think that making a stateless world would force me to detransition. As things currently stand, it’s also true. While there is some infrastructure in this country for drug production, according to the government “80% of the activities required to make the drugs sold in Canada are conducted in other countries”[1]. This means that even if the productive infrastructure we have was seized and operated correctly, being cut off from the global corporate-state apparatus would make acquiring the materials to manufacture many medicines difficult, if not impossible.
Technology is not neutral. This is as true of bio-tech as it is of tear gas and security cameras. The pathways through which we have developed modern medicine rely on resources found halfway across the globe, extracted through violence and exploitation. Getting beyond this state of affairs asks us to not only destroy what exists here and now, *we also need to create technology that is aligned with our values and capable of meeting our needs*. Only we can create the structures to do that effectively. And while doing so will not free us, it can enable us to confront this world more effectively and expand what we are capable of as the global supply chain collapses.
When I started writing this zine, I wasn’t expecting to try and take a sober look at how climate change is likely to shape our world over the next 25 years. I’m not an expert, I don’t know the future, and frankly, thinking about it too much gives me the scaries. I, like most people, get all weird and wide-eyed and would much prefer to simply crawl into a hole, take a very long nap, and get on with living life as best as we can manage in this hellworld. Unfortunately for us, I don’t think we have that luxury. Continuing to stumble blind and unprepared towards an uncertain future is probably the wrong choice to make. That said, I think that the mind-boggling fear and uncertainty that arises in us when we look too closely is paralyzing and unhelpful. I think we should glance at it just long enough to properly inform our strategies, tactics, and actions, and then go dance and love and fuck and destroy until we come back to the presence of our bodies and can keep moving. My hope is that this zine encourages us to do just that.
It seems to me that we have about 25 years to invent answers to many difficult questions before the time and resources we need to create those answers becomes much more scarce. I don’t see this as reason to despair, I see this as fuel for joyous experimentation in living and destruction alongside those I love. I see this as an opportunity to train. An opportunity to cultivate the knowledge and skills that will give us an edge in a changing terrain, and to find pleasure in the novel ways we will find to take our freedom. The way ahead might be murky, but together we can find paths forward that this world has not yet seen.
A better world is possible. We choose to make it so.
*** Principles for living and fighting
The point of this zine is to argue that our struggle can develop a stronger offence if we put more energy into developing technologies that align with our values, and support us in adapting to the unpredictable effects of climate change. I believe that we not only need to be capable of hitting the state harder, we also need to be able to meet our needs without relying on state and corporate structures.
If technology isn’t neutral, then much of the technology we depend on has capitalist and authoritarian values embedded within them. The way we produce life-saving medicine for instance, depends on tightly controlled infrastructure made possible by fossil fuel extraction and global systems of exploitation. It also gives whoever controls that infrastructure immense power over those who depend on the medicine they produce. When power dynamics are created through the possession of essential material structures, power cannot be redistributed by simply taking control of that infrastructure. In my view, the clearest way to redistribute this power is by creating decentralized infrastructure, enabling people to create multiple lines of access to their medicine, or acquire what they need to make it themselves.
Creating the technology to do this would not only enables us to produce HRT, adrenaline, and so on, but also ought to provide us with reliable access to antibiotics, pain killers, abortion pills, and other medicines that are essential to our survival. In taking away the state’s ability to cut off our access to the things we need, we make ourselves more capable of breaking away from the state entirely. I believe this to be true for a staggering amount of the basic things we rely on; technology that is an extension of our values will make us more capable of materializing those values.
This begs the question though, what are ‘our’ values? Obviously, I can’t give a comprehensive answer to that question, we all need to choose our values for ourselves and many people hold values contrary to my own. However, I’d like to try and articulate the values I see being lived by those with whom I share affinity[2] and am lucky to call my friends. I believe our values are made real through our living. They are born in our day-to-day lives, as we do our best to make sure that everyone gets their needs met, and support each other in developing our strengths and skills. They become real as we strike against the forces of domination that we hate and melt back into the shadows when our work is done. To me these values appear as five interdependent principles: *liberation, self-management, ecological harmony, adaptability, and permanent conflictuality*.
*Liberation* means that we strive for each person to be able to choose for themselves what it means for them to live well, and to be supported in pursuing the way of living that they most desire, so long as it does not harm others. This means freedom from the forces of coercion, domination, and denigration which currently define our lives, such as racism, the state, wage labor, compulsory gender, and so on. It requires each person’s basic needs to be met, and to be given support in pursuing what they, and others with whom they share affinity, decide to be of value. For me, liberation acts as a guiding light for my living and fighting, as it appears to me as a goal worth dying for that can never be won by mere concessions.
*Self-management* means that the people embedded within the structures that shape their lives have direct control over those structures, both in terms of what they aim at, the way they work, and whether or not they continue to exist. Our structures and collectives are formed on the basis of affinity, and strive to uphold the well-being of the individuals that advocate for them. Decisions are made collectively by those within the structure, and in my view, people ought to have decision-making power in proportion to how impacted they are by a particular decision. Workers decide how to run their workplaces, patients control what happens to their bodies and what treatments they pursue, and so on.
*Ecological harmony* requires that our behaviors and our systems of production have a positive or neutral impact on the ecology in which they are embedded. It recognizes that our well-being as humans depends on the well-being of the environment and all other non-human forms of life. It therefore places us in opposition to extractivist modes of production and ways of being.
*Adaptability* recognizes that our survival and flourishing depend on acting and organizing in response to our immediate material and social conditions, and that there will never be a ‘one-size-fits-all’ solution to meeting our needs and living well. We cannot afford to be dogmatic or conceited in assuming we have the ‘right’ answers about what we ought to do. In my view, adaptability recognizes that change is the one constant in this world. That our living and fighting will always be experimental, taking the form that best fits our circumstances and abandoning that form when it no longer fits.
*Permanent conflictuality* is the recognition that there will always be forces that attempt to concentrate power and create coercive social hierarchies, meaning our fight against them needs to be embedded as a permanent feature of our cultures, social organizations, and living. It acknowledges that forces of domination are both subtle and overt, appearing in the structures that shape our lives and in our most intimate relationships. It views the concentration of power as a process that reproduces itself, so that we cannot realize liberation through means that conflict with our ends, such as by establishing a state or acting as a vanguard. It also implies that there will always be external, coercive forces that seek to subjugate or neutralize us, so we need to be capable of the violence necessary to defend ourselves, and deter attacks against us.
Each of these principles work together and reinforce each other. Liberation and self-management are sustained through permanent conflictuality’s fight against the concentration of power, and adaptability’s resistance to stagnation. Ecological harmony meanwhile, ensures that the structures we build aren’t destructive of ourselves or others. Together they aim to form holistic systems and cultures that create the conditions for our flourishing. We realize our principles in our day-to-day lives and relationships, and our struggle against the state and capital. I think that if we want to effectively materialize our principles, it will be helpful to establish a framework for thinking about our fight. To this end the next section will develop a notion of offence that I hope will be of use in thinking about how we might defeat the state.
*** What is offence?
**** Materializing our principles
Before we discuss offense I need to define what I mean by force. *A force is a process that exerts consistent influence on the state-of-affairs{1} in a particular culture, sub-culture, or physical area.* Singular forces often have wide impacts on both the social and material world, but they tend to primarily act in one domain or the other. For example, a hurricane is primarily a material force, whose impact on the material conditions of a particular area may significantly influence the social world in that area. The social impacts of the hurricane are downstream from the material impacts, so the hurricane’s influence on the social world can be considered a secondary effect. Other forces such as ideologies or social trends primarily act on the psycho-social world. They influence patterns of human thought, perception, and action, which eventually cause people to act in ways that change material conditions. When a social force aims at organizing the social and material world according to their principles and desired outcomes, I consider them to be a political force.
{1} A state-of-affairs is the complete material, social, or ecological context of a specified area, entity, or group at a particular point in time. It is the objective condition of a set of things at a particular point in time, regardless of anyone’s knowledge or perception of it.
I see offence as the means by which political forces realize their principles, organizing social and material conditions with the goal of weakening opposing forces and solidifying their influence. In my view, offence is made possible by the ability to attack and the ability to sustain. Attack is the active disruption, destruction, or outmaneuvering of the forces that would keep us from bringing our desires and principles into material reality. Sustain is the force’s underlying structure of material and social support that maintains its internal functioning, and ability to attack and exert social influence. It is the force’s ability to consistently acquire the resources needed to effectively maintain its capacity and influence.
Let’s go over a few examples to clarify this framework. If we use a fist-fight as a metaphor, attack is your ability to cause physical damage, and to use your environment to your advantage. Sustain is your stamina, enabling you to continue attacking your opponent until they’re out of the fight. In a traditional military conflict, the ability to attack over a prolonged period of time is only possible if there is a consistent flow of all the resources needed to keep one’s force capable of attack, such as food, ammunition, and medicine. While the ability to hit hard is obviously important, sustain is the base from which a force builds and exercises its power. Strong support structures make more complex and flexible forms of attack and influence possible, as a force’s access to resources and technologies multiplies means of pursuing action. For this reason, if one intends to weaken an opposing force it is generally necessary to target their support structure.
For our context, we might think of attack as our ability to cause serious disruptions to the mechanisms of the state and the flow of resources that keep them functioning, and sustain as our networks that support our ability to act, recover, and exert influence. Sustain includes the relationships of affinity that we build together, the third-spaces that bring us together, the cultural practices that bring people in and minimize risk, and our ability to scrounge together the resources we need to execute our actions.
The exact form that a force’s offence takes is shaped by the principles that force seeks to realize. For us, that means that the way we attack and the way we sustain ourselves ought to help us create conditions that bring liberation, self-management, ecological harmony, adaptability, and permanent conflictuality into reality. As much as is possible, our means should be consistent with our ends. Just as we cannot reach a stateless society by establishing a ‘revolutionary’ state, we are unlikely to be able to realize our principles by significantly deviating from them.
**** Cultivating a stronger offence
Before moving forward, I think it might be a good time to clarify the difference between offence and defense as I see it. Whereas offence aims at realizing an objective by neutralizing an opposing force or bypassing them entirely, defense prioritizes preventing the loss of something, such as territory, resources, respectability, etc. Let’s demonstrate the difference between offensive and defensive approaches by examining the struggle for trans health care. An offensive approach will likely focus on bypassing the institutional medical and legal framework entirely, perhaps creating networks of DIY hormone production and distribution, and building underground support from sympathetic doctors. A defensive approach struggles for ‘equality’ within the existing legal and medical institution, it generally concerns itself with protecting trans rights, and attempting to shape public and state perception of trans people as legitimate. Because the defensive approach must gain state and public approval, it generally becomes focused on preventing the loss of ‘respectability’ in the eyes of those outside the force. This usually devolves into policing the group they seek to protect. In this case, the defensive approach tries to achieve a material outcome but only acts on the social world, whereas the offensive approach acts directly on the material world to change material conditions. Often, prioritizing the prevention of loss puts forces in dialogue with their opposition so that they can demand the opposing force stop their attack. In doing so, defensive approaches make themselves amenable to concessions and compromise from opposing forces, leading to implicit reformism even if the force claims to hold radical (or even revolutionary) values.
In my view, resistance movements in the US and Canada have struggled to find a clear means of adopting offensive stances since the rise of neoliberalism and the global supply chain. Before the outsourcing of production from the ‘western’ imperial core, it was much easier to disrupt the flow of resources that keep capital and the state functioning. When one’s extraction and production of essential resources is largely domestic, labor strikes and attacks on logistical structures are able to deal significant damage to the state, as action at scale is able to essentially cut off the state’s lifeblood. In a globalized economy however, the flow of essential resources from many external sources makes it significantly more difficult to cause serious disruptions to the flow of essential resources. When combined with the stripping away of labor protections, the dominance of the spectacle in daily life, the massive increase in surveillance, and the impoverishment of the political imagination, we have been left without a clear means by which we can effectively pursue offence.
It seems to me that if we want to take a more effective stance, we need to increase our ability to actually damage the underlying forces we oppose and replace their influence with our own. In my view our best defense is likely to be a strong offense, stopping projects before they proliferate, and making the state and capital afraid (or at least hesitant) to pursue projects we oppose. Before we explore potential means for building out our attack and sustain, I’d like to first explore how our context is likely to shift as climate change intensifies, as this will shape the efficacy of different technologies, tactics, and strategies that we might adopt.
*** Accounting for climate change
Based on current climate data and the way changing temperatures are likely to impact industrial production, I believe we can expect the global supply chain to fail within the next 25 years or so. Theoretically, this would force the US and Canada to switch back to a primarily domestic supply chain to secure essential resources, significantly increasing our ability to threaten the state by disrupting their flow and manufacturing. I think that if we begin preparing now, the creation of permanent autonomous zones across turtle island will be increasingly possible. Before we move further with that though, let’s get the data out of the way so we can move on to the more interesting stuff.
With each passing year, the felt impacts of climate change become more and more pronounced within our daily lives. Within the next 5–10 years we will likely have passed 1.5°C[3] of warming, and will have exceeded the 2° mark by 2050[4]. As we approach the 2° we can expect: #quote([agricultural and ecological droughts ... in Europe, Africa, Australasia and North, Central and South America (medium to high confidence).... [intensified] tropical cyclones and/or extratropical storms (medium confidence), and increases in aridity and fire weather (medium to high confidence). Compound heatwaves and droughts become likely more frequent, including concurrently at multiple locations (high confidence)[5]])
This is likely to create a series of multi-pronged, cascading crises across the globe. Between the threat that natural disasters pose to infrastructure, the disruption of industrial agriculture due to drought, and increasing conflict over essential resources like petroleum and water, the global economic situation is likely to shift drastically[6].
Logistically, the machinery of industrial production and extraction will become increasingly difficult to maintain across the world. Increases in heat not only pose health risks to the workers that run the machinery (particularly in factories)[7], but the machinery itself will be significantly impacted by heat stress.[8] The rising temperature will cause productive output to decrease[9] as machinery overheats and breaks more frequently,{2} creating an increased demand for a wide range of replacement parts whose manufacturers will be suffering the same conditions. If demand cannot be met, there is likely to be a downward spiral where industrial machinery will not be able to be repaired quickly enough to maintain the functioning of the system of production as a whole.
{2} One impact of extreme heat is the thinning of oils used as industrial lubricants. In order to reduce friction lubricants need to maintain certain levels of thickness, but fluids become thinner as they heat up. When dealing with extreme temperatures many lubricants fail to stay optimally thick, increasing the friction and wear on the lubricated parts.
Factories aren’t the only site of disruption however, extractive machinery such as oil wells are particularly vulnerable to heat stress and natural disasters. If part breakage or weather based disruptions stop the flow of oil, restarting production is incredibly expensive as oil pumps can’t be repaired, they need to be replaced entirely and there is no guarantee that installing a new pump will actually succeed in resuming the flow of oil.[10] As the temperature increases and such disruptions become more common, oil and gas supply and production are likely to struggle, causing mass petroleum shortages that impact every area of industrial life. This is particularly an issue for the maintenance of the global shipping which serves as the backbone of the globalized economy. Worsening matters, the vast majority of essential industrial production relies on access to vast amounts of fresh water, which will be an increasingly scarce and contested resource, further suppressing the supply of essential goods. Massive disruptions to the shipping of oil and other essential resources is likely to have widespread and unpredictable economic consequences. While there’s a chance that the global supply chain could find some way to adapt to these conditions, system-wide failure seems like a significantly more likely outcome to me.
Even if these conditions don’t cut Canada and the USA off from the global supply chain completely, the state will need to transition to a primarily domestic supply-chain to ensure that it has the resources necessary to sustain itself. Canada is particularly well-positioned to maintain industrial production and state power due to its vast reserves of oil and fresh water, but it will also become increasingly vulnerable to internal disruptions as local infrastructure of extraction, production, and transportation become its lifeblood. Significant disruptions to oil wells, refineries, railroads, mines, or semi-conductor plants are likely to result in a cascade of compounding issues throughout the supply chain. I believe this will incentivize the state to put significant resources into minimizing threats to the domestic supply chain, resulting in increased surveillance and repression. However, should we adapt well enough to outmaneuver this repression, it is possible that we can build a strong enough offence that we can make the state hesitant to act against us entirely for fear of reprisals.
I think such conditions make it significantly more viable for us to establish permanent autonomous zones (particularly in rural areas) where we can work towards materializing our principles and becoming capable of choking out the state entirely. However, given our commitment to aligning our means and ends with our values, we need to choose the technologies we adopt carefully, so we don’t become reliant on tech and systems that we ultimately want to destroy. I therefore want to sharpen our understanding of technology as a manifestation of the values and conditions that underlie its invention and production, before getting into the specific tech that can support our goals.
*** What is technology?
In my view, technology refers to *any means constructed to make individuals or collectives capable of achieving a desired end.* For example, bows were invented to make individuals capable of killing from a distance, cars were created to increase the speed with which an individual can move from point A to point B, and so on. Aside from physical objects, technologies can also be: concepts, methods, modes of social organization, tactics, strategies, and so on. An example of non-physical technology is decision-making processes; consensus, majority rule, or authoritarian decree are all constructed means by which we achieve the end of social coordination and action.
Just as our means, ends, and actions are shaped by the values and principles we hold, so too is our technology an extension of our values and principles. If what we value as a culture is the accumulation of physical wealth at any cost, the technologies our culture invents will be means for extracting everything possible from the world around us, regardless of the horrors that creates. In being extensions of principles and values, technologies are inherently ethical and can never be considered value neutral. Furthermore, just as we can argue about the ethics of different actions, we can argue about the ethics of particular technologies based on the end the tech seeks to realize, and the impact its production and use has on the rest of the world[11].
Another essential feature of technologies is that they stack, with new tech depending on the existence and functioning of older tech. When technologies stack, particular technologies becomes load-bearing, in the sense that the particular technology directly enables the development of a vast range of other technologies. Take for example, how the generation and control of electricity is a pre-requisite for nearly all the technology we depend on today. It becomes load-bearing in the sense that it creates a dependence relation, and if that technology disappeared, all the technology stacked on top of it would fail[12].
Because stacks are chains of dependence, we can locate tech at different ‘heights’ within a stack. In this way of thinking, lower technologies are dependent on fewer load-bearing technologies, and are usually less complex than technologies higher in the stack. Similarly, while higher technologies significantly expand our capacities, they also depend on many load-bearing technologies. In this way, the terms high-tech and low-tech simply mark out positions within a stack, each carrying their own strengths and weaknesses are not moral categories in which high-tech would be considered superior to low-tech, it just locates their position within a stack. They are not moral categories wherein a higher technology is thought to be inherently superior to a lower technology, and many low technologies can be incredibly sophisticated. In terms of the pragmatic considerations of different technologies, lower tech has several advantages in that it tends to be more reliable and repairable, and depends on fewer components that are highly refined and specialized.
Taken altogether, if technologies are extensions of the values that underlie them, the tech that will be best suited to our politics won’t rely on other extractivist and exploitative technologies for their use and manufacture, and will be immediately useful in strengthening our ability to attack and sustain. To the extent that we remain dependent on technologies that rely on systems that are opposed to our principles, we will be structurally forced into complicity or the reproduction of those systems.{3} Although I think producing tech that doesn’t rely on oil ought to be an ideal guiding our development, I also think that is a goal that will need to be worked towards over many decades. In the meantime though, we should prioritize adopting and developing tech that is immediately useful for building our attack and sustain, while aiming to align that tech with our values as much as possible.
{3} In a more developed account, I would like to be able to make a finer-grain distinction about why some technologies fit into multiple value systems while others don’t. For instance, it would be helpful to explain why firearms, electricity, and most medical technologies are compatible with our movements, but oil refineries and nukes probably aren’t.
*** Establishing permanent autonomous zones
While we should continue escalating our conflict with the state wherever possible, I believe we should also be preparing to establish permanent autonomous zones where we can experiment with our living and begin to structurally realize our principles. I think that doing so is a necessary step towards not just destroying the state, but outliving it. We need to have our own spaces where we can test different systems and technologies, so we can find out what actually supports our efficacy and living well. In this section I’d like to identify some of the capacities I think we’ll need to acquire to develop an offence capable of realizing our own zones.
First, I think we’ll need to *develop an attack capable of causing severe damage to industrial and state infrastructure, and neutralizing coercive forces that try to take autonomous zones*. The state has superior force and firepower, so it seems to me prudent to become capable of dissuading the state from attacking us, by making our affinity groups capable of causing significant economic damage when acting independently. We have the advantage of functioning as a decentralized network that can attack anywhere, anytime, making it nearly impossible for the state to predict our actions and prevent attacks entirely. The more damage each individual affinity group is capable of, the greater the economic consequences of multiple affinity groups attacking at once. Should this capacity become strong enough, we may eventually become capable of paralyzing the flow of resources that sustain the state, deterring the state from pursuing projects contrary to our interests, and perhaps becoming able choke it out entirely.
Gaining this capability seems to be feasible right now, as developments in current tech have vastly increased the damage that small groups acting alone can do. The most obvious (and probably versatile) example of this is the use of drones, as small groups can now engage in aerial reconnaissance and long-range explosive delivery, which used to only be possible with a massive military structure and highly technical knowledge.
One example of this significant shift in capability can be seen in Ukraine’s ‘operation spider web’, which took place in June of 2025. Using 150 consumer-grade drones, the Ukrainians were able to project power far beyond what was initially thought to be possible. The goal was to cripple Russia’s ability to launch and coordinate long-range missile strikes, destroying essential aircraft and infrastructure far from the Ukrainian border. To illustrate their reach, one target was 4000km away — approximately the distance between Los Angeles and Toronto. The kamikaze drones themselves costed between \$600-\$1000 USD each, with payloads costing \$200. With \$180,000 the Ukrainians were able to destroy \$7,000,000,000 (7 billion) of Russian assets, some of which are completely irreplaceable.[13]
Theoretically, generalizing{4} the capacity to assemble and use drones throughout our movement would vastly expand what our affinity groups are capable of, and this is true of other emerging technologies as well. Take for example the Four Thieves Vinegar Collective’s work on making DIY drug production possible. At the moment, drug production is highly centralized, meaning that in a scenario where we can no longer import drugs, whoever controls the productive infrastructure controls what kind of medicine is available. Even if a sympathetic force seized the means of drug production, the logistical difficulties of transporting drugs presents another major issue. Drug production in Canada is almost entirely concentrated around the regions of Toronto and Montreal, meaning that distributing medicine to autonomous zones on either end of the east and west coast would require the maintenance of a supply chain stretching across 9,984,670 km.[14] Creating widespread infrastructure for decentralized drug production would diffuse this power imbalance, giving us the capacity to make the medicine we need wherever and whenever we need it, bypassing the state-corporate structure entirely.
{4} Generalizing is a tactic that refers to deliberately spreading knowledge, practices, and skills throughout a broader movement, such that many participants possess them. Operational security practices are an example of a skill-set that has been generalized in our milieu over the last decade or so.
Such tech could play a huge role in building the sustain we need to have reliable access to the resources we need to attack, while also *meeting our other needs without relying on state and corporate infrastructure.* I think this should be an essential strategic priority if we want to establish permanent autonomous zones, as we will remain subordinated to the powers-that-be if we remain dependent on the state-corporate structure for food, medicine, and other essential goods. Failure to reduce our dependence on the state would also greatly inhibit our capacity to attack, as disrupting the flow of resources within the economy could amount to shooting ourselves in the foot, cutting us off from the resources we need to maintain our presence in a given area.
I think infrastructure projects like this can serve a dual function in building our sustain, as they can support our ability to *expand and solidify our influence within the locales of our choice.* It seems intuitive to me that we should act on a material level in a way people can feel if we want anarchism to break its sub-cultural containment. So for instance, if we get a DIY medicine production operation off the ground and begin distributing hormones to trans folks that lack access, we would establish ourselves as a material presence within that community, actively improving their quality of life. Even if we keep such projects clandestine and small-scale, building these networks can plant broader seeds of support for our movements, as they directly demonstrate the material feasibility and desirability of our goals.{5} In general, I think that becoming capable of demonstrating our ability to meet people’s needs would be immensely valuable for building the general social consensus and legitimacy that we’ll probably need to maintain autonomous zones.{6}
{5} I believe this could be particularly useful for building relationships in rural and underserved communities, and supporting land back projects.
{6} I take legitimacy here to mean generalized support within a locale for organizing the social structure along our principles. I do think this will be important for maintaining permanent autonomous zones, especially in areas with larger populations.
That said, the intention of our infrastructure projects shouldn’t be to soften the experience of collapse or to try and replace the state. Rather, its to provide ground for experimenting with different ways of developing and self-managing the infrastructure we will need to establish and scale up to maintain an autonomous zones. One example of why such experimentation is necessary, is that scaling up infrastructure will likely require integrating people into our systems that are not deeply committed to anarchist principles, and may want to concentrate power and introduce hierarchies. Creating systems capable of managing and combatting this tendency is part of taking permanent conflictuality seriously, and represents one social technology that we should begin developing now to increase our resiliency later. Doing so should improve the reliability and ease of deploying these systems down the road, helping us materialize our principles in concrete structures under challenging conditions.
Another strength of DIY infrastructure projects is that they can act as a broad base to weave together a wide range of struggles at once. For example, most organizing that focuses on a particular identity group or a specific area of concern, tends to direct energy towards a relatively narrow niche of projects that don’t support struggles beyond that niche. However, infrastructure projects like DIY drug production bring many bring the efforts of many interests together under a single umbrella. For example organizers who focus on trans issues, reproductive justice, disability justice, medical autonomy, and so on can all directly benefit from one project. Uniting such a range of interests under one umbrella supports the broader influence of anarchist organizing and concerns, while directing energy that might otherwise go towards defense towards a project that supports our capacity to build autonomy and defy the state.
Such projects may also be one of our strongest means of supporting our comrades around the globe, especially if we approach development from an open-source framework adapted to our particular needs.[15] Ideally, providing clear blueprints, technical procedures, and organizational structures can support comrades around the globe in accessing and adapting new tech for building their attack and sustain in their specific context. As we collectively refine our value-aligned technologies and new versions proliferate, the efficacy and adaptability of our projects may substantially increase. Experimenting within a wide range of contexts, each with their own challenges and restrictions, also makes it likely for us to find new routes to creating workable tech with whatever resources are immediately available. The problems we’re trying to tackle are extremely difficult, and I think sustained international efforts are our most likely means for realizing our ends.
*** Specialization and technical knowledge
In all the examples listed above, building out our offence requires us to gather specialized knowledge and skills that can make us capable of adapting to unpredictable circumstances, and push value-aligned technologies forward. This implies that our ability to strengthen our offense is directly connected to the capabilities of those that share our ends, and so the need for individuals to pursue specialization and generalize their knowledge should become a key area of focus over the next few decades.[16] We are living in a time of relative political stability and economic prosperity; as we have seen, this is likely to change as climate change intensifies. This means that we are currently in a uniquely strong position for acquiring specialized knowledge and skills, we have the time, leisure, and institutional support to gather the expertise that will be invaluable later. We have a pressing need for more anarchist engineers and doctors, combat specialists and counter-surveillance developers. Skill-sets that are difficult to acquire and can directly influence the trajectory of our projects will be deeply valuable, and I think pursuing them should be a priority.
That said, building a comprehensive sustain demands that we also look beyond the obvious, as we will need skilled practitioners in a wide range of fields and practices to develop a secure foundation. We need to be able to heal our bodies and minds, experiment with different systems of food production, clothe ourselves, and distribute our goods. Everyone has their unique talents and interests that can be placed within the context of our collective needs, struggles, and projects, such that they can leverage their individual development in ways that contribute to our collective capacities. As we choose the knowledge and skills we want to cultivate as individuals, we can consider how those skills can be used to support our attack and sustain.
*** Fusing high and low tech
In this last section, I’d like to return to the idea of the technological stack to propose an ideal for guiding our technological development. Given that we will eventually be forced to adapt to a world without oil, I think we should aim at *approximating the capabilities of high technologies with the lowest tech possible*, that is, developing tech that makes us capable of meeting our needs and solidifying our offense without relying on petroleum at any point in our technology’s production or use. I take it as given that oil is finite and that its extraction is based on processes contrary to our values. If that is true and we’re serious about wanting to build a world aligned with our principles, then abandoning oil seems to me like a logical necessity. Just as our current tech is shaped by our needs and material constraints, I believe that accepting the disappearance of oil is acknowledging a constraint that will inevitably arrive, and can prepare us to act more effectively in the future.
I don’t think that means simply returning to lower technologies as they once were — we return with the incredibly vast corpus of scientific knowledge that has allowed us to arrive here. Given enough time, I think we can either find new routes for reproducing some modern foundational technologies{7}, or we can revitalize technologies and traditions that have been discarded, such as weaving on the loom. Its also important to remember that the disappearance of oil doesn’t mean the disappearance of electricity as such, but it likely means that we will have significantly less electricity to work with in our day-to-day lives. It’s also possible that once we can no longer depend on the global supply chain for critical minerals, we will begin to discover other value-aligned routes to creating critical components of contemporary tech.
{7} While medical technologies will need to be prioritized, I also don’t want to go back to a world without sub-bass and sampling
Such an approach accepts that the drive to create new technologies is a fundamental part of human nature. In that acceptance, we can redirect our technological development in line with our values. This seems particularly important to me if we take permanent conflictuality seriously. If coercive forces will always inevitably emerge, they will also develop new technologies of empire and civilization that we must be prepared to confront and destroy. If our life-ways acknowledge that now, those of us that are interested can begin building the social structures and offensive tech that will help us adapt before empire reconstitutes itself without oil.
*** Conclusion
So let’s tie everything together, yeah? In this zine, I’ve argued that materially realizing principles of liberation, self-management, ecological harmony, adaptability, and permanent conflictuality would be more feasible if we develop an offence capable of dealing significant economic damage to the state, and sustaining ourselves independently of state and corporate structures. Effectively attacking the state has been very difficult in the context of a globalized economy, however the impacts of climate change will likely force the state to transition back to a domestic supply chain, making economic and state functioning more vulnerable to attack.
Contemporary technologies are vastly increasing what small groups are capable of, both in terms of their attack power and ability to create infrastructure outside of the state. I believe that we should dedicate more resources towards acquiring and developing such technologies and skill-sets, with the goal of being able to declare and hold permanent autonomous zones. Furthermore, because technologies have values embedded in their ends, use, and production, we must develop technologies that allow us to materialize our values without being forced back into reliance on fossil fuels or other systems contrary to our values.
Ideally we should aim at inventing and revitalizing technologies that will eventually allow us to approximate modern capabilities in realms such as medicine, while operating with significantly less electricity.
I see this proposal as less of a coherent plan of action, and more of a general direction for considering how we might build our strength while acknowledging the reality of our changing context. It is, more or less, one person’s educated guess about where things are going and what we can do about it, and I’m interested to see others respond to this analysis and help sharpen it. Regardless, I hope it can stimulate some interesting conversations about how we want to shape our projects and build our offensive capacity.
*** Arming those who outlive us
If we are to acknowledge permanent conflictuality as truly permanent, I think it demands of us that we recognize our impermanence. That we occupy one moment in a line of struggle that existed long before we were born, and that will continue long after we die. As we strive to strike down the forces of domination that surround us, affirming life through destruction and realizing our desires in the present, we should also consider the fighting, living and loving of those that will follow us. How can we give them the tools they need to strike a killing blow that we may never see? To live a freedom that we may never know.
The demand of future generations is not that we sacrifice our lives and desires for their sake. It is that we live our lives and fight our fight as fully and intensely as we can, knowing too that the world does not end with us. In doing so, the bones of our struggle can leave a foundation for those that follow, so they can take their living and fighting far beyond what we can currently imagine.
Long after we die and return to the earth, liberation lives on.
; Endnotes
[1] “Notice of intent to amend the regulations to address health product shortages in Canada”. *Health Canada*, 2024.
[2] “Affinity is ... the knowledge that comrades acquire of each other through action in the realisation of one’s ideas. A glance backwards to allow my comrades to see who I am is reabsorbed by looking forward together into a future in which we build our common project. In other words, we decide to intervene in specific struggles and see what we are capable of. These two moments, the first, let us say, of the knowledge of the individual, and the second, the projectual one of the knowledge of the group intertwine and constitute affinity, allowing the group to be considered to all effects an ‘affinity group’.”
Alfredo, Bonnano. *Insurrectionalist Anarchism*.
[3] “Climate Change 2023 Synthesis Report”. *International Panel on Climate Change*, 2023, pp. 69.
[4] “Climate Change 2023 Synthesis Report”. *International Panel on Climate Change*, 2023, pp. 68, footnote 115.
[5] “Climate Change 2023 Synthesis Report”. *International Panel on Climate Change*, 2023, pp. 69.
[6] “Compound Hot‐Dry Extremes Amplify Disproportionate Climate Risks for Low‐Income Nations”. *Geophysical Rearch Letters*, 2026.
[7] The demand for cooling in both commerical and residential settings will also increase massively, straining the grid to its max without a clear means of generating more power, aside from nuclear energy. If nuclear energy does see a significant increase, the threat of meltdown posed by natural disasters will also rise.
[8] Garimella, Srinivas. Hughes, Matthew. “Machines can’t always take the heat − two engineers explain the physics behind how heat waves threaten everything from cars to computers”. *The Conversation, 2023.*
[9] “Climate Risks in the Industrials Sector”. *UN Environment Program Finance Initiative*, 2023, pp. 45–46.
[10] “Shutting Down Oil Wells, a Risky and Expensive Option”. *Resilience*, Post-Carbon Institute, 2020.
[11] I’m taking a broadly neo-Aristotelian view of ethics here, in which good and bad are understood to be objective qualities that refer to the impact something has on a particular creature’s flourishing, as derived by that creature’s unique structural-functional composition and the characteristic features that facilitate its functioning. For example, the structural-functional composition of a hawk is such that it must hunt other animals to survive, and their primary method of hunting depends on its characteristic features such as the ability to fly, see, strike, and so on. If we clip a hawks wings we have done something bad to the hawk, because we have deprived it of a characteristic feature upon which its good depends. Conversely, if we help a hawk heal a broken wing we have done something good for it because we have restored one of the characteristic features upon which its good depends.
For an introduction see:
“Moral Naturalism”. *The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy*, 2024, section 5. ‘Neo-Aristotelian Naturalism’.
For a more in-depth position see:
Foot, Phillipa. *Natural Goodness*. Oxford University Press, USA, 2001.
[12] To a serious extent, the limits of our technology defines the limits of our world, and because the world we inherit is the only one we have ever known, the presence of the tech we have always lived with becomes taken for granted. This can obscure the real vulnerabilities that exist within our lifeways, as many of the technologies we have grown up with are dependent on the fragile system of global trade.
[13] “How Ukraine’s Operation Spider’s Web” Redefines Asymmetric Warfare”. *Center for Strategic and International Studies*, 2025.
Supplemental information from the author’s interview can be found on the Irregular Warfare podcast.
[14] “Building resilience: Health Canada’s plan to address health product shortages, 2024 to 2028”. Health Canada, 2025.
[15] Open-source protocols are not my area of expertise, but I’ve been told that dominant open-source practices have been largely politically neutered. That said, we can develop our own protocols and systems, perhaps in ways that enable international collaboration while still maintaining a degree of clandestinity.
[16] This is particularly true for younger generations who have not yet chosen an area of specialization. Reframing education within the context of struggle lets people choose pathways based on more than mere interest or career paths. Personally, I would’ve felt much more intrinsically motivated to pursue difficult skill-sets if I had been able to choose what to study with greater collective understanding and political direction.