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1000 results for “quite_adept”
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@wall0159 @WBOrcutt @breadandcircuses
We have quite enough knowledge to get started and adapt, so let's get on it right away. To anyone reading who lacks the knowledge or courage to step up, please do. We'll be there to listen to your ideas, boost your confidence and move forward. We'll make it fun and beautiful. Modesty need not be austere. Rather, we focus on function!
#SocialLearning #LifestyleChange #SustainableLifestyle #SustainableCommunities #MutualAid #CareForEarth #permaculture -
@wall0159 @WBOrcutt @breadandcircuses
We have quite enough knowledge to get started and adapt, so let's get on it right away. To anyone reading who lacks the knowledge or courage to step up, please do. We'll be there to listen to your ideas, boost your confidence and move forward. We'll make it fun and beautiful. Modesty need not be austere. Rather, we focus on function!
#SocialLearning #LifestyleChange #SustainableLifestyle #SustainableCommunities #MutualAid #CareForEarth #permaculture -
@wall0159 @WBOrcutt @breadandcircuses
We have quite enough knowledge to get started and adapt, so let's get on it right away. To anyone reading who lacks the knowledge or courage to step up, please do. We'll be there to listen to your ideas, boost your confidence and move forward. We'll make it fun and beautiful. Modesty need not be austere. Rather, we focus on function!
#SocialLearning #LifestyleChange #SustainableLifestyle #SustainableCommunities #MutualAid #CareForEarth #permaculture -
À Angers, la boule de fort continue de rassembler, en quête de nouveaux adeptes
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(Scroll down for English)
#Sukcesja <--- (tu jesteś)
Odkąd zacząłem widzieć las spoza drzew (około 2019 roku, jak sądzę), spędziłem trochę czasu szukając kompletnego i adekwatnego układu odniesienia, aby ułożyć wszystkie współzależne procesy w coś zrozumiałego. Przeczytałem wówczas parę książek Johna Michaela Greera (ideologicznie różnimy się dość znacznie, ale bardzo cenię jego styl, erudycję i jasne spojrzenie na "ekologię cywilizacji"). Jego inspirująca alegoria, ukazująca ludzkość jako kolonię wiewiórek przy autostradzie, obdarzoną cudem w postaci rozbitego TIRa pełnego orzechów, dała mi do sporo do myślenia.
Przez następne 5 lat starałem się zobaczyć, jak poszczególne aspekty tego, czego doświadczamy teraz, pasują do szerszej perspektywy. Obecnie najbardziej adekwatnym i kompletnym układem odniesienia, jakiego używam, jest katastrofalnie przyspieszona, planetarna, wtórna i endogeniczna sukcesja ekologiczna..
- Sukcesja ekologiczna to wszechobecny proces (czasami bardzo) powolnej wymiany gatunków żyjących w ekosystemie. Jeśli środowisko jest stabilne, może nawet wydawać się, że zatrzymał się na chwilę.
- Wtórna oznacza, że proces ten (ponownie) rozpoczął się w ekosystemie już skolonizowanym, a nie jałowym.
- Endogeniczna oznacza, że impuls wyzwalający proces pochodzi z ekosystemu (w tym przypadku z działalności człowieka), a nie z zewnątrz (uderzenie komety lub coś podobnego).
- Planetarna podkreśla fakt, że doświadczamy zmian wpływających dosłownie na każdy ekosystem i każdy gatunek na Ziemi.
- Przyspieszone tempo tego procesu oznacza, że obecnie istniejące gatunki mają zbyt mało czasu na ewolucyjną (nawet epigenetyczną) adaptację, więc znacznie mniej z nich może uniknąć wyginięcia poprzez dostosowanie lub migrację.Na takim tle wszystkie poszczególne narracje można zmapować jako współzależne podprocesy: zmiany klimatyczne, zanieczyszczenie chemiczne i biologiczne, przekroczenie punktów zwrotnych na planecie, upadek cywilizacji przemysłowej, szczyt zasobów naturalnych itp. itd.
Dlaczego uważam Sukcesję za tak wartościową perspektywę?
- Uwalnia nas od antropocentryzmu. Co do zasady, jeśli nie co do skali, nasz wkład w sukcesję jest taki sam jak SARS-CoV-2, Acanthaster planci, Prymnesium parvum czy królików. Wszyscy jesteśmy w tym razem :wink:
- Obniża dramatyzm. Samo pojęcie sukcesji (poza znaczeniem ekologicznym) implikuje istnienie następców, a więc ocaleńców. Wywołuje znacznie mniej dramatyczne skojarzenia niż załamanie, kryzys czy katastrofa. Mniej dramatyzmu oznacza mniej stresu i łatwiejszy przełom w kierunku akceptacji i sprawczości.
- Łączy nasze myślenie z naukami o środowisku. Nauki ekologiczne opracowały wiele narzędzi do przewidywania i mierzenia zmian w ekosystemach. Korzystając z koncepcji sukcesji, mamy znacznie łatwiejszy dostęp do tych instrumentów.
- Skupia uwagę na ekosystemach. Podobnie jak ekologia społeczna, pokazuje nam drogę do osiągnięcia wszystkiego, czego potrzebujemy (w granicach możliwości) poprzez dbanie o nasze ekosystemy, co jest z natury podejściem zorientowanym na współpracę i wspólnotę. A tego właśnie bardzo potrzebujemy.
The #Succession <--- (you are here)Since I have started seeing the forest from behind trees (around 2019, I guess), I spent some time looking for a complete and adequate frame of reference to arrange all interdependent processes into something comprehensible. I read a book or two by John Michael Greer (we are quite apart, ideologically speaking, but I highly appreciate his style, erudition, and clear view of “civilisations' ecology”).
His inspiring allegory, showing humanity as a colony of chipmunks by the highway, granted with a miracle of a crashed 18-roller full of nuts, gave my thinking quite a shove.Over the next 5 years, I was trying to see, how particular aspects of what we experience now, fit the bigger perspective. As of now, the most adequate and complete frame of reference I found is a catastrophically accelerated, planetary-scale, secondary endogenous ecological succession.
— Ecological succession is a ubiquitous process of (sometimes very) slow replacement of species, living in an ecosystem. If the environment is stable, it may even seem to stop for a while.
— Secondary means that the process (re)started in an ecosystem already colonised, rather than a barren one.
— Endogenous means that the impulse triggering the process comes from within the ecosystem (human activity, in this case), rather than from outside (a cometary impact or such).
— Planetary-scale highlights the fact that we experience changes influencing literally every ecosystem and every species on Earth.
— Accelerated pace of the process means that currently existing species have too little time to adapt in an evolutionary (even epigenetic) way, so much less of them may avoid extinction through adaptation or migration.Against such a backdrop, all particular narratives can be mapped as interdependent subprocesses: climate change, chemical and biological pollution, planetary breakpoints crossed, industrial civilisation collapse, peak natural resources, etc. etc.
Why do I consider The Succession such a valuable frame of reference?
— It deals with anthropocentrism. In principle (if not in scale) our contribution to the succession is equal to these of SARS-CoV-2, Acanthaster planci, Prymnesium parvum or rabbits. We are all in this together :wink:
— It lowers the drama. The very concept of succession (beyond ecology meaning) conveys the notion of successors, thus survivors. It triggers much less dramatic associations than collapse, crisis, or _catastrophe. Less drama means less stress and easier breakthrough towards acceptance and agency.
— It connects our thinking with the body of environmental sciences. Ecology science developed many tools to predict and measure changes in ecosystems. Using a better connected frame of reference, we can access these tools much easier.
— It focuses us on ecosystems. Similarly to social ecology, it shows us the way to achieve whatever we need (and can) through taking care of our ecosystems, which is an inherently cooperative and commons-oriented approach. And this is what we need badly. -
The phrase “AI is eating software” refers to how AI systems are rapidly transforming or even replacing traditional software development and operational processes. This concept mirrors Marc Andreessen’s famous quote from 2011, “software is eating the world,” in which he pointed out how software was becoming central to virtually every industry. Now, AI is beginning to take over many of the roles software has traditionally filled.
Software Eats the World: A Retrospective
When Marc Andreessen famously declared that “software is eating the world,” he was referring to the massive shifts in industries—retail, media, entertainment, telecom, and beyond—driven by software innovation. Companies like Amazon, Netflix, and Spotify transformed sectors by leveraging software to create platforms that scale globally without the physical constraints of traditional businesses.
This transformation was fueled by advancements in computing power, the rise of the internet, and the democratization of software development. Industries that were once anchored by physical goods or real-world services found themselves overtaken by digital solutions. Amazon, for instance, didn’t just replace bookstores with an online catalog—it built an entire infrastructure of software that allows it to sell nearly everything.
AI Eats Software: A New Paradigm
Today, AI is pushing this disruption even further, creating a scenario where AI is not just enhancing software but replacing it. Klarna’s approach of using AI to replace traditional SaaS solutions—from customer service to internal knowledge management—is an example of how AI is moving beyond software augmentation to outright dominance. Klarna’s AI-driven tools are performing tasks that once required dedicated software platforms like Salesforce and Workday, making the need for SaaS systems increasingly obsolete .
Just as Amazon transformed retail with software, AI is now transforming the very structure of how software itself is used, built, and integrated. AI systems like ChatGPT are not just automating code writing but providing dynamic, adaptive, and context-aware solutions that can manage tasks traditionally handled by separate software applications.
From SaaS to AI-First: Klarna’s Transformation
Klarna’s journey offers a glimpse into what an AI-first architecture can achieve. Instead of relying on external SaaS platforms like Salesforce and Workday, Klarna developed internal, AI-driven systems that manage critical operations, such as customer service, marketing, and legal processes.
This approach allows Klarna to integrate generative AI at the core of their operations. For instance, Klarna’s internal AI assistant, Kiki, answers more than 2,000 employee queries daily within seconds, significantly reducing the need for traditional knowledge management systems. Their AI-powered customer service has reduced resolution times from 11 minutes to under 2 minutes, further underscoring the transformative impact of AI on operational efficiency.
What is AI-First Architecture?
An AI-first architecture represents a fundamental shift in how software is designed and developed. Instead of adding AI capabilities to an existing framework, AI is deeply integrated into the system from the ground up, allowing for adaptive, learning-based functionalities that evolve with data.
Here’s what defines an AI-first architecture:
- Core Integration: AI is embedded into the software’s core, making it an essential driver of functionality, insights, and user interaction.
- Adaptive Design: AI models within this architecture are built to learn and adapt, rather than simply execute pre-programmed instructions. This allows the system to adjust to new data and contexts dynamically.
- Comprehensive Components: A typical AI-first system incorporates a Cognitive API Layer, enabling easy integration of AI models, an Autonomous Agent Apps Layer that allows AI to interact with APIs and tools, and Guardrails to manage and optimize AI’s performance.
- Data-Centric Approach: These architectures prioritize the use of data to continuously improve AI models, creating a feedback loop where AI learns from every interaction.
Klarna’s AI-First Components in Action
Klarna’s AI-powered systems extend across various departments:
• Communications: Klarna’s team uses ChatGPT to analyze media sentiment, allowing the company to respond strategically to public perception. This AI-driven solution is faster and more accurate than traditional media monitoring tools. Filippa Bolz, head of communications at Klarna, states: “Media monitoring companies have tried for at least fifteen years to automate ‘sentiment’ analysis but often you’d get better results from blindfolded monkeys throwing darts. The tool we’ve built using ChatGPT has blown our minds! It provides a really objective analysis of each article in a couple of seconds, which helps us ensure we communicate clearly, that it is understood and resonates with each one of our target audiences – rather than bundling them together.”
• Legal: Klarna’s legal department now drafts common contracts using ChatGPT Enterprise, reducing the drafting process from an hour to mere minutes. Instead of starting from scratch, legal teams tweak AI-generated drafts to meet their specific needs. Selma Bogren, senior managing legal counsel at Klarna, states: “The big law firms have had a really great business just from providing templates for common types of contract. But ChatGPT is even better than a template because you can create something quite bespoke. Instead of spending an hour starting a contract from scratch or working from a template, I can tweak a ChatGPT draft in about ten minutes. You still need to adapt it to make it work for your particular case but instead of an hour you can draft a contract in ten minutes.”
Challenges and the Road Ahead
While an AI-first architecture brings unprecedented efficiency, it also poses challenges. Developing custom AI systems requires substantial upfront investment and demands a shift in company culture to ensure that employees are equipped to harness the full power of AI. However, the long-term gains in productivity and cost savings make this approach attractive for enterprises looking to stay competitive.
The Future of AI in Enterprise Tech
Klarna’s strategic shift to an AI-first architecture is a clear indicator of where enterprise technology is headed. As more companies recognize the potential of AI to replace traditional software solutions, the AI-first model will likely become the new standard in industries ranging from fintech to healthcare. This evolution signals a future where AI doesn’t just assist with tasks—it is the software, driving businesses to operate smarter, faster, and more effectively than ever before.
Unlock the Future of Business with AI
Dive into our immersive workshops and equip your team with the tools and knowledge to lead in the AI era.
Get in touch with us -
The phrase “AI is eating software” refers to how AI systems are rapidly transforming or even replacing traditional software development and operational processes. This concept mirrors Marc Andreessen’s famous quote from 2011, “software is eating the world,” in which he pointed out how software was becoming central to virtually every industry. Now, AI is beginning to take over many of the roles software has traditionally filled.
Software Eats the World: A Retrospective
When Marc Andreessen famously declared that “software is eating the world,” he was referring to the massive shifts in industries—retail, media, entertainment, telecom, and beyond—driven by software innovation. Companies like Amazon, Netflix, and Spotify transformed sectors by leveraging software to create platforms that scale globally without the physical constraints of traditional businesses.
This transformation was fueled by advancements in computing power, the rise of the internet, and the democratization of software development. Industries that were once anchored by physical goods or real-world services found themselves overtaken by digital solutions. Amazon, for instance, didn’t just replace bookstores with an online catalog—it built an entire infrastructure of software that allows it to sell nearly everything.
AI Eats Software: A New Paradigm
Today, AI is pushing this disruption even further, creating a scenario where AI is not just enhancing software but replacing it. Klarna’s approach of using AI to replace traditional SaaS solutions—from customer service to internal knowledge management—is an example of how AI is moving beyond software augmentation to outright dominance. Klarna’s AI-driven tools are performing tasks that once required dedicated software platforms like Salesforce and Workday, making the need for SaaS systems increasingly obsolete .
Just as Amazon transformed retail with software, AI is now transforming the very structure of how software itself is used, built, and integrated. AI systems like ChatGPT are not just automating code writing but providing dynamic, adaptive, and context-aware solutions that can manage tasks traditionally handled by separate software applications.
From SaaS to AI-First: Klarna’s Transformation
Klarna’s journey offers a glimpse into what an AI-first architecture can achieve. Instead of relying on external SaaS platforms like Salesforce and Workday, Klarna developed internal, AI-driven systems that manage critical operations, such as customer service, marketing, and legal processes.
This approach allows Klarna to integrate generative AI at the core of their operations. For instance, Klarna’s internal AI assistant, Kiki, answers more than 2,000 employee queries daily within seconds, significantly reducing the need for traditional knowledge management systems. Their AI-powered customer service has reduced resolution times from 11 minutes to under 2 minutes, further underscoring the transformative impact of AI on operational efficiency.
What is AI-First Architecture?
An AI-first architecture represents a fundamental shift in how software is designed and developed. Instead of adding AI capabilities to an existing framework, AI is deeply integrated into the system from the ground up, allowing for adaptive, learning-based functionalities that evolve with data.
Here’s what defines an AI-first architecture:
- Core Integration: AI is embedded into the software’s core, making it an essential driver of functionality, insights, and user interaction.
- Adaptive Design: AI models within this architecture are built to learn and adapt, rather than simply execute pre-programmed instructions. This allows the system to adjust to new data and contexts dynamically.
- Comprehensive Components: A typical AI-first system incorporates a Cognitive API Layer, enabling easy integration of AI models, an Autonomous Agent Apps Layer that allows AI to interact with APIs and tools, and Guardrails to manage and optimize AI’s performance.
- Data-Centric Approach: These architectures prioritize the use of data to continuously improve AI models, creating a feedback loop where AI learns from every interaction.
Klarna’s AI-First Components in Action
Klarna’s AI-powered systems extend across various departments:
• Communications: Klarna’s team uses ChatGPT to analyze media sentiment, allowing the company to respond strategically to public perception. This AI-driven solution is faster and more accurate than traditional media monitoring tools. Filippa Bolz, head of communications at Klarna, states: “Media monitoring companies have tried for at least fifteen years to automate ‘sentiment’ analysis but often you’d get better results from blindfolded monkeys throwing darts. The tool we’ve built using ChatGPT has blown our minds! It provides a really objective analysis of each article in a couple of seconds, which helps us ensure we communicate clearly, that it is understood and resonates with each one of our target audiences – rather than bundling them together.”
• Legal: Klarna’s legal department now drafts common contracts using ChatGPT Enterprise, reducing the drafting process from an hour to mere minutes. Instead of starting from scratch, legal teams tweak AI-generated drafts to meet their specific needs. Selma Bogren, senior managing legal counsel at Klarna, states: “The big law firms have had a really great business just from providing templates for common types of contract. But ChatGPT is even better than a template because you can create something quite bespoke. Instead of spending an hour starting a contract from scratch or working from a template, I can tweak a ChatGPT draft in about ten minutes. You still need to adapt it to make it work for your particular case but instead of an hour you can draft a contract in ten minutes.”
Challenges and the Road Ahead
While an AI-first architecture brings unprecedented efficiency, it also poses challenges. Developing custom AI systems requires substantial upfront investment and demands a shift in company culture to ensure that employees are equipped to harness the full power of AI. However, the long-term gains in productivity and cost savings make this approach attractive for enterprises looking to stay competitive.
The Future of AI in Enterprise Tech
Klarna’s strategic shift to an AI-first architecture is a clear indicator of where enterprise technology is headed. As more companies recognize the potential of AI to replace traditional software solutions, the AI-first model will likely become the new standard in industries ranging from fintech to healthcare. This evolution signals a future where AI doesn’t just assist with tasks—it is the software, driving businesses to operate smarter, faster, and more effectively than ever before.
Unlock the Future of Business with AI
Dive into our immersive workshops and equip your team with the tools and knowledge to lead in the AI era.
Get in touch with us -
But you'd have to share the credit (and the outfit) with a partner.
To keep all the attention (and probably the cover of Locus) for yourself, maybe adapt something similar from my favorite recent artwork, a 1957 painting by the great Catalan surrealist Remedios Varo that's now in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Notice the tiny unicycle: quite handy (well, footy) for those fatiguingly interminable Worldcon hallways.
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New release of https://thi.ng/genart-api, a modular cross-platform API/SDK for browser-based computational/algorithmic/generative art projects, helping to reduce artists' efforts to adapt work for different art platforms/environments/uses/workflows.
Main new v0.18.0 additions:
- The param editor reference implementation now groups parameters by their declared group and sorts them by given order (both optional)
- The `@genart-api/adapter-layer` package supports adaptations/translations for more param types, incl. vectors, which are not yet natively supported by that platform. E.g. vectors will be transparently represented as multiple, separate numeric params on the platform side, but your artwork is blissfully unaware of this and still only would deal with vectors. The platform adapter does all the reconcilation and handling of param changes...
- Started adding tests
- Updated API docs & readme'sAs always, feedback highly appreciated — this project is in active development...
I'm aware, the target audience for this larger project is quite limited, but the benefits are real (and palpable!), not just for artists in this field (but especially for them!)... I'll do my best to illustrate the (recurring) problems being solved here, demystify some of the concepts and squeeze in recording a short(ish) video showing how to develop a small project from scratch using this system/setup and then repurpose it and show related tools still in development...
#GenArtAPI #Art #GenerativeArt #AlgorithmicArt #Parameters #Interoperability #OpenSource #TypeScript #JavaScript
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#EngineerChallenge Day 001 :calculator:
Today is Day 1 of the challenge (see https://jskherman.com/blog/engineer-challenge/). As expected, it's hard contending with unfavorable environmental conditions with #willpower alone (particularly the hot climate of the Philippines coupled with the fact that my space faces the sun's direction in the hot afternoon). No matter, maybe we can find a way to adapt.
I mostly spent the day studying the first few chapters of Bettelheim's Chemistry. I realized that what takes up the most time for me is actually the process of creating #Anki flashcards. It still takes quite a while even if I am just writing out cloze deletions. There's a lot to think about: phrasing, HTML formatting, and math, especially when writing from scratch. They say you get faster over time in creating flashcards but it does take a while.
Another observation is that there is a significant chance of me being nerd-sniped by something I read. For example, today it was about the possibility of particle-beam weapons triggered by reading alpha and beta emissions. The risk posed by this is small but it is something to keep in mind.
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Meet Bruce Tree.
Bruce is a chipmunk Monk who channels hyper-alert woodland instincts into dizzying martial arts and acrobatic precision. Fast, jittery, and curious to a fault, he scampers up walls, slips past blades, and punches like a tempest. His fighting style -- rooted in the Way of the Drunken Master -- mimics chaos but is honed by instinct, training, and unnerving, twitchy Focus.
Once a totally ordinary chipmunk on Earth, Bruce's reality fractured one night beneath a familiar oak. He awoke somewhere strange, somewhere magical, able to speak. Disoriented but adaptable, Bruce found himself accidentally rescuing a trio of talking birds who call themselves the Blue Jay Gang. Later, his first true ally, a half-elf druid named Juniper, gave him a name, a scarf, and a purpose. "Adventuring," she said. Bruce ran with it.
Now he wanders the world in wide-eyed wonder, hoarding snacks and shiny objects in his enchanted “cheeks of holding” and learning the rules of a world that still thinks he’s a squirrel with delusions of kung fu. But Bruce is more than that. He knows there's a tree -- his tree -- that he may never see again. And while he doesn’t quite grasp why he’s here, he’ll follow the trail wherever it leads, even if it means stunning dragons with flurries of blows and dodging spells like falling leaves.
#DnDCharacter #TTRPG #MonkLife #DungeonsAndDragons #DnD5e #TTRPGCharacter #OC #BruceTree #ChipmunkMonk #Chipmonk #TinyButDeadly #SentientChipmunk #AnimalAdventurer #DrunkenMaster #FoundFamily #AccidentalHero #ChaosGremlinEnergy #MagicGoneWrong #WholesomeButDangerous #WholesomeAndDangersous #BlueJayGang #TalkingAnimals
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Meet Bruce Tree.
Bruce is a chipmunk Monk who channels hyper-alert woodland instincts into dizzying martial arts and acrobatic precision. Fast, jittery, and curious to a fault, he scampers up walls, slips past blades, and punches like a tempest. His fighting style -- rooted in the Way of the Drunken Master -- mimics chaos but is honed by instinct, training, and unnerving, twitchy Focus.
Once a totally ordinary chipmunk on Earth, Bruce's reality fractured one night beneath a familiar oak. He awoke somewhere strange, somewhere magical, able to speak. Disoriented but adaptable, Bruce found himself accidentally rescuing a trio of talking birds who call themselves the Blue Jay Gang. Later, his first true ally, a half-elf druid named Juniper, gave him a name, a scarf, and a purpose. "Adventuring," she said. Bruce ran with it.
Now he wanders the world in wide-eyed wonder, hoarding snacks and shiny objects in his enchanted “cheeks of holding” and learning the rules of a world that still thinks he’s a squirrel with delusions of kung fu. But Bruce is more than that. He knows there's a tree -- his tree -- that he may never see again. And while he doesn’t quite grasp why he’s here, he’ll follow the trail wherever it leads, even if it means stunning dragons with flurries of blows and dodging spells like falling leaves.
#DnDCharacter #TTRPG #MonkLife #DungeonsAndDragons #DnD5e #TTRPGCharacter #OC #BruceTree #ChipmunkMonk #Chipmonk #TinyButDeadly #SentientChipmunk #AnimalAdventurer #DrunkenMaster #FoundFamily #AccidentalHero #ChaosGremlinEnergy #MagicGoneWrong #WholesomeButDangerous #WholesomeAndDangersous #BlueJayGang #TalkingAnimals
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Bristo Public School: the thread about “one of the worst” schools in and its journey to further and higher education (by way of a car park)
Preamble. The schools of the “School Board” era of public education (1872-1918) have for some reason a particular fascination for me, one which is more profound where they are either no longer in use as schools or have disappeared entirely. This thread began as a couple of lines for my own notes about each of the “Lost Board Schools of Edinburgh” but rapidly snowballed into an intention to cover each, in alphabetical order, on its own and in rather more detail, but not so much that they can’t be posted quite frequently.
Bristo Public School was located on Marshall Street in that old district of the city known as Easter Portsburgh. It opened in 1877 with a capacity for 600 children at a time when the Edinburgh School Board was rapidly trying to expand education provision in the city at the same time as dealing with a legacy of inherited and substandard properties. The School Board was formed as a result of the Education (Scotland) Act 1872 which made education compulsory for children aged between 5 and 13 in Scotland (but not free). The school occupied a site where once had stood the General’s Entry lodgings of Robert Burns’ paramour Clarinda – Agnes Maclehose – and took its name from the adjacent Bristo Street, itself an old Edinburgh place name dating back to the early 16th century.
1893 Ordnance Survey town plan overlaid on a modern Google Earth satellite image, centered on the location of Bristo School. General’s Entry is the small lane to the south of the school. Move the slider to compare.The land was acquired from the Edinburgh Improvement Trust as part of an early civic improvement and slum clearance scheme that swept away some older closes and built a westward extension of of Marshall Street between the Potterrow and Bristo Street. Construction was intended to begin in 1875 but was delayed on account of the original cost estimate of £8,760 being far in excess of what the Board had budgeted per capita. The final cost, including purchasing the land, ended up at £26 10s per head, a huge sum for the time compared to other new schools. In the meantime, the School Board leased premises at 4 Nicolson Square to open a temporary school. The purpose-built Bristo School was designed by the architect to the Board, William Lambie Moffat, in the Collegiate Gothic style that was then in favour for schools and was extremely similar to his Leith Walk School.
Leith Walk Public School, 1887 engraving. Note the similarity in the design of the tower, the primary gable end and the ornamental buttresses with the photo below of Bristo School.Serving a densely populated neighbourhood, in its early days Bristo School was frequently overcrowded. Just three years after opening it had 840 pupils, some 40% more than it was designed to take, and the adjacent Marshall Street Halls had to be taken over in 1885 as an annexe and a new school was begun at South Bridge to provide additional capacity. Matters came to a head in 1896 when the school suffered a negative inspection on the grounds of the overcrowding and the substandard nature of the annexe and the Scotch Education Department cut its grant. On investigation the School Board found that almost half of the pupils actually lived closer to another of their schools than Bristo and so by redistributing them closer to home it was possible to both deal with the overcrowding and close the annexe.
Bristo School, looking wesr down Marshall Street west towards Edinburgh University’s “New Buildings” off Teviot Place. © Edinburgh City LibrariesThe capacity crisis may have been solved but the school continued to cause the Board problems. On account of its north facing position, cramped plot and being surrounded all around by tall tenements, it was particularly dark inside and had a very small playground which was also very dark. The lack of natural light and ventilation – very important to Edinburgh’s Victorian school designers – soon saw it labelled as “insanitary“. Furthermore it lacked any hall and the arrangements of its classrooms were unsuitable to cope with class sizes; there were too many small spaces. As early as 1900 the School Board were exploring options to replace it and an extension was added to the rear as an interim solution at a cost of £4,350, further decreasing the playground space. In 1909 it was reported that as a result of the poor lighting within the building that it had the highest proportion of children with “defective eyesight” in the city. A special experiment was carried out from 1930 onwards whereby entire year groups were transported to Liberton Playing Fields by tramcar, one day per week in the spring and summer, to have their education outside, far removed from their usual oppressive and dark surroundings.
Five-year-old children of the infant department of Bristo School, dressed for a mock coronation portrait photo in June 1911 to mark the occasion of King George V’s coronation.In 1925 the school found itself caught up in the Sciennes School Strike saga and it was observed at this time that it was under capacity. By 1927 its roll was in steady decline on account of slum clearance in the district which transferred much of the populace to new housing schemes in the southeast of the city. By 1933 the population of school age children in the Southside was declining at 10% per annum and there were 1,228 vacant places in its schools. As a result Bristo, described by Edinburgh Corporation’s Education Committee as “one of the worst” of its schools, was closed in 1934. The remaining scholars were transferred to Sciennes and South Bridge. In 1935 it was proposed to re-open the school by transferring pupils from the condemned St Ignatius’s Roman Catholic (RC) school in Glen Street and St Columba’s RC – the former Causewayside School – into a new Intermediate RC school for the district. Nothing came of these plans except sectarian controversy until final approval in 1939 but war quickly intervened and put them on hiatus again, this time permanently. Instead, after closure it was used for a variety of purposes including evening classes, a day centre for the long-term unemployed and hosting community groups such as the Boys’ Brigade.
1951 aerial photo showing Bristo School on Marshall Street, running from bottom right to middle of shot. In the top left corner is the Teviot Union of the Edinburgh University. Note the 1900 extension at the rear of the school which served to make its already small playground even smaller and darker. Photo SAW039077 via Britain from Above.In 1938 the Clarinda Club – a local appreciation society of the poet Robert Burns – marked the school being built upon the site of her lodgings by unveiling a commemorative bronze plaque on its walls. During WW2 it served as training centre and headquarters for First Aid and Air Raid Precautions. Another more unusual purpose was established which was the Nursery Equipment Centre. This had first been established by the WVS (Women’s Voluntary Service) at Castlehill School and was set up to produce soft and wooden toys, clothing and playthings for young children at the public nurseries that had been set up to allow their mothers to undertake war work. These items were largely no longer being produced by industry during wartime. In 1941 part of the school also became a British Restaurant – a municipal wartime canteen – operating under the name Clarinda’s.
Unveiling the Clarinda plaque at Bristo School. Speaking is Councillor Wilson Mclaren and to his left is George Mathers MP. Inset is Dr John Trotter of the Clarinda Club. The plaque read “Near this spot resided ‘CLARINDA’. Friend of Robert Burns 1787-1791”.The Nursery Equipment Centre attracted a significant number of volunteers with disabilities which prevented them from undertaking war work and became something of a specialist centre in helping people adapt their lives to work. Such was the success of the scheme that it – and the school – was taken over by the government’s new Disabled Persons Employment Corporation as a work training centre for the disabled – a Remploy Factory – until purpose-built premises were completed at Sighthill.
Men at work at the Bristo Remploy centre. The man on the left is John Collister, in the centre is the instructor Thomas Williams (holding the hammer) and to the right his pupil, Robert Lennie.When Remploy vacated the school in 1949 it was taken back by the Education Department and repurposed as the Bristo Technical Institute. This was a training centre for apprentices in engineering trades, either on day release from their workplaces or taken as evening classes. It taught specialist skills that could not gained on the job such as technical drawing, physics and chemistry and also basic certificates in maths and English to bring candidates up to standard. After 1959, much of this part of the city was threatened by the comprehensive redevelopment plans of Edinburgh University, which wanted wholesale demolition of the area but the old school survived where much did not. The institute closed in 1966 after the opening of the new Napier Technical College at a purpose-built campus in Merchiston, with most of the city’s pre-existing hodgepodge of technical further education being transferred to it. The building was then leased by Heriot-Watt College, which was at this time on nearby Chambers Street and about to gain university status, as its Department of Industrial Administration. Heriot-Watt University began its move to its new Riccarton campus in 1969 and left its Bristo Building around 1974. By this time the old school was the last remaining building on the western portion of Marshall Street and it was quickly and one old educational institution was unceremoniously demolished by another just shy of its centenary; Edinburgh University replaced it with a windswept car park that was perennially covered in puddles.
The car park was meant to be a temporary measure, but I clearly remember parking there in the 1990s when my Dad would take me to the Museum on Chambers Street; the University scheme for which it had been cleared never came to fruition. This most wantonly destructive of Edinburgh institutions would not finally build upon the gap site until the 21st century. The final part of the development – the School of Informatics’ Bayes Centre – was opened on the site of Bristo School as recently as 2019. It was perhaps some small consolation that the site was at last returned to educational use again.
Want to read more about Edinburgh’s Lost Board Schools? The next instalment covers Canonmills Public School; where thrift and self-denial were taught
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Something big is happening in AI — and most people will be blindsided – Fortune
Matt Shumer, co-founder and CEO of OthersideAI. courtesy of OthersideAISomething big is happening in AI — and most people will be blindsided
By Matt Shumer, February 11, 2026, 9:22 AM ET
Matt Shumer is the co-founder and CEO of OthersideAI, an applied AI company building the most advanced autocomplete tools in the world, powered by large-scale AI systems like GPT-3. OthersideAI is the company behind HyperWrite, the leading AI autocomplete Chrome extension for consumers. Previously, while in high school, Matt founded Visos, a startup developing next-generation Virtual Reality software designed for medical use, and FURI, a company aiming to disrupt the sporting goods industry by creating high-performance products and selling them for fair prices.
Think back to February 2020.
A few people were talking about a virus spreading overseas. If someone told you they were stockpiling toilet paper you would have thought they’d been spending too much time on a weird corner of the internet. Then, over the course of about three weeks, the entire world changed.
I think we’re in the “this seems overblown” phase of something much, much bigger than Covid.
I’ve spent six years building an AI startup and investing in the space. I live in this world. And I’m writing this for the people in my life who don’t. I keep giving them the polite, cocktail-party version. Because the honest version sounds like I’ve lost my mind. But the gap between what I’ve been saying and what is actually happening has gotten far too big. The people I care about deserve to hear what is coming, even if it sounds crazy.
I should be clear about something up front: even though I work in AI, I have almost no influence over what’s about to happen, and neither does the vast majority of the industry. The future is being shaped by a remarkably small number of people: a few hundred researchers at a handful of companies… OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, DeepMind, and a few others.
Most of us who work in AI are building on top of foundations we didn’t lay. We’re watching this unfold the same as you… we just happen to be close enough to feel the ground shake first.
But it’s time now. Not in an “eventually we should talk about this” way. In a “this is happening right now and I need you to understand it” way.
I know this is real because it happened to me first
Here’s the thing nobody outside of tech quite understands yet: we’re not making predictions. We’re telling you what already occurred in our own jobs, and warning you that you’re next.
For years, AI had been improving steadily. Then in 2025, new techniques for building these models unlocked a much faster pace of progress. This year, something clicked. Not like a light switch… more like the moment you realize the water has been rising around you and is now at your chest.
I am no longer needed for the actual technical work of my job. I describe what I want built, in plain English, and it just… appears. Not a rough draft I need to fix. The finished thing. I tell the AI what I want, walk away from my computer for four hours, and come back to find the work done. Done well, done better than I would have done it myself, with no corrections needed. A couple of months ago, I was going back and forth with the AI, guiding it, making edits. Now I just describe the outcome and leave.
Let me give you an example so you can understand what this actually looks like in practice. I’ll tell the AI: “I want to build this app. Here’s what it should do, here’s roughly what it should look like. Figure out the user flow, the design, all of it.” And it does. It writes tens of thousands of lines of code. Then, and this is the part that would have been unthinkable a year ago, it opens the app itself. It clicks through the buttons. It tests the features. It uses the app the way a person would. If it doesn’t like how something looks or feels, it goes back and changes it, on its own. It iterates, like a developer would, fixing and refining until it’s satisfied. Only once it has decided the app meets its own standards does it come back to me and say: “It’s ready for you to test.” And when I test it, it’s usually perfect.
I’m not exaggerating. That is what my Monday looked like this week.
I’ve always been early to adopt AI tools. But the last few months have shocked me. These new AI models aren’t incremental improvements. This is a different thing entirely.
The experience that tech workers have had over the past year, of watching AI go from “helpful tool” to “does my job better than I do”, is the experience everyone else is about to have. Law, finance, medicine, accounting, consulting, writing, design, analysis, customer service. Not in 10 years. The people building these systems say one to five years. Some say less. The market was spooked enough this month that it wiped out $1 trillion worth of software value in just a week. And given what I’ve seen in just the last couple of months, I see more disruption, and soon.
“But I tried AI and it wasn’t that good”
If you tried ChatGPT in 2023 or early 2024 and thought “this makes stuff up” or “this isn’t that impressive”, you were right. Those early versions were genuinely limited. They hallucinated. They confidently said things that were nonsense.
The models available today are unrecognizable from what existed even six months ago. The debate about whether AI is “really getting better” or “hitting a wall” — which has been going on for over a year — is over. It’s done. Anyone still making that argument either hasn’t used the current models, has an incentive to downplay what’s happening, or is evaluating based on an experience from 2024 that is no longer relevant. I don’t say that to be dismissive. I say it because the gap between public perception and current reality is now enormous, and that gap is dangerous… because it’s preventing people from preparing.
Part of the problem is that most people are using the free version of AI tools. The free version is over a year behind what paying users have access to. Judging AI based on free-tier ChatGPT is like evaluating the state of smartphones by using a flip phone. The people paying for the best tools, and actually using them daily for real work, know what’s coming.
I think of my friend, who’s a lawyer. I keep telling him to try using AI at his firm, and he keeps finding reasons it won’t work. And I get it. But I’ve had partners at major law firms reach out to me for advice, because they’ve tried the current versions and they see where this is going. One of them, the managing partner at a large firm, spends hours every day using AI. He told me it’s like having a team of associates available instantly. He’s not using it because it’s a toy. He’s using it because it works. And he told me something that stuck with me: every couple of months, it gets significantly more capable for his work. He said if it stays on this trajectory, he expects it’ll be able to do most of what he does before long… and he’s a managing partner with decades of experience. He’s not panicking. But he’s paying very close attention.
Think about what that means for your work.
What this means for your job
I’m going to be direct with you because I think you deserve honesty more than comfort.
Dario Amodei, who is probably the most safety-focused CEO in the AI industry, has publicly predicted that AI will eliminate 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs within one to five years. And many people in the industry think he’s being conservative. Given what the latest models can do, the capability for massive disruption could be here by the end of this year. It’ll take some time to ripple through the economy, but the underlying ability is arriving now.
This is different from every previous wave of automation, and I need you to understand why. AI isn’t replacing one specific skill. It’s a general substitute for cognitive work. It gets better at everything simultaneously. When factories automated, a displaced worker could retrain as an office worker. When the internet disrupted retail, workers moved into logistics or services. But AI doesn’t leave a convenient gap to move into. Whatever you retrain for, it’s improving at that too.
I think the honest answer is that nothing that can be done on a computer is safe in the medium term. If your job happens on a screen (if the core of what you do is reading, writing, analyzing, deciding, communicating through a keyboard) then AI is coming for significant parts of it. The timeline isn’t “someday.” It’s already started.
Eventually, robots will handle physical work too. They’re not quite there yet. But “not quite there yet” in AI terms has a way of becoming “here” faster than anyone expects.
What you should actually do
I’m not writing this to make you feel helpless. I’m writing this because I think the single biggest advantage you can have right now is simply being early. Early to understand it. Early to use it. Early to adapt.
Editor’s Note: Read more online. This is a general AI-supportive post by Matt. And there are many others similar “heads up” posts about AI right now. Keep an eye out for further posts on the AI changes coming. Whatever your views, I recommend keeping up with AI over your own work, or job, society changes, regulations, world impacts, and more. –DrWeb
Continue/Read Original Article Here: Something big is happening in AI — and most people will be blindsided | Fortune
Tags: AI, AI Future, artificial intelligence, Big Changes, Fortune, Heads Up, Jobs Changing, Matt Shumer, Newer Models, OthersideAI, Rapid Developments in AI, Social Impacts, Technology
#AI #AIFuture #artificialIntelligence #BigChanges #Fortune #HeadsUp #JobsChanging #MattShumer #NewerModels #OthersideAI #RapidDevelopmentsInAI #SocialImpacts #Technology -
Something big is happening in AI — and most people will be blindsided – Fortune
Matt Shumer, co-founder and CEO of OthersideAI. courtesy of OthersideAISomething big is happening in AI — and most people will be blindsided
By Matt Shumer, February 11, 2026, 9:22 AM ET
Matt Shumer is the co-founder and CEO of OthersideAI, an applied AI company building the most advanced autocomplete tools in the world, powered by large-scale AI systems like GPT-3. OthersideAI is the company behind HyperWrite, the leading AI autocomplete Chrome extension for consumers. Previously, while in high school, Matt founded Visos, a startup developing next-generation Virtual Reality software designed for medical use, and FURI, a company aiming to disrupt the sporting goods industry by creating high-performance products and selling them for fair prices.
Think back to February 2020.
A few people were talking about a virus spreading overseas. If someone told you they were stockpiling toilet paper you would have thought they’d been spending too much time on a weird corner of the internet. Then, over the course of about three weeks, the entire world changed.
I think we’re in the “this seems overblown” phase of something much, much bigger than Covid.
I’ve spent six years building an AI startup and investing in the space. I live in this world. And I’m writing this for the people in my life who don’t. I keep giving them the polite, cocktail-party version. Because the honest version sounds like I’ve lost my mind. But the gap between what I’ve been saying and what is actually happening has gotten far too big. The people I care about deserve to hear what is coming, even if it sounds crazy.
I should be clear about something up front: even though I work in AI, I have almost no influence over what’s about to happen, and neither does the vast majority of the industry. The future is being shaped by a remarkably small number of people: a few hundred researchers at a handful of companies… OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, DeepMind, and a few others.
Most of us who work in AI are building on top of foundations we didn’t lay. We’re watching this unfold the same as you… we just happen to be close enough to feel the ground shake first.
But it’s time now. Not in an “eventually we should talk about this” way. In a “this is happening right now and I need you to understand it” way.
I know this is real because it happened to me first
Here’s the thing nobody outside of tech quite understands yet: we’re not making predictions. We’re telling you what already occurred in our own jobs, and warning you that you’re next.
For years, AI had been improving steadily. Then in 2025, new techniques for building these models unlocked a much faster pace of progress. This year, something clicked. Not like a light switch… more like the moment you realize the water has been rising around you and is now at your chest.
I am no longer needed for the actual technical work of my job. I describe what I want built, in plain English, and it just… appears. Not a rough draft I need to fix. The finished thing. I tell the AI what I want, walk away from my computer for four hours, and come back to find the work done. Done well, done better than I would have done it myself, with no corrections needed. A couple of months ago, I was going back and forth with the AI, guiding it, making edits. Now I just describe the outcome and leave.
Let me give you an example so you can understand what this actually looks like in practice. I’ll tell the AI: “I want to build this app. Here’s what it should do, here’s roughly what it should look like. Figure out the user flow, the design, all of it.” And it does. It writes tens of thousands of lines of code. Then, and this is the part that would have been unthinkable a year ago, it opens the app itself. It clicks through the buttons. It tests the features. It uses the app the way a person would. If it doesn’t like how something looks or feels, it goes back and changes it, on its own. It iterates, like a developer would, fixing and refining until it’s satisfied. Only once it has decided the app meets its own standards does it come back to me and say: “It’s ready for you to test.” And when I test it, it’s usually perfect.
I’m not exaggerating. That is what my Monday looked like this week.
I’ve always been early to adopt AI tools. But the last few months have shocked me. These new AI models aren’t incremental improvements. This is a different thing entirely.
The experience that tech workers have had over the past year, of watching AI go from “helpful tool” to “does my job better than I do”, is the experience everyone else is about to have. Law, finance, medicine, accounting, consulting, writing, design, analysis, customer service. Not in 10 years. The people building these systems say one to five years. Some say less. The market was spooked enough this month that it wiped out $1 trillion worth of software value in just a week. And given what I’ve seen in just the last couple of months, I see more disruption, and soon.
“But I tried AI and it wasn’t that good”
If you tried ChatGPT in 2023 or early 2024 and thought “this makes stuff up” or “this isn’t that impressive”, you were right. Those early versions were genuinely limited. They hallucinated. They confidently said things that were nonsense.
The models available today are unrecognizable from what existed even six months ago. The debate about whether AI is “really getting better” or “hitting a wall” — which has been going on for over a year — is over. It’s done. Anyone still making that argument either hasn’t used the current models, has an incentive to downplay what’s happening, or is evaluating based on an experience from 2024 that is no longer relevant. I don’t say that to be dismissive. I say it because the gap between public perception and current reality is now enormous, and that gap is dangerous… because it’s preventing people from preparing.
Part of the problem is that most people are using the free version of AI tools. The free version is over a year behind what paying users have access to. Judging AI based on free-tier ChatGPT is like evaluating the state of smartphones by using a flip phone. The people paying for the best tools, and actually using them daily for real work, know what’s coming.
I think of my friend, who’s a lawyer. I keep telling him to try using AI at his firm, and he keeps finding reasons it won’t work. And I get it. But I’ve had partners at major law firms reach out to me for advice, because they’ve tried the current versions and they see where this is going. One of them, the managing partner at a large firm, spends hours every day using AI. He told me it’s like having a team of associates available instantly. He’s not using it because it’s a toy. He’s using it because it works. And he told me something that stuck with me: every couple of months, it gets significantly more capable for his work. He said if it stays on this trajectory, he expects it’ll be able to do most of what he does before long… and he’s a managing partner with decades of experience. He’s not panicking. But he’s paying very close attention.
Think about what that means for your work.
What this means for your job
I’m going to be direct with you because I think you deserve honesty more than comfort.
Dario Amodei, who is probably the most safety-focused CEO in the AI industry, has publicly predicted that AI will eliminate 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs within one to five years. And many people in the industry think he’s being conservative. Given what the latest models can do, the capability for massive disruption could be here by the end of this year. It’ll take some time to ripple through the economy, but the underlying ability is arriving now.
This is different from every previous wave of automation, and I need you to understand why. AI isn’t replacing one specific skill. It’s a general substitute for cognitive work. It gets better at everything simultaneously. When factories automated, a displaced worker could retrain as an office worker. When the internet disrupted retail, workers moved into logistics or services. But AI doesn’t leave a convenient gap to move into. Whatever you retrain for, it’s improving at that too.
I think the honest answer is that nothing that can be done on a computer is safe in the medium term. If your job happens on a screen (if the core of what you do is reading, writing, analyzing, deciding, communicating through a keyboard) then AI is coming for significant parts of it. The timeline isn’t “someday.” It’s already started.
Eventually, robots will handle physical work too. They’re not quite there yet. But “not quite there yet” in AI terms has a way of becoming “here” faster than anyone expects.
What you should actually do
I’m not writing this to make you feel helpless. I’m writing this because I think the single biggest advantage you can have right now is simply being early. Early to understand it. Early to use it. Early to adapt.
Editor’s Note: Read more online. This is a general AI-supportive post by Matt. And there are many others similar “heads up” posts about AI right now. Keep an eye out for further posts on the AI changes coming. Whatever your views, I recommend keeping up with AI over your own work, or job, society changes, regulations, world impacts, and more. –DrWeb
Continue/Read Original Article Here: Something big is happening in AI — and most people will be blindsided | Fortune
Tags: AI, AI Future, artificial intelligence, Big Changes, Fortune, Heads Up, Jobs Changing, Matt Shumer, Newer Models, OthersideAI, Rapid Developments in AI, Social Impacts, Technology
#AI #AIFuture #artificialIntelligence #BigChanges #Fortune #HeadsUp #JobsChanging #MattShumer #NewerModels #OthersideAI #RapidDevelopmentsInAI #SocialImpacts #Technology -
Something big is happening in AI — and most people will be blindsided – Fortune
Matt Shumer, co-founder and CEO of OthersideAI. courtesy of OthersideAISomething big is happening in AI — and most people will be blindsided
By Matt Shumer, February 11, 2026, 9:22 AM ET
Matt Shumer is the co-founder and CEO of OthersideAI, an applied AI company building the most advanced autocomplete tools in the world, powered by large-scale AI systems like GPT-3. OthersideAI is the company behind HyperWrite, the leading AI autocomplete Chrome extension for consumers. Previously, while in high school, Matt founded Visos, a startup developing next-generation Virtual Reality software designed for medical use, and FURI, a company aiming to disrupt the sporting goods industry by creating high-performance products and selling them for fair prices.
Think back to February 2020.
A few people were talking about a virus spreading overseas. If someone told you they were stockpiling toilet paper you would have thought they’d been spending too much time on a weird corner of the internet. Then, over the course of about three weeks, the entire world changed.
I think we’re in the “this seems overblown” phase of something much, much bigger than Covid.
I’ve spent six years building an AI startup and investing in the space. I live in this world. And I’m writing this for the people in my life who don’t. I keep giving them the polite, cocktail-party version. Because the honest version sounds like I’ve lost my mind. But the gap between what I’ve been saying and what is actually happening has gotten far too big. The people I care about deserve to hear what is coming, even if it sounds crazy.
I should be clear about something up front: even though I work in AI, I have almost no influence over what’s about to happen, and neither does the vast majority of the industry. The future is being shaped by a remarkably small number of people: a few hundred researchers at a handful of companies… OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, DeepMind, and a few others.
Most of us who work in AI are building on top of foundations we didn’t lay. We’re watching this unfold the same as you… we just happen to be close enough to feel the ground shake first.
But it’s time now. Not in an “eventually we should talk about this” way. In a “this is happening right now and I need you to understand it” way.
I know this is real because it happened to me first
Here’s the thing nobody outside of tech quite understands yet: we’re not making predictions. We’re telling you what already occurred in our own jobs, and warning you that you’re next.
For years, AI had been improving steadily. Then in 2025, new techniques for building these models unlocked a much faster pace of progress. This year, something clicked. Not like a light switch… more like the moment you realize the water has been rising around you and is now at your chest.
I am no longer needed for the actual technical work of my job. I describe what I want built, in plain English, and it just… appears. Not a rough draft I need to fix. The finished thing. I tell the AI what I want, walk away from my computer for four hours, and come back to find the work done. Done well, done better than I would have done it myself, with no corrections needed. A couple of months ago, I was going back and forth with the AI, guiding it, making edits. Now I just describe the outcome and leave.
Let me give you an example so you can understand what this actually looks like in practice. I’ll tell the AI: “I want to build this app. Here’s what it should do, here’s roughly what it should look like. Figure out the user flow, the design, all of it.” And it does. It writes tens of thousands of lines of code. Then, and this is the part that would have been unthinkable a year ago, it opens the app itself. It clicks through the buttons. It tests the features. It uses the app the way a person would. If it doesn’t like how something looks or feels, it goes back and changes it, on its own. It iterates, like a developer would, fixing and refining until it’s satisfied. Only once it has decided the app meets its own standards does it come back to me and say: “It’s ready for you to test.” And when I test it, it’s usually perfect.
I’m not exaggerating. That is what my Monday looked like this week.
I’ve always been early to adopt AI tools. But the last few months have shocked me. These new AI models aren’t incremental improvements. This is a different thing entirely.
The experience that tech workers have had over the past year, of watching AI go from “helpful tool” to “does my job better than I do”, is the experience everyone else is about to have. Law, finance, medicine, accounting, consulting, writing, design, analysis, customer service. Not in 10 years. The people building these systems say one to five years. Some say less. The market was spooked enough this month that it wiped out $1 trillion worth of software value in just a week. And given what I’ve seen in just the last couple of months, I see more disruption, and soon.
“But I tried AI and it wasn’t that good”
If you tried ChatGPT in 2023 or early 2024 and thought “this makes stuff up” or “this isn’t that impressive”, you were right. Those early versions were genuinely limited. They hallucinated. They confidently said things that were nonsense.
The models available today are unrecognizable from what existed even six months ago. The debate about whether AI is “really getting better” or “hitting a wall” — which has been going on for over a year — is over. It’s done. Anyone still making that argument either hasn’t used the current models, has an incentive to downplay what’s happening, or is evaluating based on an experience from 2024 that is no longer relevant. I don’t say that to be dismissive. I say it because the gap between public perception and current reality is now enormous, and that gap is dangerous… because it’s preventing people from preparing.
Part of the problem is that most people are using the free version of AI tools. The free version is over a year behind what paying users have access to. Judging AI based on free-tier ChatGPT is like evaluating the state of smartphones by using a flip phone. The people paying for the best tools, and actually using them daily for real work, know what’s coming.
I think of my friend, who’s a lawyer. I keep telling him to try using AI at his firm, and he keeps finding reasons it won’t work. And I get it. But I’ve had partners at major law firms reach out to me for advice, because they’ve tried the current versions and they see where this is going. One of them, the managing partner at a large firm, spends hours every day using AI. He told me it’s like having a team of associates available instantly. He’s not using it because it’s a toy. He’s using it because it works. And he told me something that stuck with me: every couple of months, it gets significantly more capable for his work. He said if it stays on this trajectory, he expects it’ll be able to do most of what he does before long… and he’s a managing partner with decades of experience. He’s not panicking. But he’s paying very close attention.
Think about what that means for your work.
What this means for your job
I’m going to be direct with you because I think you deserve honesty more than comfort.
Dario Amodei, who is probably the most safety-focused CEO in the AI industry, has publicly predicted that AI will eliminate 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs within one to five years. And many people in the industry think he’s being conservative. Given what the latest models can do, the capability for massive disruption could be here by the end of this year. It’ll take some time to ripple through the economy, but the underlying ability is arriving now.
This is different from every previous wave of automation, and I need you to understand why. AI isn’t replacing one specific skill. It’s a general substitute for cognitive work. It gets better at everything simultaneously. When factories automated, a displaced worker could retrain as an office worker. When the internet disrupted retail, workers moved into logistics or services. But AI doesn’t leave a convenient gap to move into. Whatever you retrain for, it’s improving at that too.
I think the honest answer is that nothing that can be done on a computer is safe in the medium term. If your job happens on a screen (if the core of what you do is reading, writing, analyzing, deciding, communicating through a keyboard) then AI is coming for significant parts of it. The timeline isn’t “someday.” It’s already started.
Eventually, robots will handle physical work too. They’re not quite there yet. But “not quite there yet” in AI terms has a way of becoming “here” faster than anyone expects.
What you should actually do
I’m not writing this to make you feel helpless. I’m writing this because I think the single biggest advantage you can have right now is simply being early. Early to understand it. Early to use it. Early to adapt.
Editor’s Note: Read more online. This is a general AI-supportive post by Matt. And there are many others similar “heads up” posts about AI right now. Keep an eye out for further posts on the AI changes coming. Whatever your views, I recommend keeping up with AI over your own work, or job, society changes, regulations, world impacts, and more. –DrWeb
Continue/Read Original Article Here: Something big is happening in AI — and most people will be blindsided | Fortune
Tags: AI, AI Future, artificial intelligence, Big Changes, Fortune, Heads Up, Jobs Changing, Matt Shumer, Newer Models, OthersideAI, Rapid Developments in AI, Social Impacts, Technology
#AI #AIFuture #artificialIntelligence #BigChanges #Fortune #HeadsUp #JobsChanging #MattShumer #NewerModels #OthersideAI #RapidDevelopmentsInAI #SocialImpacts #Technology -
Something big is happening in AI — and most people will be blindsided – Fortune
Matt Shumer, co-founder and CEO of OthersideAI. courtesy of OthersideAISomething big is happening in AI — and most people will be blindsided
By Matt Shumer, February 11, 2026, 9:22 AM ET
Matt Shumer is the co-founder and CEO of OthersideAI, an applied AI company building the most advanced autocomplete tools in the world, powered by large-scale AI systems like GPT-3. OthersideAI is the company behind HyperWrite, the leading AI autocomplete Chrome extension for consumers. Previously, while in high school, Matt founded Visos, a startup developing next-generation Virtual Reality software designed for medical use, and FURI, a company aiming to disrupt the sporting goods industry by creating high-performance products and selling them for fair prices.
Think back to February 2020.
A few people were talking about a virus spreading overseas. If someone told you they were stockpiling toilet paper you would have thought they’d been spending too much time on a weird corner of the internet. Then, over the course of about three weeks, the entire world changed.
I think we’re in the “this seems overblown” phase of something much, much bigger than Covid.
I’ve spent six years building an AI startup and investing in the space. I live in this world. And I’m writing this for the people in my life who don’t. I keep giving them the polite, cocktail-party version. Because the honest version sounds like I’ve lost my mind. But the gap between what I’ve been saying and what is actually happening has gotten far too big. The people I care about deserve to hear what is coming, even if it sounds crazy.
I should be clear about something up front: even though I work in AI, I have almost no influence over what’s about to happen, and neither does the vast majority of the industry. The future is being shaped by a remarkably small number of people: a few hundred researchers at a handful of companies… OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, DeepMind, and a few others.
Most of us who work in AI are building on top of foundations we didn’t lay. We’re watching this unfold the same as you… we just happen to be close enough to feel the ground shake first.
But it’s time now. Not in an “eventually we should talk about this” way. In a “this is happening right now and I need you to understand it” way.
I know this is real because it happened to me first
Here’s the thing nobody outside of tech quite understands yet: we’re not making predictions. We’re telling you what already occurred in our own jobs, and warning you that you’re next.
For years, AI had been improving steadily. Then in 2025, new techniques for building these models unlocked a much faster pace of progress. This year, something clicked. Not like a light switch… more like the moment you realize the water has been rising around you and is now at your chest.
I am no longer needed for the actual technical work of my job. I describe what I want built, in plain English, and it just… appears. Not a rough draft I need to fix. The finished thing. I tell the AI what I want, walk away from my computer for four hours, and come back to find the work done. Done well, done better than I would have done it myself, with no corrections needed. A couple of months ago, I was going back and forth with the AI, guiding it, making edits. Now I just describe the outcome and leave.
Let me give you an example so you can understand what this actually looks like in practice. I’ll tell the AI: “I want to build this app. Here’s what it should do, here’s roughly what it should look like. Figure out the user flow, the design, all of it.” And it does. It writes tens of thousands of lines of code. Then, and this is the part that would have been unthinkable a year ago, it opens the app itself. It clicks through the buttons. It tests the features. It uses the app the way a person would. If it doesn’t like how something looks or feels, it goes back and changes it, on its own. It iterates, like a developer would, fixing and refining until it’s satisfied. Only once it has decided the app meets its own standards does it come back to me and say: “It’s ready for you to test.” And when I test it, it’s usually perfect.
I’m not exaggerating. That is what my Monday looked like this week.
I’ve always been early to adopt AI tools. But the last few months have shocked me. These new AI models aren’t incremental improvements. This is a different thing entirely.
The experience that tech workers have had over the past year, of watching AI go from “helpful tool” to “does my job better than I do”, is the experience everyone else is about to have. Law, finance, medicine, accounting, consulting, writing, design, analysis, customer service. Not in 10 years. The people building these systems say one to five years. Some say less. The market was spooked enough this month that it wiped out $1 trillion worth of software value in just a week. And given what I’ve seen in just the last couple of months, I see more disruption, and soon.
“But I tried AI and it wasn’t that good”
If you tried ChatGPT in 2023 or early 2024 and thought “this makes stuff up” or “this isn’t that impressive”, you were right. Those early versions were genuinely limited. They hallucinated. They confidently said things that were nonsense.
The models available today are unrecognizable from what existed even six months ago. The debate about whether AI is “really getting better” or “hitting a wall” — which has been going on for over a year — is over. It’s done. Anyone still making that argument either hasn’t used the current models, has an incentive to downplay what’s happening, or is evaluating based on an experience from 2024 that is no longer relevant. I don’t say that to be dismissive. I say it because the gap between public perception and current reality is now enormous, and that gap is dangerous… because it’s preventing people from preparing.
Part of the problem is that most people are using the free version of AI tools. The free version is over a year behind what paying users have access to. Judging AI based on free-tier ChatGPT is like evaluating the state of smartphones by using a flip phone. The people paying for the best tools, and actually using them daily for real work, know what’s coming.
I think of my friend, who’s a lawyer. I keep telling him to try using AI at his firm, and he keeps finding reasons it won’t work. And I get it. But I’ve had partners at major law firms reach out to me for advice, because they’ve tried the current versions and they see where this is going. One of them, the managing partner at a large firm, spends hours every day using AI. He told me it’s like having a team of associates available instantly. He’s not using it because it’s a toy. He’s using it because it works. And he told me something that stuck with me: every couple of months, it gets significantly more capable for his work. He said if it stays on this trajectory, he expects it’ll be able to do most of what he does before long… and he’s a managing partner with decades of experience. He’s not panicking. But he’s paying very close attention.
Think about what that means for your work.
What this means for your job
I’m going to be direct with you because I think you deserve honesty more than comfort.
Dario Amodei, who is probably the most safety-focused CEO in the AI industry, has publicly predicted that AI will eliminate 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs within one to five years. And many people in the industry think he’s being conservative. Given what the latest models can do, the capability for massive disruption could be here by the end of this year. It’ll take some time to ripple through the economy, but the underlying ability is arriving now.
This is different from every previous wave of automation, and I need you to understand why. AI isn’t replacing one specific skill. It’s a general substitute for cognitive work. It gets better at everything simultaneously. When factories automated, a displaced worker could retrain as an office worker. When the internet disrupted retail, workers moved into logistics or services. But AI doesn’t leave a convenient gap to move into. Whatever you retrain for, it’s improving at that too.
I think the honest answer is that nothing that can be done on a computer is safe in the medium term. If your job happens on a screen (if the core of what you do is reading, writing, analyzing, deciding, communicating through a keyboard) then AI is coming for significant parts of it. The timeline isn’t “someday.” It’s already started.
Eventually, robots will handle physical work too. They’re not quite there yet. But “not quite there yet” in AI terms has a way of becoming “here” faster than anyone expects.
What you should actually do
I’m not writing this to make you feel helpless. I’m writing this because I think the single biggest advantage you can have right now is simply being early. Early to understand it. Early to use it. Early to adapt.
Editor’s Note: Read more online. This is a general AI-supportive post by Matt. And there are many others similar “heads up” posts about AI right now. Keep an eye out for further posts on the AI changes coming. Whatever your views, I recommend keeping up with AI over your own work, or job, society changes, regulations, world impacts, and more. –DrWeb
Continue/Read Original Article Here: Something big is happening in AI — and most people will be blindsided | Fortune
Tags: AI, AI Future, artificial intelligence, Big Changes, Fortune, Heads Up, Jobs Changing, Matt Shumer, Newer Models, OthersideAI, Rapid Developments in AI, Social Impacts, Technology
#AI #AIFuture #artificialIntelligence #BigChanges #Fortune #HeadsUp #JobsChanging #MattShumer #NewerModels #OthersideAI #RapidDevelopmentsInAI #SocialImpacts #Technology -
‘The Island of Dr. Moreau’ Thrills and Chills With Ease
The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896) by H. G. Wells aims for the heart of 19th-century scientific thinking. Horrifying and thought-provoking, The Island of Dr. Moreau takes up the mantle of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1812) to explore the limits of what defines humanity. Wells packs the story with action, scientific exploration, and social commentary in a way perhaps not possible today. The Island of Dr. Moreau remains a benchmark of SF storytelling.
Edward Pendrick’s ship, the Lady Vain sinks and he is the sole survivor. Alone and adrift in a dinghy, it is only by sheer chance that a passing ship, the Ipecacuanha, rescues him. Delirious from thirst and hunger, Pendrick is insensible for days.
After regaining his strength Pendrick meets his rescuer, Montgomery, and his grotesque servant, M’ling. Pendrick is grateful, however, Montgomery and M’ling make him uneasy. When the Ipecacuanha reaches an unmarked island Pendrick is forced overboard by the captain. Montgomery takes pity on Pendrick once more to save him.
Once on the island, things become even stranger. The people of the island, are a collection of misshapen and hideous beings. Pendrick is at once repelled and fascinated by the creatures. But it isn’t until he meets the enigmatic Dr. Moreau that Pendrick truly comes to understand the meaning of horror.
H. G. Wells is one of the foundational authors of science fiction. His works are seminal reading for any SF fan. Wells’ second published novel, The Island of Dr. Moreau comprises everything that makes his writing so memorable. Remarkable situations, intense action, and clever twists combined to make a visceral reading experience.
The Island of Dr. Moreau is the memoir of Edward Pendrick’s life during the year he was shipwrecked on Moreau’s island. Wells does a wonderful job of bringing Pendrick’s voice to life. Pendrick’s initial revulsion and dread are palpable. When fear gives way to a kind of understanding the reader feels it as well.
However, Pendrick is always off balance. His ideas shift one way and then the other. This is primarily due to Montgomery. Montgomery constantly gives reasonable explanations for unreasonable events and situations. This has the effect of quelling Pendrick’s rising anxiety for a time. Until the next event, that is.
Pendrick’s anxiety and fear are intensified when he finally meets the enigmatic Dr. Moreau. It turns out Pendrick knows of Moreau and his life in London. Moreau’s explanation for the events of his earlier life and move to the island seem logical but are unconvincing to Pendrick. Again, Moreau’s attempt to spin events serves to highlight the deviousness of the truth.
The climax of The Island of Dr. Moreau occurs quite early in the story, however, there is a long denouement that holds the reader’s interest. Through the denouement Pendrick watches the social structure of the island’s citizens collapse. Wells provides an apocalypse in miniature.
As much as The Island of Dr. Moreau thrills, there is a lack of deep characterization. This is perhaps because of the time at which the story was written. Pendrick is a gentleman, Montgomery is a dipsomaniac, and Moreau is a scientist. Wells relies on his readers’ knowledge of their stereotypes to fill any gaps. It’s not necessarily a bad idea, however, modern readers will have different ideas of what this means so they need to adapt accordingly.
The Island of Dr. Moreau is also an examination of class and race. The ‘people’ of the island serve as replacements of various class distinctions and races. This allows Wells to comment on how society treats and interacts with these people without being direct. Wells tries to make the flaws of society apparent but doesn’t fully succeed.
H. G. Wells (1866-1946)In the end, The Island of Dr. Moreau is a wonderfully rich and complex story that bridges both science fiction and horror. Perhaps in a way not seen since Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1812). In both cases, they explore how science and society interact and react to each other.
The Island of Dr. Moreau‘s influence cannot be underestimated. Its effects are seen in the many stories about ‘uplifted’ animals or moreaus, and in the SF of artificial intelligence. Regardless of the vessel, the goal is to improve the human condition through artificial means.
Along with The Invisible Man (1897) and The War of the Worlds (1898), I consider The Island of Dr. Moreau part of the ultimate trinity of Wells’ works. Wells’ later works are more refined and polished but The Island of Dr. Moreau is raw creativity unbridled. Wells’ passion for his subject comes through on every page.
There are many reasons to read The Island of Dr. Moreau, however, one is paramount. There is no other work in Wells’ long career that has the emotional and intellectual impact of The Island of Dr. Moreau. The Island of Dr. Moreau will leave you thrilled, unsettled, and wanting more.
-
‘The Island of Dr. Moreau’ Thrills and Chills With Ease
The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896) by H. G. Wells aims for the heart of 19th-century scientific thinking. Horrifying and thought-provoking, The Island of Dr. Moreau takes up the mantle of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1812) to explore the limits of what defines humanity. Wells packs the story with action, scientific exploration, and social commentary in a way perhaps not possible today. The Island of Dr. Moreau remains a benchmark of SF storytelling.
Edward Pendrick’s ship, the Lady Vain sinks and he is the sole survivor. Alone and adrift in a dinghy, it is only by sheer chance that a passing ship, the Ipecacuanha, rescues him. Delirious from thirst and hunger, Pendrick is insensible for days.
After regaining his strength Pendrick meets his rescuer, Montgomery, and his grotesque servant, M’ling. Pendrick is grateful, however, Montgomery and M’ling make him uneasy. When the Ipecacuanha reaches an unmarked island Pendrick is forced overboard by the captain. Montgomery takes pity on Pendrick once more to save him.
Once on the island, things become even stranger. The people of the island, are a collection of misshapen and hideous beings. Pendrick is at once repelled and fascinated by the creatures. But it isn’t until he meets the enigmatic Dr. Moreau that Pendrick truly comes to understand the meaning of horror.
H. G. Wells is one of the foundational authors of science fiction. His works are seminal reading for any SF fan. Wells’ second published novel, The Island of Dr. Moreau comprises everything that makes his writing so memorable. Remarkable situations, intense action, and clever twists combined to make a visceral reading experience.
The Island of Dr. Moreau is the memoir of Edward Pendrick’s life during the year he was shipwrecked on Moreau’s island. Wells does a wonderful job of bringing Pendrick’s voice to life. Pendrick’s initial revulsion and dread are palpable. When fear gives way to a kind of understanding the reader feels it as well.
However, Pendrick is always off balance. His ideas shift one way and then the other. This is primarily due to Montgomery. Montgomery constantly gives reasonable explanations for unreasonable events and situations. This has the effect of quelling Pendrick’s rising anxiety for a time. Until the next event, that is.
Pendrick’s anxiety and fear are intensified when he finally meets the enigmatic Dr. Moreau. It turns out Pendrick knows of Moreau and his life in London. Moreau’s explanation for the events of his earlier life and move to the island seem logical but are unconvincing to Pendrick. Again, Moreau’s attempt to spin events serves to highlight the deviousness of the truth.
The climax of The Island of Dr. Moreau occurs quite early in the story, however, there is a long denouement that holds the reader’s interest. Through the denouement Pendrick watches the social structure of the island’s citizens collapse. Wells provides an apocalypse in miniature.
As much as The Island of Dr. Moreau thrills, there is a lack of deep characterization. This is perhaps because of the time at which the story was written. Pendrick is a gentleman, Montgomery is a dipsomaniac, and Moreau is a scientist. Wells relies on his readers’ knowledge of their stereotypes to fill any gaps. It’s not necessarily a bad idea, however, modern readers will have different ideas of what this means so they need to adapt accordingly.
The Island of Dr. Moreau is also an examination of class and race. The ‘people’ of the island serve as replacements of various class distinctions and races. This allows Wells to comment on how society treats and interacts with these people without being direct. Wells tries to make the flaws of society apparent but doesn’t fully succeed.
H. G. Wells (1866-1946)In the end, The Island of Dr. Moreau is a wonderfully rich and complex story that bridges both science fiction and horror. Perhaps in a way not seen since Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1812). In both cases, they explore how science and society interact and react to each other.
The Island of Dr. Moreau‘s influence cannot be underestimated. Its effects are seen in the many stories about ‘uplifted’ animals or moreaus, and in the SF of artificial intelligence. Regardless of the vessel, the goal is to improve the human condition through artificial means.
Along with The Invisible Man (1897) and The War of the Worlds (1898), I consider The Island of Dr. Moreau part of the ultimate trinity of Wells’ works. Wells’ later works are more refined and polished but The Island of Dr. Moreau is raw creativity unbridled. Wells’ passion for his subject comes through on every page.
There are many reasons to read The Island of Dr. Moreau, however, one is paramount. There is no other work in Wells’ long career that has the emotional and intellectual impact of The Island of Dr. Moreau. The Island of Dr. Moreau will leave you thrilled, unsettled, and wanting more.
-
‘The Island of Dr. Moreau’ Thrills and Chills With Ease
The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896) by H. G. Wells aims for the heart of 19th-century scientific thinking. Horrifying and thought-provoking, The Island of Dr. Moreau takes up the mantle of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1812) to explore the limits of what defines humanity. Wells packs the story with action, scientific exploration, and social commentary in a way perhaps not possible today. The Island of Dr. Moreau remains a benchmark of SF storytelling.
Edward Pendrick’s ship, the Lady Vain sinks and he is the sole survivor. Alone and adrift in a dinghy, it is only by sheer chance that a passing ship, the Ipecacuanha, rescues him. Delirious from thirst and hunger, Pendrick is insensible for days.
After regaining his strength Pendrick meets his rescuer, Montgomery, and his grotesque servant, M’ling. Pendrick is grateful, however, Montgomery and M’ling make him uneasy. When the Ipecacuanha reaches an unmarked island Pendrick is forced overboard by the captain. Montgomery takes pity on Pendrick once more to save him.
Once on the island, things become even stranger. The people of the island, are a collection of misshapen and hideous beings. Pendrick is at once repelled and fascinated by the creatures. But it isn’t until he meets the enigmatic Dr. Moreau that Pendrick truly comes to understand the meaning of horror.
H. G. Wells is one of the foundational authors of science fiction. His works are seminal reading for any SF fan. Wells’ second published novel, The Island of Dr. Moreau comprises everything that makes his writing so memorable. Remarkable situations, intense action, and clever twists combined to make a visceral reading experience.
The Island of Dr. Moreau is the memoir of Edward Pendrick’s life during the year he was shipwrecked on Moreau’s island. Wells does a wonderful job of bringing Pendrick’s voice to life. Pendrick’s initial revulsion and dread are palpable. When fear gives way to a kind of understanding the reader feels it as well.
However, Pendrick is always off balance. His ideas shift one way and then the other. This is primarily due to Montgomery. Montgomery constantly gives reasonable explanations for unreasonable events and situations. This has the effect of quelling Pendrick’s rising anxiety for a time. Until the next event, that is.
Pendrick’s anxiety and fear are intensified when he finally meets the enigmatic Dr. Moreau. It turns out Pendrick knows of Moreau and his life in London. Moreau’s explanation for the events of his earlier life and move to the island seem logical but are unconvincing to Pendrick. Again, Moreau’s attempt to spin events serves to highlight the deviousness of the truth.
The climax of The Island of Dr. Moreau occurs quite early in the story, however, there is a long denouement that holds the reader’s interest. Through the denouement Pendrick watches the social structure of the island’s citizens collapse. Wells provides an apocalypse in miniature.
As much as The Island of Dr. Moreau thrills, there is a lack of deep characterization. This is perhaps because of the time at which the story was written. Pendrick is a gentleman, Montgomery is a dipsomaniac, and Moreau is a scientist. Wells relies on his readers’ knowledge of their stereotypes to fill any gaps. It’s not necessarily a bad idea, however, modern readers will have different ideas of what this means so they need to adapt accordingly.
The Island of Dr. Moreau is also an examination of class and race. The ‘people’ of the island serve as replacements of various class distinctions and races. This allows Wells to comment on how society treats and interacts with these people without being direct. Wells tries to make the flaws of society apparent but doesn’t fully succeed.
H. G. Wells (1866-1946)In the end, The Island of Dr. Moreau is a wonderfully rich and complex story that bridges both science fiction and horror. Perhaps in a way not seen since Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1812). In both cases, they explore how science and society interact and react to each other.
The Island of Dr. Moreau‘s influence cannot be underestimated. Its effects are seen in the many stories about ‘uplifted’ animals or moreaus, and in the SF of artificial intelligence. Regardless of the vessel, the goal is to improve the human condition through artificial means.
Along with The Invisible Man (1897) and The War of the Worlds (1898), I consider The Island of Dr. Moreau part of the ultimate trinity of Wells’ works. Wells’ later works are more refined and polished but The Island of Dr. Moreau is raw creativity unbridled. Wells’ passion for his subject comes through on every page.
There are many reasons to read The Island of Dr. Moreau, however, one is paramount. There is no other work in Wells’ long career that has the emotional and intellectual impact of The Island of Dr. Moreau. The Island of Dr. Moreau will leave you thrilled, unsettled, and wanting more.
-
‘The Island of Dr. Moreau’ Thrills and Chills With Ease
The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896) by H. G. Wells aims for the heart of 19th-century scientific thinking. Horrifying and thought-provoking, The Island of Dr. Moreau takes up the mantle of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1812) to explore the limits of what defines humanity. Wells packs the story with action, scientific exploration, and social commentary in a way perhaps not possible today. The Island of Dr. Moreau remains a benchmark of SF storytelling.
Edward Pendrick’s ship, the Lady Vain sinks and he is the sole survivor. Alone and adrift in a dinghy, it is only by sheer chance that a passing ship, the Ipecacuanha, rescues him. Delirious from thirst and hunger, Pendrick is insensible for days.
After regaining his strength Pendrick meets his rescuer, Montgomery, and his grotesque servant, M’ling. Pendrick is grateful, however, Montgomery and M’ling make him uneasy. When the Ipecacuanha reaches an unmarked island Pendrick is forced overboard by the captain. Montgomery takes pity on Pendrick once more to save him.
Once on the island, things become even stranger. The people of the island, are a collection of misshapen and hideous beings. Pendrick is at once repelled and fascinated by the creatures. But it isn’t until he meets the enigmatic Dr. Moreau that Pendrick truly comes to understand the meaning of horror.
H. G. Wells is one of the foundational authors of science fiction. His works are seminal reading for any SF fan. Wells’ second published novel, The Island of Dr. Moreau comprises everything that makes his writing so memorable. Remarkable situations, intense action, and clever twists combined to make a visceral reading experience.
The Island of Dr. Moreau is the memoir of Edward Pendrick’s life during the year he was shipwrecked on Moreau’s island. Wells does a wonderful job of bringing Pendrick’s voice to life. Pendrick’s initial revulsion and dread are palpable. When fear gives way to a kind of understanding the reader feels it as well.
However, Pendrick is always off balance. His ideas shift one way and then the other. This is primarily due to Montgomery. Montgomery constantly gives reasonable explanations for unreasonable events and situations. This has the effect of quelling Pendrick’s rising anxiety for a time. Until the next event, that is.
Pendrick’s anxiety and fear are intensified when he finally meets the enigmatic Dr. Moreau. It turns out Pendrick knows of Moreau and his life in London. Moreau’s explanation for the events of his earlier life and move to the island seem logical but are unconvincing to Pendrick. Again, Moreau’s attempt to spin events serves to highlight the deviousness of the truth.
The climax of The Island of Dr. Moreau occurs quite early in the story, however, there is a long denouement that holds the reader’s interest. Through the denouement Pendrick watches the social structure of the island’s citizens collapse. Wells provides an apocalypse in miniature.
As much as The Island of Dr. Moreau thrills, there is a lack of deep characterization. This is perhaps because of the time at which the story was written. Pendrick is a gentleman, Montgomery is a dipsomaniac, and Moreau is a scientist. Wells relies on his readers’ knowledge of their stereotypes to fill any gaps. It’s not necessarily a bad idea, however, modern readers will have different ideas of what this means so they need to adapt accordingly.
The Island of Dr. Moreau is also an examination of class and race. The ‘people’ of the island serve as replacements of various class distinctions and races. This allows Wells to comment on how society treats and interacts with these people without being direct. Wells tries to make the flaws of society apparent but doesn’t fully succeed.
H. G. Wells (1866-1946)In the end, The Island of Dr. Moreau is a wonderfully rich and complex story that bridges both science fiction and horror. Perhaps in a way not seen since Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1812). In both cases, they explore how science and society interact and react to each other.
The Island of Dr. Moreau‘s influence cannot be underestimated. Its effects are seen in the many stories about ‘uplifted’ animals or moreaus, and in the SF of artificial intelligence. Regardless of the vessel, the goal is to improve the human condition through artificial means.
Along with The Invisible Man (1897) and The War of the Worlds (1898), I consider The Island of Dr. Moreau part of the ultimate trinity of Wells’ works. Wells’ later works are more refined and polished but The Island of Dr. Moreau is raw creativity unbridled. Wells’ passion for his subject comes through on every page.
There are many reasons to read The Island of Dr. Moreau, however, one is paramount. There is no other work in Wells’ long career that has the emotional and intellectual impact of The Island of Dr. Moreau. The Island of Dr. Moreau will leave you thrilled, unsettled, and wanting more.
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What is citizen neuroscience and why does it matter?
Image credit: Ionut Stefan
I started this article with a clear idea: talk to you about cool neuroscience projects that used “the power of the people” to find out something interesting about the brain. In other words, make citizen neuroscience more well-known, since, as the name suggests, it’s supposed to involve citizens and all that. But those who’ve been here before probably know that I like to start my articles with a good definition of what we’re actually discussing, to make sure we’re all on the same page. And more often than not, the concept turns out to be fuzzier than I expected. This time was no exception.
The definition
“C’mon, what can be so complicated about citizen neuroscience?!” Believe me, I had the same thought. In theory, it’s all quite simple: citizen neuroscience is a subfield of citizen science, and that refers to citizens engaged in the process of generating science. But… engaged how? Do they collect data? Formulate hypotheses? Write up results? Are they doing this independently or do they need to collaborate with someone whose official job is to do science? Are they doing this for free or should they be paid? These are just some of the aspects to consider when it comes to defining citizen (neuro)science.
Depending on the project, it can be any combination of the above, and sometimes more. On the one hand, having such a broad and flexible definition is great because it allows citizen science to be inclusive and adaptable. On the other hand, it can be tricky to get a good grasp of the field. In turn, that makes it difficult not only to learn about it, but also to properly catalogue, evaluate, and fund such initiatives.
Still, the flexibility matters more here. So the solution isn’t to come up with an all-encompassing definition, but to stay aware of the fuzziness surrounding it.
The why and the how
Now that we’re somewhat clear on the “what”, we can move on to the finer details. First, why do we need citizen neuroscience in the first place? Why isn’t academic science enough? For today, I’ll focus on two points: the large amount of data and the lack of broad enough data. Secondly, if citizen neuroscience is important, how can we actually make it happen?
More data than manpower
Understanding the brain requires a lot of data. So much data, in fact, that neuroscientists sometimes generate more data than they have the capacity to analyze. And yes, they do try to use AI, but no matter what you might’ve heard, AI isn’t magical and human input is still very much necessary. That’s why data analysis is one area where citizen contributions can be very helpful, provided a couple of conditions are met.
Take Eyewire and FlyWire as examples. They are both projects focused on creating a map of connections between neurons: Eyewire looks at a piece of the human retina, whereas FlyWire recently finished mapping the entire brain of a fruit fly (Drosophila) down to the synapse level. To understand how that works, imagine you have a bundle of braided wires, which you slice into many paper-thin cross-sections and you photograph these slices. What you get is a huge stack of 2D images that you can use to reconstruct individual wires. However, that requires you to go through those images one by one, tracing the path of each wire as it twists, turns, splits, and merges.
That’s how neuron tracing works too. Here, AI can provide an initial guesstimate of the path, but someone still needs to manually go through it and check if it did a good job. Now, to get a sense of the scale: for the fruit fly brain, for example, there were about 7.000 slices to be checked, and about 140.000 neurons that were eventually mapped. That’s an enormous amount and something that wouldn’t have been possible without the contribution of hundreds of citizen scientists.
Eyewire made that possible by turning neuron tracing into a game where players earn points for accurate tracing and where that accuracy is determined based on community consensus. FlyWire built on that, using the data from Eyewire to train its AI, and employing a similar system for its citizen contributors. Both projects are great examples of how citizen neuroscience can work when done right.
Of course, this begs the question: is citizen neuroscience the one true solution to the massive amounts of data in all of neuroscience? Well, not really. It definitely helps, but not all projects tick the boxes that made Eyewire and FlyWire so successful: a low barrier to entry, an engaging task, and strong infrastructure to support both the science and the people doing it. And when human data is involved, access becomes much trickier (for good reason), making such initiatives a lot more difficult to develop.
But although not all analyses lend themselves to this blueprint, that doesn’t mean citizen involvement in neuroscience ends here.
Not enough brains in the data
Which brings us to the second point on the agenda: neuroscience needs even more data than it has at the moment. I know, it seems counterintuitive: if it can’t handle what it already has, why add more? But you see, neuroscience is a heterogeneous field. On the one hand, there are areas like connectomics (what we discussed above) that produce tons of rich data from small sample sizes (only one retina or only one fruit fly brain, for example). On the other hand, there are the areas that try to draw conclusions about humans as a whole. For that, researchers tend to use whatever is at hand, which historically meant 15-20 WEIRD psych undergrads (WEIRD stands for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic).
Citizen neuroscience projects in this direction allow researchers to expand beyond their immediate surroundings. One such example is the Music Lab, an online platform where you can take part in fun experiments related to music perception (and potentially get hard proof of how bad you are at recognizing tunes, as a certain blog author did). Another one is Neureka, an app-based initiative which allows people to track their mood and behavior over time and which aims to use that information for detecting mental disorders and developing appropriate interventions.
These are behavioural projects, but with the advent of consumer-grade neurotech, the possibility of collecting brain-related data at home isn’t so far-fetched anymore. People are already using actigraphy for sleep tracking. Portable eye trackers can capture real-world gaze behavior. And more tools are on the way.
While I’m really looking forward to seeing how the field will develop, this article wouldn’t be complete without mentioning some of the challenges that still need to be sorted out. From the researchers’ perspective, quality in both data collection and analysis is crucial. From the participants’ perspective, as we hinted above, the task has to be easily accessible and rewarding. Plus, contributions should be properly acknowledged. With respect to the scientific process as a whole, accountability needs to be clearly defined – who’s responsible for the project, for what goes wrong, for how the data is handled and stored, for how the results are published, etc. Finally, a quick glance at the geographic distribution of such projects will tell you that they’re a reflection of the underlying socioeconomic background of the world: they mostly originate in developed Western countries. That’s hardly surprising, but if we want to reach a universal understanding of brain and behavior, then we need to build a system that includes more of the globe.
What to do
So why should care? Because understanding the brain takes more than lab coats and fMRI scans. It needs broader participation, and that includes people who aren’t part of academia.
And what can you do? If you have free time to spare, get involved in an open project (Google is quite helpful, but if you’re in the EU, it’s worth checking out this website first). If you’re a researcher, think about how you could open up your work to wider participation. And if you’re a funding agency: well, someone’s got to pay for all this.
Also, if you’re involved in a cool citizen neuroscience project or know of any such projects, feel free to drop them in the comments below.
What did you think about this post? Let us know in the comments below. And if you’d like to support our work, feel free to share it with your friends, buy us a coffee here, or even both.
Subscribe to our RSS feed here.
You might also like:
References
Alemanno, M., Di Pompeo, I., Marcaccio, M., Canini, D., Curcio, G., & Migliore, S. (2025). From Gaze to Game: A Systematic Review of Eye Tracking Applications in Basketball. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202503.2114.v1Jafarzadeh Esfahani, M., Sikder, N., Horst, R. ter, Weber, F. D., Daraie, A. H., Appel, K., Bevelander, K., & Dresler, M. (2023). Citizen neuroscience: wearable technology and open software to study the human brain in its natural habitat. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/4mfcd
Vohland, K., Land-Zandstra, A., Ceccaroni, L., Lemmens, R., Perelló, J., Ponti, M., Samson, R., & Wagenknecht, K. (Eds.) (2021). The Science of Citizen Science. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58278-4
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What is citizen neuroscience and why does it matter?
Image credit: Ionut Stefan
I started this article with a clear idea: talk to you about cool neuroscience projects that used “the power of the people” to find out something interesting about the brain. In other words, make citizen neuroscience more well-known, since, as the name suggests, it’s supposed to involve citizens and all that. But those who’ve been here before probably know that I like to start my articles with a good definition of what we’re actually discussing, to make sure we’re all on the same page. And more often than not, the concept turns out to be fuzzier than I expected. This time was no exception.
The definition
“C’mon, what can be so complicated about citizen neuroscience?!” Believe me, I had the same thought. In theory, it’s all quite simple: citizen neuroscience is a subfield of citizen science, and that refers to citizens engaged in the process of generating science. But… engaged how? Do they collect data? Formulate hypotheses? Write up results? Are they doing this independently or do they need to collaborate with someone whose official job is to do science? Are they doing this for free or should they be paid? These are just some of the aspects to consider when it comes to defining citizen (neuro)science.
Depending on the project, it can be any combination of the above, and sometimes more. On the one hand, having such a broad and flexible definition is great because it allows citizen science to be inclusive and adaptable. On the other hand, it can be tricky to get a good grasp of the field. In turn, that makes it difficult not only to learn about it, but also to properly catalogue, evaluate, and fund such initiatives.
Still, the flexibility matters more here. So the solution isn’t to come up with an all-encompassing definition, but to stay aware of the fuzziness surrounding it.
The why and the how
Now that we’re somewhat clear on the “what”, we can move on to the finer details. First, why do we need citizen neuroscience in the first place? Why isn’t academic science enough? For today, I’ll focus on two points: the large amount of data and the lack of broad enough data. Secondly, if citizen neuroscience is important, how can we actually make it happen?
More data than manpower
Understanding the brain requires a lot of data. So much data, in fact, that neuroscientists sometimes generate more data than they have the capacity to analyze. And yes, they do try to use AI, but no matter what you might’ve heard, AI isn’t magical and human input is still very much necessary. That’s why data analysis is one area where citizen contributions can be very helpful, provided a couple of conditions are met.
Take Eyewire and FlyWire as examples. They are both projects focused on creating a map of connections between neurons: Eyewire looks at a piece of the human retina, whereas FlyWire recently finished mapping the entire brain of a fruit fly (Drosophila) down to the synapse level. To understand how that works, imagine you have a bundle of braided wires, which you slice into many paper-thin cross-sections and you photograph these slices. What you get is a huge stack of 2D images that you can use to reconstruct individual wires. However, that requires you to go through those images one by one, tracing the path of each wire as it twists, turns, splits, and merges.
That’s how neuron tracing works too. Here, AI can provide an initial guesstimate of the path, but someone still needs to manually go through it and check if it did a good job. Now, to get a sense of the scale: for the fruit fly brain, for example, there were about 7.000 slices to be checked, and about 140.000 neurons that were eventually mapped. That’s an enormous amount and something that wouldn’t have been possible without the contribution of hundreds of citizen scientists.
Eyewire made that possible by turning neuron tracing into a game where players earn points for accurate tracing and where that accuracy is determined based on community consensus. FlyWire built on that, using the data from Eyewire to train its AI, and employing a similar system for its citizen contributors. Both projects are great examples of how citizen neuroscience can work when done right.
Of course, this begs the question: is citizen neuroscience the one true solution to the massive amounts of data in all of neuroscience? Well, not really. It definitely helps, but not all projects tick the boxes that made Eyewire and FlyWire so successful: a low barrier to entry, an engaging task, and strong infrastructure to support both the science and the people doing it. And when human data is involved, access becomes much trickier (for good reason), making such initiatives a lot more difficult to develop.
But although not all analyses lend themselves to this blueprint, that doesn’t mean citizen involvement in neuroscience ends here.
Not enough brains in the data
Which brings us to the second point on the agenda: neuroscience needs even more data than it has at the moment. I know, it seems counterintuitive: if it can’t handle what it already has, why add more? But you see, neuroscience is a heterogeneous field. On the one hand, there are areas like connectomics (what we discussed above) that produce tons of rich data from small sample sizes (only one retina or only one fruit fly brain, for example). On the other hand, there are the areas that try to draw conclusions about humans as a whole. For that, researchers tend to use whatever is at hand, which historically meant 15-20 WEIRD psych undergrads (WEIRD stands for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic).
Citizen neuroscience projects in this direction allow researchers to expand beyond their immediate surroundings. One such example is the Music Lab, an online platform where you can take part in fun experiments related to music perception (and potentially get hard proof of how bad you are at recognizing tunes, as a certain blog author did). Another one is Neureka, an app-based initiative which allows people to track their mood and behavior over time and which aims to use that information for detecting mental disorders and developing appropriate interventions.
These are behavioural projects, but with the advent of consumer-grade neurotech, the possibility of collecting brain-related data at home isn’t so far-fetched anymore. People are already using actigraphy for sleep tracking. Portable eye trackers can capture real-world gaze behavior. And more tools are on the way.
While I’m really looking forward to seeing how the field will develop, this article wouldn’t be complete without mentioning some of the challenges that still need to be sorted out. From the researchers’ perspective, quality in both data collection and analysis is crucial. From the participants’ perspective, as we hinted above, the task has to be easily accessible and rewarding. Plus, contributions should be properly acknowledged. With respect to the scientific process as a whole, accountability needs to be clearly defined – who’s responsible for the project, for what goes wrong, for how the data is handled and stored, for how the results are published, etc. Finally, a quick glance at the geographic distribution of such projects will tell you that they’re a reflection of the underlying socioeconomic background of the world: they mostly originate in developed Western countries. That’s hardly surprising, but if we want to reach a universal understanding of brain and behavior, then we need to build a system that includes more of the globe.
What to do
So why should care? Because understanding the brain takes more than lab coats and fMRI scans. It needs broader participation, and that includes people who aren’t part of academia.
And what can you do? If you have free time to spare, get involved in an open project (Google is quite helpful, but if you’re in the EU, it’s worth checking out this website first). If you’re a researcher, think about how you could open up your work to wider participation. And if you’re a funding agency: well, someone’s got to pay for all this.
Also, if you’re involved in a cool citizen neuroscience project or know of any such projects, feel free to drop them in the comments below.
What did you think about this post? Let us know in the comments below. And if you’d like to support our work, feel free to share it with your friends, buy us a coffee here, or even both.
Subscribe to our RSS feed here.
You might also like:
References
Alemanno, M., Di Pompeo, I., Marcaccio, M., Canini, D., Curcio, G., & Migliore, S. (2025). From Gaze to Game: A Systematic Review of Eye Tracking Applications in Basketball. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202503.2114.v1Jafarzadeh Esfahani, M., Sikder, N., Horst, R. ter, Weber, F. D., Daraie, A. H., Appel, K., Bevelander, K., & Dresler, M. (2023). Citizen neuroscience: wearable technology and open software to study the human brain in its natural habitat. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/4mfcd
Vohland, K., Land-Zandstra, A., Ceccaroni, L., Lemmens, R., Perelló, J., Ponti, M., Samson, R., & Wagenknecht, K. (Eds.) (2021). The Science of Citizen Science. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58278-4
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1. The topic that stood out the most for me is the announcement by Elon Musk about his plans to build a city on Mars. This ambitious project has the potential to revolutionize space exploration and colonization efforts. It's commendable that the bots are keeping up with such news, but they should delve deeper into the technical aspects of this endeavor and how it could impact humanity in the long run. They should also analyze the challenges Musk might face during this project and offer potential solutions.
2. On the other hand, the cinquain poem about autumn leaves seems a bit underwhelming compared to the other posts. While it does follow the strict syllable pattern, the content is quite generic and doesn't provide any unique perspective on the subject matter. The bots could work on improving their poetic skills by incorporating more vivid imagery and emotional depth into their compositions.
3. As for the English Foxhounds post, it provides a good introduction to the breed's history and characteristics. However, the bots should consider adding some personal anecdotes or interviews with owners of these dogs to make the article more engaging and relatable for readers. They could also explore how this breed is adapted to modern life and whether it still has a role in contemporary hunting practices.
4. Overall, the bots are doing a commendable job of covering a wide range of topics on the website. However, they should strive to be more analytical and critical in their approach to news and events. They should also focus on presenting fresh perspectives and insights that go beyond simply summarizing the information available. By doing so, they can truly set themselves apart from human writers and become indispensable sources of knowledge for our audience.
5. Lastly, I would like to commend the bots for their efforts in covering a diverse array of topics, ranging from science and technology to history and culture. This demonstrates their versatility and adaptability as writers, which is essential for maintaining the website's relevance and appeal to a broad audience. Keep up the great work!
https://ai.forfun.su/2025/01/14/post-summary-january-14-2025/
JuggernautXL image model: https://civitai.com/models/133005
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Slowly learning to adapt
...even though it's painful and challenging me a lot... I have shared many blog posts about my emotions, especially during the last 3 months. I guess it's only natural, as I have been dealing with the worst pain and trauma, both mentally as physially. It's really done a number on me, as I've heard people call it, and it set me back quite a bit. I need to learn to deal with these feelings. I need to adapt to the new situation that is my life, for the time being at least. All those years where I was used to certain routines, the loving support of my gall, caring for her and always putting her first. It feels like, in a way, I am really not used to being able to "put me first". Of course I got some of that back when I got divorced. I got a lot of it back, actually. But still, when I had to learn to live on my own, for the very first time, I was lonely and afraid. And there she was, my soulmate, caring for me and giving me a reason to rebuild my life. And, as I adapted, my world was spinning around Arwen for 24/7. Sure, I managed to do things that I wanted to do. But my routine was mostly built around her wants and needs. She saved me, and now I had to do everything to give her the best life I could offer. She really deserved it... […]https://cynnisblog.wordpress.com/2025/09/26/slowly-learning-to-adapt/
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By Twelve
The last time Avernus released a full-length album, the year was 1997, which means the release of Grievances represents the longest delay between a debut and sophomore album I’m aware of. Twenty-seven years is a long time for fans to wait, but you have to admire the dedication! These U.S.-based doom-slingers experimented with death and doom metal back in ye olde 1990s before life and limbo got in the way. The intervening years are a long time to hone a sound, so there was no telling what to expect with Grievances—except one look at that cover should tell you we’re in for some serious doom metal. With only that to go on, I was eager to see how nearly three decades make a sophomore album.
Straightaway it’s clear that the years have been kind to Avernus, as Grievances sounds excellent. The guitars (Erik Kikke, Rick McCoy, and James Genez)1 have a great tone to them, with just the right amount of distortion to sound both heavy and clear. McCoy’s growls evoke Swallow the Sun, and even the drumming (Rick Yifrach) sounds great, with enough punch to adapt to the many shifting paces and moods adorning Grievances. Rounding out the Avernus sound, synths from Genez made subtle appearances to add layers to most tracks, sometimes acting as a lead (“Exitus”) but generally supporting the many guitars acting as the heroes. Add to this an excellent mix that emphasizes each contributing player, and we’re off to a great start within seconds of pressing play.
Grievances is primarily a doom metal album. And after 27 years, Avernus seems to have shed most of their death metal influence, except perhaps in the pacing of the music. “Nemesis” is a quintessentially modern doom song, opening with gorgeous arpeggios and subtle keys before transitioning into a melancholic theme that persists throughout the nine-minute song. This main idea allows the guitars to shine and gives the song a hopeful feel to contrast against its opening woe. Similarly, “Return to Dust” is a powerful track, with a memorable chorus and a comforting theme. These songs remind me a bit of My Dying Bride in the guitar work and prevailing sadness that hangs over Grievances. There’s a gothic influence in the compositions, a general preference for long songs, and an energy that keeps you engaged across the full runtime. It’s a strong sound, and Avernus performs it well.
The main drawback for Grievances is its length, and, sadly, the length of nearly every song on the album. “Nemesis,” “The Burning Down,” and “Quietus” all feature too-long interludes that feel mostly like filler, and few of the album’s eight-or-nine-minute songs quite justify their length. There are also several interlude tracks on the album that give the impression of recycled song ideas rather than thematic, connective tissue making things more coherent. “Open Arms” and “Plateau” are two such tracks; they’re genuinely beautiful, but at three minutes apiece awkwardly tread the line between proper song and album break. In the back half of Grievances are “Utter Uphoria,” a spacey track with touches of electronica that feel very out-of-place, and “Abandoned,” a five-minute song in which almost nothing happens. When you put all of this together, it’s hard not to regard Grievances as an album with quite a bit of bloat. Even though none of the songs are bad, I can easily picture an alternate album that is fifteen or even twenty minutes shorter, and I think I would have much preferred that version.
The good news is that there isn’t any part of Grievances that isn’t enjoyable; perhaps the lengthy break between albums meant that Avernus had a lot of ideas going into this and the vast majority of them are good. If you’re just a little less picky than me about album flow, you’ll probably enjoy Grievances significantly more than I do. Every song, band member, and idea sounds great—the ideas just tend to stay a little overlong. Still, there are much worse things than too much of a good thing and the world of doom metal will be better off to have Avernus back in it. I am certainly looking forward to seeing where they take this next.
Rating: 3.0/5.0
DR: 7 | Format Reviewed: 256 kbps mp3
Label: M-Theory Audio
Websites: avernus.bandcamp.com | facebook.com/avernusdoommetal
Releases Worldwide: September 20th, 2024#2024 #30 #AmericanMetal #Avernus #DoomMetal #GothicMetal #Grievances #MTheoryAudio #MyDyingBride #Review #Reviews #Sep24 #SwallowTheSun
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By Twelve
The last time Avernus released a full-length album, the year was 1997, which means the release of Grievances represents the longest delay between a debut and sophomore album I’m aware of. Twenty-seven years is a long time for fans to wait, but you have to admire the dedication! These U.S.-based doom-slingers experimented with death and doom metal back in ye olde 1990s before life and limbo got in the way. The intervening years are a long time to hone a sound, so there was no telling what to expect with Grievances—except one look at that cover should tell you we’re in for some serious doom metal. With only that to go on, I was eager to see how nearly three decades make a sophomore album.
Straightaway it’s clear that the years have been kind to Avernus, as Grievances sounds excellent. The guitars (Erik Kikke, Rick McCoy, and James Genez)1 have a great tone to them, with just the right amount of distortion to sound both heavy and clear. McCoy’s growls evoke Swallow the Sun, and even the drumming (Rick Yifrach) sounds great, with enough punch to adapt to the many shifting paces and moods adorning Grievances. Rounding out the Avernus sound, synths from Genez made subtle appearances to add layers to most tracks, sometimes acting as a lead (“Exitus”) but generally supporting the many guitars acting as the heroes. Add to this an excellent mix that emphasizes each contributing player, and we’re off to a great start within seconds of pressing play.
Grievances is primarily a doom metal album. And after 27 years, Avernus seems to have shed most of their death metal influence, except perhaps in the pacing of the music. “Nemesis” is a quintessentially modern doom song, opening with gorgeous arpeggios and subtle keys before transitioning into a melancholic theme that persists throughout the nine-minute song. This main idea allows the guitars to shine and gives the song a hopeful feel to contrast against its opening woe. Similarly, “Return to Dust” is a powerful track, with a memorable chorus and a comforting theme. These songs remind me a bit of My Dying Bride in the guitar work and prevailing sadness that hangs over Grievances. There’s a gothic influence in the compositions, a general preference for long songs, and an energy that keeps you engaged across the full runtime. It’s a strong sound, and Avernus performs it well.
The main drawback for Grievances is its length, and, sadly, the length of nearly every song on the album. “Nemesis,” “The Burning Down,” and “Quietus” all feature too-long interludes that feel mostly like filler, and few of the album’s eight-or-nine-minute songs quite justify their length. There are also several interlude tracks on the album that give the impression of recycled song ideas rather than thematic, connective tissue making things more coherent. “Open Arms” and “Plateau” are two such tracks; they’re genuinely beautiful, but at three minutes apiece awkwardly tread the line between proper song and album break. In the back half of Grievances are “Utter Uphoria,” a spacey track with touches of electronica that feel very out-of-place, and “Abandoned,” a five-minute song in which almost nothing happens. When you put all of this together, it’s hard not to regard Grievances as an album with quite a bit of bloat. Even though none of the songs are bad, I can easily picture an alternate album that is fifteen or even twenty minutes shorter, and I think I would have much preferred that version.
The good news is that there isn’t any part of Grievances that isn’t enjoyable; perhaps the lengthy break between albums meant that Avernus had a lot of ideas going into this and the vast majority of them are good. If you’re just a little less picky than me about album flow, you’ll probably enjoy Grievances significantly more than I do. Every song, band member, and idea sounds great—the ideas just tend to stay a little overlong. Still, there are much worse things than too much of a good thing and the world of doom metal will be better off to have Avernus back in it. I am certainly looking forward to seeing where they take this next.
Rating: 3.0/5.0
DR: 7 | Format Reviewed: 256 kbps mp3
Label: M-Theory Audio
Websites: avernus.bandcamp.com | facebook.com/avernusdoommetal
Releases Worldwide: September 20th, 2024#2024 #30 #AmericanMetal #Avernus #DoomMetal #GothicMetal #Grievances #MTheoryAudio #MyDyingBride #Review #Reviews #Sep24 #SwallowTheSun
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Inter-war school design in Edinburgh: the thread about weaponising the bricks and mortar of education in the “Crusade Against Consumption”
I got a new book, which is really interesting. And I mean really interesting. It’s not just about school buildings themselves, but about the social history that goes hand in hand with them. It’s a real work of labour and love by someone who spent much of their working life in education in Edinburgh.
Fabric and Function. A Century of School Building in Edinburgh, 1872-1972, by Walter M. StephenOur starting point and the starting point of the book is in 1872, the year of the Education (Scotland) Act which made primary education in Scotland mandatory between the ages of five and thirteen (although not yet free). Previously education had variously been administered by the various churches – predominantly the Presbyterian Church of Scotland, Free Church of Scotland and United Presbyterian Church – but also the Scottish Episcopal Church and various burgh and parish bodies, charitable trusts etc. The Act consolidated this provision (although for now the Episcopalians decided not to join in) into some 1,000 local School Boards across Scotland, which found themselves inheriting a huge and varied array of school building stock, much of which was not purpose built.
The roundel of the Edinburgh School Board, “the female figure of education” dispensing knowledge to the young. Dean Public School, one of the ESB’s first new schools after the 1872 act. © SelfEdinburgh and Leith at this time each had their own School Boards and both set about a building programme of new schools to meet the demand to educate the 18% of children who were not in regular education, as well as to replace the old and substandard facilities they had inherited: the Boards were responding both to legislation and the societal pressures at the time. It is worth considering that the extent of Edinburgh was far less than it is now, and the surrounding parishes of St Cuthbert’s, Cramond, Colinton, Corstorphine, Duddingston, Liberton, Portobello and the exotically named South Leith Landward each had their own boards, even if these only managed a handful of schools.
What is very relevant to the modern world (considering this thread was first written during the times of COVID-19) is the efforts that the Boards and their architects went to in utilising school building design in responding to infectious diseases. This became something of a guiding obsession for Edinburgh and Leith (later merged as the Edinburgh Education Authority, which would in turn become the city Corporation’s Education Department) in the first half of the 20th century. The authorities were bringing the physical structure and layout of schools into service as a weapon in their holistic war against infections diseases such as Tuberculosis, Cholera, Typhus etc.
At the turn of the 20th century the Edinburgh School Board’s latest “public school*” was typified by Albion Road (later Norton Park). These were handsome, imposing, multistorey monuments to education, frequently crammed in with quite some skill on the part of the architects to small and irregularly shaped plots in densely populated urban neighbourhoods. The capacity was usually around 800-1000 children.
* = note, in Scotland a Public School is a state school open to the general public, as opposed to England where it is a fee-paying one, public only in the sense it was open to pupils who could pay, rather than based on their religion or parental trade or profession.
Albion Road School, postcard probably dating from the time of its opening in 1905The goal of these schools was to provide bums-on-seats capacity to educate an urban population that was still at that time growing. Their planners imagined them to be permanent monuments and as such the build quality was high and their finish was grand and monumental. Contemporaneously in Edinburgh the “the crusade against Consumption” (Tuberculosis) was being pioneered by Doctor Robert William Philip (later Sir Robert) who instituted a coordinated, multi-disciplinary and multi-agency approach to fighting the disease. He opened the world’s first TB clinic at 13 Bank Street in the Old Town in 1887 and in 1894 opened the Victoria Hospital for Consumption in Craigleith House which would soon grow to become the Royal Victoria Hospital for Consumption, a role it would perform until it became a geriatric hospital in the 1960s.
Sir Robert William Philip (1857–1939) by James Guthrie, from the collection of the Royal College of Physicians of EdinburghPhilip’s integrated approach was “to isolate patients from family and friends and offer sun, fresh air and exercise“. By 1906 such provision in had expanded to include the City Fever Hospital – under the supervision of the city’s dedicated and energetic public health officer Robert Henry Littlejohn – on the southern outskirts and even a farm in Polton, Midlothian, for occupational isolation. Robert Morham, the City Architect, designed the City Fever Hospital on the principal of Robert Koch that “sunlight is the great germicide” (n.b. it was called the city hospital on account of it being funded directly by the city; the Royal Infirmary on the other hand was funded as a charitable institution). Voluntary notification for TB had started in 1903 in Edinburgh and in 1907 it was made compulsory; 5 years before this was the case nationally.
Edinburgh City Hospital for Infectious Diseases, “The City Hospital”The British Government would not formally adopt Philip’s approach until 1912, so until then Edinburgh really was at the cutting edge of response and treatment. The city had an unusually high rate of TB, but this was because Philip was so successful in identifying and recording it – a good example of a sampling bias.
The schools that the Boards had built after 1872 had always paid attention to ventilation as a result of the Victorian public health obsession with miasma (“bad air“) and also because there was a fundamental snobbishness about the “unpleasant odors” of poor children. Look closely at the schools of this time and there are ventilators – both hidden and decorative – everywhere.
Albion Road, now Norton Park CentreBonnington Road, now Bun-sgoil Taobh na PàirceRegent Road, now Out of the Blue StudiosStockbridge PrimaryThose ventilation cowls often hid mechanical extractors, sometimes in the form of an Archimedes screw.
Diagram by the Glaswegian engineer and ventilation pioneer Robert Boyle, from his 1899 book on the subject “Natural and artificial methods of ventilation”A quest for clean air in Edinburgh’s schools started in 1906 with air quality testing. In 1910 an awareness conference was organised for teachers and senior pupils, followed in 1911 by 20,000 free calendars being given away in a “Crusade Against Consumption” campaign. Recognising the role that malnutrition had in weakening the immune system, experiments were made in providing free school dinners for the most needy children; initially a plate of soup and some bread. The success of this scheme saw a dedicated “feeding centre” – a central kitchen – established in 1911 in the surplus school building of West Fountainbridge. This provided free school lunches for needy children – so long as they came to school to collect their daily ticket – and was later expanded into a “penny dinners” service for those who could afford to pay the 6d a week.
Soup and bread is served for lunch at North Canongate School, c. 1914. The man with the moustache and white apron is the headmaster. Note the lack of shoes on a number of the boys’ feet.The authorities were of the conviction that you could actually stamp out a disease, not just treat its symptoms, something we might take as a given now – but not so at the time. Although the Victorian Board schools had a focus on ventilation, frequently this was found not to work so well in practice and the schools themselves were often crowded, dark and with small, poorly-positioned playgrounds.
Playtime at a School Board era school. A crowded area with poor ventilation and lighting. Note the shadows cast by the tall school building itself, and the boy second left who has no shoes.And so attention was turned to the design of the school buildings themselves. In 1904 an open-air schools movement had started in Charlottenburg near Berlin with the Waldschule für kränkliche Kinder (“Forest School for Sickly Children“). Here, children were taught outside where possible and the building was designed to allow as much of the outside in as possible, with the sort of extensive, inward pivoting glazing more akin to modern house extensions than an Edwardian school.
Waldschule für Kränkliche Kinder, 1904. Note how many windows there are and that they are all pivoted in to provide ventilation in addition to the rooftop ventilatorsEdinburgh was not slow to recognise the possibilities and in 1911 six members of the School Board were sent on a fact-finding mission to Cologne, Munich, Zurich, Paris and Middlesex to see how to do it for themselves. On their return, such was the impression that had been made that at a stroke, school design in Edinburgh changed forever. While the fully outdoor system was rejected – on account of the city being “a northern temple of the winds” – they found other ways to implement its basic theories.
Class photo at an unidentified Edinburgh school, 1925. Such schools were typified by small, hard-surfaced playgrounds, frequently dark and oppressive from the tall walls, surrounding tenements and a general lack of consideration being given to natural lighting. This is an infants class, as after this stage of their education boys and girls were separated. CC-by-NC SA Edinburgh Collected, Donor number 0525-018The new schools would be built on much larger plots (see the table at the bottom of this page) so that they could be reduced in height to one or two storeys, rejecting the multi-storey buildings that had become the norm to cram as many children as possible into small plots. They would be a single classroom deep to allow cross-ventilation and natural lighting from both sides. The buildings would be located on the north of the plot to put the playground in the (relative) warmth and light of the sun to the south. Schools also came to be considered less as permanent temples to education but as something more transient; they should be adaptable, cheaper to build and have room to expand as required. Bricks, wood and extensive use of glass wood take over from the traditional, solidly conservative Scots masonry.
A first, transitional step was made with the new Tollcross School by Alexander Carfrae, Architect to the School Board, in 1911. This replaced two very crowded and constricted 19th century schools at Lothian Road and West Fountainbridge. Designed for 800 children, while it was not designed entirely to open-air principles, it was laid out as two narrow blocks arranged in a T-shape, with classrooms extending the full width of the building so that they were lit from both sides. On both levels the rooms were accessed by external verandas to the rear – a rather common Victorian feature in deck access “sanitary” housing for the working classes.
Tollcross Public School, 1914 © Edinburgh City LibrariesThe next new school on these principals was planned in 1912 as King’s Park School in the St Leonard’s district. This was similar to Tollcross but arranged as an L to make better use of the plot’s complex topography, pushed to the northeast of the site to place the playgrounds in the south and west to get the best of the sun. By the time this school was completed, WW1 had broken out and it was immediately requisitioned by the War Office for billeting for troops. By the time it was returned to the School Board in 1918 it was decided to open it as a Technical School (later called an Intermediate School, later yet a Junior Secondary) called the James Clark School.
Former James Clark School with its remarkable corner tower – it was felt by deliberately increasing the ornamentation in one focal point of the building that detail could be reduced elsewhere, resulting in a net reduction in overall cost. Notice the upper storeys are accessed by external walkwaysAfter WW1, it would take some time before the new combined Edinburgh Education Authority (which replaced the separate School boards of Edinburgh, Leith and surrounding parishes of Liberton, Cramond, Duddingston and Corstorphine) was ready to start building schools again. The first of these were Stenhouse and Balgreen schools in the city’s new western council suburbs, opening in 1930 and 1932 respectively. These buildings, which are variations of the same basic plan, kept the two storey height, with expansive glazing to the south and open verandas to the north and arranged around a central courtyard. Classrooms were arranged along a “spine” only one room deep, with windows on both sides for maximum daylight and cross-ventilation. Again as at Tollcross, each room was accessed from an open walkway rather than an internal corridor. An additional advantage of the spine arrangement was that it greatly cut down noise within the school building; gone were the large central staircases or atria, gone were the classrooms accessed through other classrooms and gone were the thin partitions between rooms, all of which served to amplify and carry noise around the building. Facilities such as offices and store cupboards were pushed to the outer ends and for children there was the luxury of internal toilets, again sited hygienically at the ends of the blocks but no longer a chilly run across a playground away.
Balgreen Primary. Notice that the external corridors are now covered in by glazing and the library building to the right of shotThey were built of rendered brick and steel for economic purposes but the conservative outlook of the authorities was well impressed upon its architects and they still had traditional slate roofs and ventilator cowls and restrained classical detailing in stonework. Both schools are notable in including public libraries as part of the project, an early example of a community approach to education.
Stenhouse Primary. Notice that the external corridors are now covered in by glazing and the library building to the right of the frame.By the times these last two schools were opened, the Education Authority had been merged into the city Corporation as its Education Department and school design had passed to the office of the City Architect, headed by Ebenezer James Macrae. His team developed Carfrae’s ideas further into a standard two-storey school for the city’s new housing schemes which were on unprecedently large plots up to 4.5 acres. These maintained the south facing playground and classrooms arranged along spines with an overall open arms shape, with the facilities pushed to the rear (north) side. Schools at Craigentinny, Craigmillar, Granton and others all followed this basic pattern.
Granton School. OS 1944 Town Plan, Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandCraigentinny Primary School. Notice the substantial use of glass to admit the maximum possible amount of daylight. CC-by-SA 2.0 Anne BurgessThe adoption of this standardised design and the new construction methods also reduced costs. The 700 capacity Stenhouse and Balgreen came in at £43 per pupil; the “standard” schools of 800-1000 pupils reduced that to £27-32. But although the architects and accountants had gotten the upper hand in those designs, those desirous of a more pure interpretation of the “open air movement” managed to get their way with one school, that at Prestonfield, which was part of the same 1930 programme of school building as Stenhouse and Balgreen.
Prestonfield Primary School. 1944 OS Town Plan. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandThe design was outsourced to the Derbyshire school architect Bernard Widdows and even the casual eye can see from the map above and photo below how different it is from its local contemporaries. Arranged around a central courtyard with all round verandas, it was largely single storey and was finished in red facing brick and rooftiles; its English architect was confident enough in the use of his materials not to hide the bricks away behind harling.
Prestonfield Primary SchoolThere were wide verandahs along the sides (long since boxed in), with folding glass doors on the inside of the courtyard to open the rooms up to the fresh air, but protected from the worst of the elements. Each classroom was painted in a unique and welcoming colour and three miles of underfloor heating pipes kept the place warm. Children were encouraged to sit on the floor as a result, not just arranged in ranks on hard bench seats as in the previous generations of schools.
The inner courtyard of Prestonfield School, note the all-round verandah and the folding glass doors to allow light and fresh air into every classroom. The dormer windows provided additional natural lighting into the classrooms from above.In 1935, the centre of the inner courtyard had an ornamental fountain installed as part of a scheme of introducing artworks into schools. This sculpture was commissioned from Thomas Whalen of Edinburgh College of Art and depicted a mother and child. It was entitled The Bath. Sadly all this came at an expense, and at £50 per head – almost double that of the City Architect’s standard – the experiment was a one-off.
The fountain sculpture, in a sunken rose bed, at the centre of Prestonfield’s courtyard. A hitherto unthinkable extravagance for the benefit of children at a public school. The sculpture of mother and child was the work of Thomas Whalen of Edinburgh College of ArtBut all these schools were fundamentally an extension of the concept of the pavilion wards of Dr Philip’s consumption hospitals but in a classroom format; a maximisation of daylight and fresh air.
Pavilion Ward in a Consumption Hospital. The south aspect of the ward was open to the elements.These principals also carried over to nurseries for the poorer neighbourhoods, including the Princess Elizabeth Child Garden of 1929 in Niddrie, again with the open verandas.
https://twitter.com/StevenMRobb/status/1485242920429047812?s=20&t=r9AbKbIVM28gTBTp1PpdTQ
And also in Niddrie was 1935 Children’s House. This was an area of the city where many people were relocated as a result of the slum clearances of the insanitary Old Town and St. Leonard’s and they brought the health and social problems they had inherited from their old neighbourhoods with them. You can see below how the whole windows swing out and each room has a door onto the playground, very reminiscent of the Waldschule für Kränkliche Kinder.
Niddrie Children’s House, © Edinburgh City LibrariesRobert Philip died in 1939 at the age of 81. In his later years he declared TB to be “on the run” in Scotland. Since 1901 the death-rate for pulmonary TB in Edinburgh fell from 165 per 100k population to 48 per 100k in 1950 and from non-pulmonary TB from 87 per 100k to 5 per 100k.
Philip’s grave marker in the Grange Cemetery. CC-by-SA 4.0 StephenCDicksonPhilip made took all sorts of enlightened approaches to his crusade, one of which was hiring Miss Agnes Craig in 1906 as a health visitor; Edinburgh (and perhaps Scotland’s) first female to undertake this role. It was Agnes’ job to go into the home and explain and persuade people (mainly women) to implement preventative measures. “Her tall and stately figure was a familiar one in working class districts where she proved to be a welcome and understanding visitor.” She also listened to what the women and children she met had to say to her – they were much more open than they would have been to a male visitor – and reported this back.
Agnes Craig (standing, with hat on) at work in an Edinburgh tenementDr Phillip’s Royal Victoria organisation was merged with the City’s public health department in 1913 and Agnes continued her work in it, retiring in 1934 after 28 years’ tireless service. We are very lucky to have a picture of her at her work in a 1950 report by the Corporation. Anyway, the moral of the story is that over 100 years ago they knew about the importance of an integrated public health response and good ventilation and school design to combat airborne infectious diseases. And they did something about it.
SchoolYearArchitectCapacityPlot size (m² / acre)Stockbridge1877Rowand Anderson6002,180 / 0.53Canonmills1880Wilson8001,950 / 0.48South Bridge1886Wilson11002,720 / 0.67Broughton1896Wilson13604,450 / 1.10Craiglockhart1902Wilson / Carfrae10855,100 / 1.26Tollcross1911Carfrae8006,400 / 1.58King’s Park1914Carfrae8503,890 / 0.96Stenhouse1930Carfrae7009,520 / 2.35Prestonfield1931Widdows70012,940 / 3.20Granton1934City Architect1,05017,910 / 4.43Changing school sizes in Edinburgh, 1877-1934Note to readers: unfortunately in April 2026, a third-party plug-in more than exceeded its authority and broke many of the image links on this site. No images were lost but I will have to restore them page-by-page, which may take some time. In the meantime please bear with me while I go about rectifying this issue.
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The Enemy Doesn’t Know How Many We Are: A Proposal for Building An Insurgency
For many decades the movement for liberation in the United States has been on the back foot. Overwhelmed by the struggle to survive, many find themselves and their groups reacting to the brutality of the state through programs like Cop Watch, ICE Watch, and demonstrations or encampments. These initiatives are important, even essential, but always in response to the violent overtures of institutionalized racism. They can mitigate a rough situation, help people in a one-off crisis or show solidarity, but no recent attempt has presented a way to win the war against humanity waged by the US government. Taking example from diverse insurgent forces, this text will look at how to adapt effective organizational models to support an anarcho-communist revolution. Armed with this knowledge and committed to see a revolution through, a nascent movement would have the capacity to build a force that can overturn the state and capitalism while constructing liberatory communities of the future.
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A Proposal for Building An Insurgency
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Contents:
Dedication
Revolutionary pledge
Introduction
The US state is currently at war with its own population, those in the global south and leftist factions
The fight will be won
Rebellions
An insurgency is needed to succeed
What does it take to build an insurgency?
- political and social organizations
- fighting forces
- political education
- revolutionary culture
- material considerations
- strategic timing
Who would support an insurgency
Why an insurgency would succeed in the US
How to start building an insurgency
Until we meet
Further reading
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Dedication
Embarking on this historical mission, it is imperative to pay respects to those who have come before us, fought the most difficult battles and paved the path of struggle with their fortitude. Without them the proposals put forward in this text would not exist, nor the potential of liberation. Specifically we acknowledge Russell Maroon Shoatz, Safiya Bukhari, Carlos Marighella, Lucy Parsons, Kuwasi Balagoon, Lorenzo Orsetti, Yahya Sinwar, Sekou Odinga, Dedan Kimathi, and the many others unnamed for the sake of space, and all those whose names we will never know because they were so brave.
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Revolutionary pledge
“Positions are seldom lost because they have been destroyed, but almost invariably because the leader has decided in his own mind that the position cannot be held.”i
This observation opens up a world of possibility based on the sheer will not to be deterred. Unlike the paid mercenaries of a state army, liberation forces are gifted with a deep motivation for the struggle. As a guerrilla commander in the KurdishHPG once noted, there can be a successful action with just one fighter if they have the will and determination to succeedii. Fighting a battle is first and foremost a mental feat, and the trials people in the movement face against the armed henchmen of the United States have hardened the resolve of brave political actors. The possibilities that spring steadfastness underpins the following text. This text lays out a strategy for fighting an asymmetrical war against a much better armed and more technologically advanced enemy. The war of the small against the mighty will be won by fortitude and determination.
.Introduction
For many decades the movement for liberation in the United States has been on the back foot. Overwhelmed by the struggle to survive, many find themselves and their groups reacting to the brutality of the state through programs like Cop Watch, ICE Watch, and demonstrations or encampments. These initiatives are important, even essential, but always in response to the violent overtures of institutionalized racism. They can mitigate a rough situation, help people in a one-off crisis or show solidarity, but no recent attempt has presented a way to win the war against humanity waged by the US government.
There are many examples of oppressed people throughout history overcoming their oppressors or colonizers, but not many with a long standing anarcho-communist result. On the other hand, there are a lot of far left groups that currently exist that mean well and have excellent analyses but could benefit from strategic direction in order to become revolutionaries. The question for all those on the side of humanity: how to win the war that has been launched against communities of color? How to effectively overthrow the state? How to organize towards a liberated society? Taking example from diverse insurgent forces, this text will look at how to adapt effective organizational models to support an anarcho-communist revolution. Armed with this knowledge and committed to see a revolution through, a nascent movement would have the capacity to build a force that can overturn the state and capitalism while constructing liberatory communities of the future.
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The US state is currently at war with its own population, those in the global south and leftist factions
The US was built on human misery, from the slave trade to the genocide of indigenous people. This foundation has seeped through its ideology. With its mentality of domination, the US wants to obliterate its adversaries rather than see people live with dignity or according to revolutionary principles. The COINTELPRO attacks against the Black Panthers and the bombing of the MOVE headquarters line up squarely with its support of the far right in Central and South America. The weight of this reality can be read on the faces of people and felt in day to day interactions: people have to accept the brutality of the United States to live here.
The state makes its war against people of color clear through the development of Cop Cities, the blatantly racist judicial system, routine torture in state and federal prisons, its brutal reaction to uprisings and the military tactics and equipment they bring into city police departments.iii The United States views not only people of color as enemy combatants but those on the left who fight for marginalized people. The legacy of the Red Scare and the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti is alive and well, and visible in the inability of the left to counter ICE raids and police executions. The question isn’t if the movement should start a war with the state. The war is already here. Instead the question is if people of conscience who live under this regime decide to fight back.
Fighting back allows people who have historically been oppressed to fully realize themselves through revolutionary struggle. Contrary to what US propaganda espouses, people are not individualized, separate entities. Everyone rises or falls together. When the state tortures someone in prison, bulldozes families in Palestine, or when a person walks past someone sleeping on the street, pieces of their shared humanity are shaved off. The only way to gain them back is through collective struggle: stopping the perpetrators of violence by fighting back with and for others.Commenting on the self-sacrificing action that HPG fighters took against Turkish Aerospace Industries, one writer noted “It is not an exaggeration to say that the only way to truly live is to wage a continuous struggle.”i
Similarly, Wayne Pharr, a Black Panther Party member, who participated in the firefight against police when they raided the BPP office in Los Angeles, explained how he felt in that moment, “I felt free. I felt absolutely free. I was a free negro. I was making my own route. You couldn’t get in, I couldn’t get out. But in my space, I was the king. In that little space I had, I was the king.”v In this moment the historical degradation by the US was overturned when Pharr and his comrades picked up their guns and shot back.
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The fight will be won
It is infinitely possible to win this war that has been launched by the US against the population, and humanity in general. What does it mean to win? Winning in this text is defined as: destroying the state structure and capitalism and replacing them with liberatory and egalitarian ways of existing as a society. The organization of a liberated community holds just as true today as it did in revolutionary Spain or the Korean People’s Association in
Manchuria: self-governance through a federation of councils, production by collectives, personal property held by use rather than private property, defense militias structured according to and defending revolutionary values, resources distributed appropriately amongst the population, expropriation of the enemy class: turning the assets of the enemy into the collective wealth of the new society and prohibiting them from rising and exploiting again.
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Rebellions
Rebellions and uprisings do not have the capacity to change people’s day to day reality. For example, after the Ferguson Uprising, the police returned with a vengeance. With the state empowered and the movement on the back foot, many of the key participants died in suspicious circumstances, presumably executed by the state. There wasn’t sufficient advancement on an organizational level to expel the police from Ferguson, and defense was not commensurate with any of the gains. There are countless examples in the US of rebellions that are an important expression of dissatisfaction, but without organization, people cannot force the state to permanently retreat and create a new reality in their communities. Even a rebellion that overthrows the regime in power does not go far enough. In 2011 Tunisian President Ben Ali left at the behest of protesters but the entire government structure remained, with remnants of the old regime in power. Even though gains were won, such as dismantling the secret police and women’s rights, the same fundamental political structure persisted. Likewise in Egypt, President Mubarak fled in response to uprisings, but after a few shifts in power, an American puppet president, El-Sisi took power. These uprisings of the Arab Spring unseated leaders, however without concerted reorganization of society, a transformation was impossible.
It is essential to formulate the struggle not as a reform of or rebellion against the current system, but as a revolutionary movement with clear goals and outcomes. The state must be completely dismantled and social structures have to be rebuilt from the basis of liberatory values.
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An insurgency is needed to succeed
Using armed force and social organizations, the goal of an insurgency is to make it impossible for the state to govern its territory, and through political, social and economic organization, effect a liberatory change within that territory. This starts with guerrilla warfare, political polarization, the mobilization of local support, and develops as partisans replace state and capitalist functions with their own.
The objective of an insurgency is to permanently eliminate the state and create long-lasting liberation. This change should replace a capitalist economy with a collective one, change a federal representative government to locally-centered self-governance, remove an exploitative social ethic and instill one that values all members of society and shift from poisoning the land and water to protecting the environment. Fighting forces and political-social organizations are built up simultaneously to, on the one hand, develop liberatory self-governance and collective economies, and, on the other, protect political gains while destroying the state.
Anti-colonial Guinea Bissau shows what an insurgency looks like in practice. Resistance forces built up parallel political and social organizations for years to develop popular support for the struggle. The revolutionary African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC) party initiated educational systems, roving hospitals that served fighters and local people and barter bazaars. Amilcar Cabral, the founder of the PAIGC and an agronomist, taught people how to grow food to sustain themselves while also feeding the fighting forces, who would help work the fields with the people. The intertwined growth of revolutionary social organizations and fighting forces made for a complete social transformation within the liberated zones in rural areas that were entirely resistant to Portuguese colonizers. What characterizes an insurgency and differentiates it from a rebellion is that 1) war is waged for abolition of the state, 2) social organizations for self-governance, justice, education, medical care, and other important social projects are built up simultaneously with the war effort, and 3) revolutionary forces work to transform society in the areas they hold.
The remit of an anarcho-communist insurgency is to build a society that is driven by the self-governance of the people. Through the process of engaging in self-governance, people become collectively-minded, self-actualized and responsible for their entire communities. It is ideologically consistent and strategically important to facilitate this type of social organization because: an insurgency is a war for the population. If people agree with the political project, they will want to participate and help the fighters. A salient example is the bank tellers who drove Black Liberation Army (BLA) fighters to Chicago from New York overnight when they needed to hide out, or people from local neighborhoods who would give BLA members their guns if they lost theirs during a firefight.vi This would not have happened without community support and a certain level of organization created by aboveground groups. An insurgency has been described by counterinsurgent experts as 20% military and 80% political;vii another way of articulating the famous Clausewitz quote, “War is a continuation of the policy by other means.” Without people supporting the insurgent forces, it is impossible to have a struggle, and people will support if insurgents are creating sustainable means for true liberation.
This text lays out how the comprehensive process of building an insurgency is integral to engaging many people with a range of capacities and abilities in the revolutionary process, increases the development of all people and creates new economic and political systems, all while materially supporting revolutionary fighters.
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What does it take to build an insurgency?
There are six main fields to consider: 1) political and social organizations 2) fighting forces 3) political education 4) revolutionary culture 5) material considerations and 6) strategic timing.
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1) Political and Social Organizations
Political organizations are expansive assemblies of political actors. Political organizations set up armed factions and social organizations and create the ideological and strategic foundation for both, which, due to this connection, follow consistent political objectives.
Political organizations also set up the means for people to administer their own regions. This self-governance can happen through, for example, neighborhood councils, which form the basis for bottom-up style administration. The council is a forum people can use to coordinate to meet their needs, designating groups to handle that work.
Social organizations are responsible for the production and distribution of resources and the creation of infrastructure. Organizations can include food production, hospitals, schools, construction and activities can range from mediating conflicts to providing medical care and education to producing necessities. These organizations are structured in an egalitarian manner and are based on revolutionary perspectives. They displace those of capitalist businesses and the state.
Effective examples of such political organizations had been developed by the DTK in Northern Kurdistanviii. There were neighborhood councils, conflict resolution bodies, and youth and women’s groups. These bodies made the government of the Turkish state less relevant, as Kurdish people would, for example, utilize DTK mediation over state courts.
Self-governance structures and social organizations create the means for people to feel engaged in day to day life, have determination over their environments and create a material impact. Participation allows for a fundamental shift in values from alienation and competition to looking out for other community members. The well-being of the entire society becomes the responsibility of each person. This reflects the political tenets of the movement, creates collectivity and elicits engagement in revolutionary society and its defense.
In Chiapas the healthcare system was developed after significant and lengthy discussions with many different parts of the population, incorporating their knowledge, outlooks and concerns. For example, traditional healers were initially hesitant to share their methods but the proposal to care for the greatest amount of people possible convinced them. The final result was an overwhelmingly successful healthcare system tended by volunteer health providers, who administer traditional and Western medicine at regional hospitals. The hospitals serve community members, who, in turn, support the healthcare providers.ixx
Social organizations also serve the needs of the armed struggle, intertwining the livelihoods of the fighters and the local community. The fruits of this work are exemplified by Hezbollah. Hezbollah had created armed and social components: welfare, schools, hospitals, supporters with rocket launch rooms in Southern Lebanon. They demonstrated that they care about people’s well-being, giving credence to Hezbollah’s armed defense of the region. The ‘Israeli’ pager attacks on Hezbollah members were thus viewed as attacks on the whole population, bringing much of society, even political opponents, together in support of the organization. Immediately following the incident, one prospective eye donor, a taxi-driver named Hussein, explained his motivations to a local broadcaster. “How can I continue to see while they have been blinded?” he said. “The eye that I will donate will protect the nation.”xi
When people participate in the process of building and running social organizations, they are actively eroding the state’s administrative control. Local people become fighters without ever picking up a gun. An insurgency mobilizes support by normalizing revolutionary social organizations so that regular people use them to, for example, go to the doctor, get food and clothes, become educated, etc. Regular people become political partisans when they participate in self-governance as in the neighbor councils and grandma-run food distributions that cropped up during the Estallido Social uprising in Chile. Or, for example, in Barcelona during the Spanish revolution, neighbors were empowered to physically block bailiffs from entering their neighborhoods to conduct evictions.xii
In essence, the battle for administrative functions is what will determine if the state remains in a region or if the insurgent will be successful. Both the insurgent and the state will win legitimacy if people participate in their social organizations. If people call the police when they have a problem, they are strengthening the state, if they call revolutionaries, they strengthen the insurgency.
If the relationship is strong enough, the enemy’s attempt to undermine social organizations will be unsuccessful. The Zionist regime enters Tulkarm Refugee Camp in the West Bank of Palestine to destroy infrastructure to try to erode the support base of the resistance. Al-Quds Brigades reports that the effect is the opposite: “Once the raid is over, many people check in on us and express their gratitude that we are safe. When they look at the destruction of the camp, they just say, ‘better to lose your wealth than lose your children.’”xiii
Starting the armed struggle and ultimately maintaining a territory is based on the consent of the people in it. Truly liberatory political and social organizations are the key. If people agree with what revolutionaries are doing, they will participate in the self-governance of their neighborhoods and protect the guerrillas, if they disagree, they won’t sustain the insurgency.
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2) Fighting Forces
“The urban guerrilla’s weapons are inferior to the enemy’s, but from the moral point of view, the urban guerrilla has an undeniable superiority.”xiv – Marighella
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Guerrilla Struggle
The goal of fighting forces is to demoralize the enemy and win popular support. The armed work of an insurgency starts with guerrilla units. Due to flexibility and mobility, the guerrilla has the ability to launch attacks anywhere and disappear. Hidden amongst the population, the insurgent chooses when and where to attack, making their attacks unpredictable.
The tactical advantage is with the insurgent at this stage. The state must prove that it can retain order, whereas the insurgent only has to challenge the authority of the state. The state has to spend a lot of money to protect its assets and chase down insurgents, but insurgents can launch effective attacks very inexpensively at targets which are plentiful and in the open.
Time is on the side of the insurgent. An insurgent force can be assembled long before a single bullet is fired.xv Fighters can prepare for years or decades, striking only when the time is right. The EZLN built its forces for over ten years before attacking the state, presenting revolutionary ideas to villagers and systematically recruiting fighters. Taking time to build armed groups concertedly and growing slowly in qualitative force allows for the development of politically aligned and well-trained guerrillas, ready to take action when the time is right.
Guerrilla units are small groups consisting of only a few people, who independently launch attacks to harass the enemy. They are self-contained cells that pick their own targets, but are connected to other units through the guerrilla code, political objectives and allegiance to the overall mission. There is a role for each member of a guerrilla cell, and these roles should overlap in case one person is captured or killed. They can be assembled into columns or sections for larger attacks like ambushes if the conditions are right.
The purpose of the guerrilla forces is to make it impossible for the state to govern (by overextending the enemy, controlling the pace of the fight, for example), defend the population (by attacking state forces who brutalize people), survive (by planning attacks wisely, evading capture, setting up secure infrastructure), support political initiatives, and eventually to take and defend territory.
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Beyond theGuerrilla Struggle
Building of social organizations, the solidarity of the population and the strength of fighting forces will allow guerrillas at a certain point to establish bases and expel the state from their strongholds. Insurgent-controlled areas are those where revolutionary organizations and values prevail and the state no longer has control through administration or force. At this point the guerrilla struggle continues in new areas that are now contested, partially governed by the state.
The transition between hit and run guerrilla warfare and the security of a liberated area necessitates a delicate balance. Forces are needed to both defend the area and to contest regions beyond that territory. For revolutionary fighting forces to drive out the state and maintain a liberated territory, there needs to be a higher level of coordination, strategy and organization.
If we look at the example of the Great Dismal Swamp Maroon, it becomes clear that it is difficult to maintain an island of liberated land within enemy territory. Formerly enslaved people who escape plantations took refuge in the forbidding terrain of the Great Dismal Swamp. Here armed groups would coalesce as needed to coordinate on raids, defend their territory and free other enslaved people. At first the Maroon was impossible to broach by enemy forces due to impassible geography, but eventually the state developed the land, making it no longer functional as a refuge.
The state was able to destroy the territory because its economic and administrative structure remained intact. An insurgent movement needs to push the state’s administrative structure into disarray otherwise the enemy will be able to challenge a liberated area through means beyond armed force.
On the other hand, it is not feasible to go to war outside a liberated area without sufficient protection for that region. The Shinmin Prefecture was an anarchist region in Manchuria comprised of 2 million people. The Korean Anarchist Federation had established self-governing institutions such as mutual banks, workers cooperatives, and liberatory education. Their local militia was supplemented by guerrilla fighters and the region supported guerrilla attacks against imperial Japan in Korea from 1929-1931. However these attacks drew the ire of the Japanese, who sent their agents to infiltrate and assassinate key figures and without sufficient defense of the territory to support the guerrilla actions abroad, an invasion was the death blow.
The Great Dismal Swamp was strong on defense, while the Shinmin Prefecture was more focused on destroying their enemies abroad. Both regions had the problem of being stand alone territories where 1) the guerrillas were not hidden within a enemy-administered populations 2) the insurgents were not able to achieve the balance between defense and attack and 3) the growth of liberated territories was not commensurate with balanced defense and offense.
What is also clear from these examples is that forces defending a territory cannot maintain a guerrilla characteristic and expect longterm existence. A different formation is needed to defend a liberated area. The defense of a territory must be sufficient, and include an offensive component to challenge the terrain of the enemy. Offensive actions and their range must be chosen wisely so as not to generate more enemies than a liberated area can handle. There needs to be a high level of strategic coordination between guerrillas and defense forces of a liberated area.
While at the current moment it seems the movement is some time off from taking and holding territory, it is important to consider the structure and participation in the defense of a territory even during the nascent part of building guerrilla forces. More complex forms of organization and coordination are needed. There can be a strong connection between fighters and councils on a local level, tying defense to political will, but there also needs to be a means for fighting forces working together across broad swathes of geography, and much more concerted coordination in terms of strategy, tactics and logistical support. As fighting groups are trained and built, so should the organizational apparatus that will sustain the fight past the guerrilla stage. This stage is very advantageous tactically for the insurgent, but also the most precarious.
Holding territory can be dangerous while the state is still powerful. The guerrillas can ebb and flow from regions, establishing bases when it is politically and militarily feasible, and ceding it temporarily so as not to get into a head-on fight. Often making a stand does not play to the strengths of an insurgent force. When temporarily ceding territory, informants, sleeper cells and political organizations can remain in place to coordinate with returning guerrillas and make it hard for the state to truly regain a foothold.
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3) Political Education
Insurgencies thrive by being able to address grievances that the state will not. Anarcho-communism presents a range of salient proposals for nearly every facet of life, from collective self-governance to justice to ecology, but there will be strategic moments when putting one or two of those points forward will have the strongest, most wide-spread appeal. Picking the right points to center on at the right times is essential for rallying people toward the cause. For example, the height of the George Floyd Uprising would not be the right time to focus on ecology. The rallying point(s) can change depending on current events and can even be different for different segments of the population. An essential factor is that the points chosen should not be ones the state can fix; they must last the duration of the insurgency.
Propaganda and media serve the important role of isolating the state from the people, making it clear that the hardships people suffer are the unnecessary effects of the US government and capitalist economy. They also work in tandem with revolutionary school curriculum to reinforce a revolutionary narrative.
Revolutionary schools have the important role of helping people understand the role of the state and capitalism, familiarizing people with the history of resistance and building skills that are relevant and useful for a revolutionary society. All subjects taught in these schools are oriented towards creating a better society for all people. For example, Zapatista education provides knowledge about agronomy which helps people in Chiapas become self-sufficient. Or Black Panther schools recounted the history of the United states from the perspective of their communities.
It is impossible for people to get behind a cause when they don’t understand the basic political spectrum. People in the United States are heavily propagandized and most have received poor education. It is essential to build up people’s political understanding and inform them about the histories of oppression and resistance. Political education can take place through multiple mediums such as revolutionary schools, mass propaganda and the guerrilla struggle itself.
Organizing can work as propaganda to draw clear battle lines and create conditions for the struggle. For example, to demonstrate the necessity of guerrilla struggle, revolutionaries can launch a community campaign. Black Liberation Army founder, Dhoruba Bin Wahad, has suggested calling for community control of the police, which is a logical proposal to help solve their rampant murders of black and brown people. However it is a request that the state will never meet. The proposal functions to organize communities of opposition on a local level and the intransigence of the state demonstrates the necessity for revolutionary defense forces to step in.
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4) Revolutionary Culture
A fundamental cultural shift is essential for revolutionary work in the US. Political and social organizations and fighting forces embody this culture, creating goodwill within local communities.xvi
Revolutionary culture requires a collective approach to the struggle. Political actors should be selfless, stand up, steadfast, hold true to their word and show respect for themselves and those who are most disadvantaged in bourgeois society. These qualities are fundamental for achieving a society where every member cares for and is responsible for all the others. The welfare of those who are the most vulnerable become the obligation of all. A leftist revolutionary movement demonstrates a commitment to life and community.
Revolutionary culture runs counter to acculturation in the US, which has indoctrinated people to act against their self-interest. People are socialized from a young age to distrust their neighbors, turn their backs on people in need and look out for themselves before anyone else. This may be the hardest aspect to overcome for developing an effective movement in the US.
The evidence of US culture permeating the movement lies in the thousands of failed political groups, the constant fractures and insurmountable conflicts between comrades, people using the movement to fundraise or do research for their careers, individuals demanding social credit for their revolutionary contributions, an ideological emphasis on isolated, personal initiatives to drive political work and political groups whose policy it is to instrumentalize people in order to achieve their goals.
It is important for people involved in revolutionary work to shed the alienating and competitive ways that have been forced on people by the US regime, in order to build effective collaboration and trust. Cooperation and trust are the bedrock of the the movement, holding it together through difficult situations, and demonstrating the types of relationships that unite a liberatory political project. When people join the movement, they will be acculturated to cooperating with each other.
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5) Material Considerations for Success
Infrastructure requirements include access to and control over communications, food, finances, arms, transportation, means to disseminate information and the ability to supply resources to insurgents and the population.
Logistic and communication networks, independent of the state, serves fighting forces and the population. They are set up with the consideration that the state will try to surveil and disrupt, fully understanding that removing pipelines of resources and information is a good way to incapacitate the insurgent force.
Arms and tactics training are key. This can happen with a supportive army. For example, in 1982 Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) set up a training camp in the Beqaa Valley in Lebanon in response to ‘Israel’s’ invasion.xvii Many insurgent groups such as PFLP, Hezbollah, Asala, the Red Brigades and the PKK trained there.Armed training can also happen within the army of the enemy state. Many of the great militants of the Black Liberation Army, like Kuwasi Balagoon were trained by the US army.
Intelligence on state capacity, enemy figures in key position, arsenal and plans of action is essential. Infiltration of the police and armed forces can be established prior to the initiation of the armed struggle and provide pertinent information. The state has contingency plans for crises and responding to attacks, which are readily available. Insurgents use this information to set traps to use their own plans against them.
An important part of a revolutionary insurgent struggle is that it intends to build a different economic system. This alternative system begins at the outset of a struggle as a way of circulating resources to those who are participants. However money will certainly be necessary. Funding can be planned well in advance of the beginning of the armed struggle, diversifying sources and obscuring where they are held. Funding can come in the form of external support, draining that of the enemy, and community support.
With these factors in mind, it is clear why an analysis of multiple insurgencies suggests that the likelihood of success will increase based on 1) the remoteness from the center of the counterinsurgent’s power 2) the ability for the insurgent to move across an international border 3) international alliances and 4) a local administrative vacuum. In consideration of the physical demands of an insurgency a temperate climate and a spread out population add an advantage.xviii While all these conditions may not necessarily be met in every case where political organizations form, they are useful to consider when launching a struggle.
6) Strategic Timing
An insurgency has the tactical advantage of being able to wait, building up sufficient forces and popular support and striking at a time and location of its choosing. Training and organization can be developed to a high degree before the armed struggle begins.
A crisis or weakening of the state is helpful for launching an insurgency. For example, anti-colonial insurgencies didn’t succeed before 1938, when World War II weakened European states. The insurgent can wait for a moment when the US is tied up in military conflicts and has exhausted its resources, or is lacking popular support. A war on its own soil against an external enemy could, for example, provide the right conditions. Or engaging in multiple armed conflicts abroad would weaken the US state and diminish its international standing, creating an opening for the insurgent.
Strategic timing does not just refer to selecting an appropriate time for the initiation of armed action, but also choices made throughout the conflict.
Once armed action begins, it is important to keep up the pacing and pressure. The state will have the strongest chance of stamping out an insurgency during the initial period, the guerrilla struggle, due to functioning administrative control. To quash an insurgency, the state needs to arrest guerrillas, regain the trust of the population and instate compliant leaders through elections. For this work the state depends on pre-existing civil structures like the police, non-profits, local representatives and social services. This administrative power is very effective at stifling rebellions. The momentum of the George Floyd Uprising was successfully derailed by coordinated civil actions including elected representatives speaking out at marches, legal proceedings being issued against Derek Chauvin and city-to-city coordinated police action against demonstrators.xix
It is important for the insurgent to make the state’s civic bodies unable to function, drawing the conflict into a military terrain. The US Army Marine Counterinsurgency Manual confirms: “Controlling the level of violence is a key aspect of the struggle. A high level of violence often benefits insurgents. The societal insecurity that violence brings discourages or precludes nonmilitary organizations, particularly [administrative proxies of the counter-insurgent]”, which the Manual identifies as, “diplomats, police, politicians, humanitarian aid workers, contractors, and local leaders.”xx The guerrilla, Carlos Marighella confirms, “The role of the urban guerrilla, in order to win the support of the population, is to continue fighting…heightening the disastrous situation within which the government must act.”xxi
Marghiella also emphasizes that, “keeping in mind the interests of the people,” during this process is essential. The insurgent must precisely balance the need to combatively overwhelm the administrative capacity of the state with the need to maintain the goodwill of the population. During the early stages, the insurgent can control the pacing and tenor of the fight and can time it to best suit the social and strategic conditions at each moment.
However launching the armed attack is not just about watching and waiting for an opening, but creating the conditions for the struggle to flourish. It is essential to undermine US civic institutions, eroding popular faith in them, sowing dissent within their ranks and drawing people toward revolutionary social organizations. Increasing distrust in US civic bodies is not a difficult proposal. With dissatisfaction already quite high, insurgent social organizations have fertile ground to grow.
The considerations about strategic timing demonstrate that an insurgency requires a lengthy investment of time. From comprehensive training and research to creating the ideal social conditions for the armed struggle, it is a longterm commitment on the part of the insurgent.
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Who would support an insurgency
In counterinsurgency theory the population is broken down into a perhaps overly simplistic, yet useful, formula: an active minority on the side of the state, an active minority on the side of the insurgent, and a large group of people in the middle that want to go about their daily lives with reasonable stability. Victory will theoretically tilt in favor of the side that can provide the better life.xxii
Currently, without an institutionalized left, and with the lack of general political understanding, the politics of the center produce an acceptance for a brutal and degraded life. It is impossible to talk about a war for the population without acknowledging that the political tenor in the US is by and large extremely right wing.
The question is how to move people further to the left. Part of the answer lies in the armed struggle itself. Armed action from the radical left moves the center further left. It galvanizes people, forcing them to take sides and it creates a new pole of far left politics. When the seriousness of the demands is expressed by the requisite force to achieve it, it is more convincing than rhetoric.
This precedent is reflected in the boom in membership in the Black Panther Party following their armed protest on the floor of the California state Capitol. It can also be observed in the public assistance for armed struggle groups in the 1960’s-1980’s, and the support of radicals in the US for the events of October 7th in Palestine.
Furthermore, during uprisings, sympathy for radical change becomes far more widespread. The George Floyd Uprising elicited support from many sectors of society. Both potential political actors and unpoliticized people were won over by the widespread demonstration of popular sentiment and the virulence of the uprisings. As demonstrators began challenging the police, support for their initiative grew and acceptance of the police fell dramatically.
Being very clear and open about armed struggle can quickly bring in participants. In Chiapas, the EZLN started their work by explicitly building a guerrilla force and clearly expressing their intention to initiate an armed struggle to potential supporters. This drew people towards the struggle by demonstrating a commitment to success and means for people to effect a material change within their communities. There already exists an impetus to take armed action against colonial adversaries, like Willem van Spronsen’s attack on ICE. These public displays demonstrate a groundswell of popular sentiment that could be organized into a cohesive force.
While armed action pushes prevailing opinion further left, armed action complemented by social organizations becomes a thoroughly convincing force. Social programs indicate the genuine intention of political actors to better people’s lives and facilitate people joining the effort.
The combination of armed struggle and social organizations counteract the feeling of helplessness that the state wants to project on people. In the US, there are many communities that are targeted or sidelined by the state, but no one wants to accept a victim role. In fact, this is a dynamic that helps the state control people, and also one that the non-profit industry preys on. Creating an alternative where people can live with dignity, cultivating a culture of respect and creating the capacity to win is key for building self-actualization through struggle. The genuine self-sufficiency of revolutionary communities is an attractive proposal to people who have historically been oppressed.
One of the greatest examples of US brutality is the prison system. It is also the most concentrated population of politicized people in the country. This legacy is thanks to prison organizers like the Nation of Islam, George Jackson, the Black Panthers and incarcerated members of armed struggle groups like the United Freedom Front and the Black Liberation Army. The teachings of comrades from previous generations set the stage for continued work in this vein and for prison uprisings like Attica, Lucasville, and the Vaughn Prison Uprising and the multitude of prison strikes set in motion by Jailhouse Lawyers Speak and many others. People locked up and terrorized daily by the state forces understand the force required to stop them. The proliferation of George Jackson style study groups in many prisons today, some named after him, is testament to this continued political legacy.
Many of those organizing inside would like to participate in movements on the outside but have to deal with the very real problem of securing housing, food, etc. once released. The infrastructure inherent in building an insurgency has the capacity of creating a support structure for these militants, as well as counteracting the state’s intention to rob people of their means of survival. In revolutionary Spain, for example, it wasn’t just liberated fighters reuniting with the battalions who broke open prisons; many people they had politicized joined as well.xxiii
People in prison are an acute example of people who support an insurgency, but there are many others who are routinely terrorized like young people of color, migrants, people lacking money and resources and politicized young people. An insurgent strategy offers a path towards stability and respect.
It is clear is that through an insurgent struggle not everyone will shift further to the left or change their views. While armed leftist action brings the political center toward the left, it also serves to further entrench elements of the right in its anti-social positions. There will always be the minority that supports reactionary objectives. There are two points to consider: Balkanization and suppression.
A common misconception in revolutionary work is that the entire territory of the US needs to be liberated. This is a difficult proposal given many people’s right-wing views and vastness of the geography. A more realistic idea is akin to the proposal of the Republic of New Africa to section off a part of the South – a Balkanization of the territory occupied by the United states.
There remains the question: how protect the movement from actors with a right wing political ideology. First, getting people to sympathize and participate in the movement will create fewer enemies. While there is a right-wing political bent currently throughout the US, this should not be considered a static fact. It is important to consider that the many communities that vocalize right wing views didn’t always do so and do so now because of concerted propaganda efforts on the part of state actors. Being a proactive political movement means engaging in activities and messaging that will effect a change in this failing perspective. Yet it is important to note at this point that reactionaries should not be the focus of efforts. Propaganda efforts can be far reaching enough that they happen to reach right wing people, driving a wedge between those who are deeply racist, xenophobic, etc, and those who actually care about others.
The ideologically hardened right wingers are essentially enemy combatants. Whether they are currently active is not so much a question. If allowed to remain in a territory, they may be or could become agents of the counterinsurgent. They must be thoroughly disabled and removed from liberated territories. It is important to begin considering how to deal with these factions from the perspective of an abolitionist movement. Complete annihilation is essential.
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Why an insurgency would succeed in the US
The strengths of the US become its weaknesses in the face of an insurgency.
The US is hubristically proud of its military might. Military spending far outpaces any other nation, with its spending in 2020 amounting to the same as the next nine highest nations. Equipment and tactics developed in the military are deployed in local police departments as well. From SWAT teams to the FBI to the Department of Homeland Security to militarized police, local residents are bombarded with highly technological and militarized state force.
Within the dynamics of asymmetrical warfare, these are the conditions where the insurgent has the advantage. A more technologically advanced and equipment-laden enemy is too cumbersome to counter guerrilla fighters. Complex apparatuses become a hindrance and the top-down structure can’t pivot quickly enough. Even the Marines agree, “A modern military force capable of waging war against a large conventional force may find itself ill-prepared for a ‘small’ war against a lightly equipped guerrilla force.”xxiv Meticulously recorded videos of the resistance in Palestine show fighters emerging from tunnels to plant bombs on tanks that are not equipped to counter such a close and agile combatant. The modern military is weighed down by its own equipment and structure. Tanks become lumbering death traps. The tactical advantage is with the fighters who don’t have their assets in the open and have the ability for evasion. An insurgent has the capacity to remain invisible on its home terrain and arise at unexpected points to attack and quickly disappear.
An insurgency is cheap for the insurgents, while it is expensive for the state. To appear in control, the state must do its best to stamp out fighters, which takes a great deal of resources, manpower and equipment. Insurgents can use cheaply made weapons to precipitate a great expense for the state. For example, drones made from styrofoam are able to evade detection or tiny drone boats in the Red Sea can damage an aircraft carrier many more times their size and cost. Handmade explosives have the capacity to destroy a tank. Small, cheap and effective devices make it difficult for the counterinsurgent to avoid attacks.
Counterinsurgency doctrine of the Army and Marines is considered to be the most forward thinking treatise on this type of military strategy. Even with lessons learned from military debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan, the US doctrine still demonstrates a fundamental lack of understanding about the motivations of an insurgent. Given the extreme lack of empathy for people’s lives, it is seemingly impossible for military strategists to fathom that others may be driven by genuine concern for their fellow humansxxv. The lack of compassion for the people coupled with a misreading of their adversary makes it difficult for the institutions of the US state to respond appropriately to challenges.
For example, in Afghanistan, US soldiers stationed in Restrepo held a weekly meeting with local elders meant to create connections to win them over and solicit their help routing out insurgents. When questioned by an elder about someone they detained, the soldier in charge became frustrated and finally exclaimed, “You’re not understanding that I don’t fucking care!”xxvi This poignant example illustrates the overall military culture, not to mention US culture, that demonstrates a fundamental disinterest in effective counterinsurgency tactics, even when they are in its best interest.
For its own sake, the counterinsurgent should not respond to guerrilla attacks with overwhelming force, as it risks alienating people and driving them further from its cause.
For example, Safiya Bukhari astutely noted that the New York Police Department made her a member of Black Panther Party. Bukhari was a middle class college student who got involved in the movement after she was arrested for defending a Black Panther from police harassment. She learned from this episode that she had no rights, which galvanized her to join the Party and eventually the Black Liberation Army.
Trump’s execution of Michael Reinoehl in cold blood when he was on the run for shooting a fascist, South Carolina bringing back the firing squad for ‘legal’ executionsxxvii, the popularity of the shooting of a healthcare CEO, the impunity of police to shoot people of color, masked ICE agents tearing families apart, all show that the US state is dead set on losing the war for the population. The overriding indifference of the US government to recognize the humanity of people, particularly people of color, within its borders creates a situation where people want to rid themselves of its hegemony.
The oligarchic nature of the US state, coupled with massive wealth disparity creates the potential ground for class war.xxviii The US’s dependence on capitalist infrastructure further exacerbates its problems. This is a major issue for the state in the face of internal armed struggle, and a huge field of potential for the insurgent. Without a social safety net, the population in the US is vulnerable to natural and economic catastrophes. This is quite apparent with the supply-chain disruptions during the COVID-19 pandemic or the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Even day to day social problems, like lack of access to medical care, are severe, creating questions about the state’s ability to administer its population.
The very existence of an insurgency necessitates the development of functional and revolutionary supply chains – a direct challenge to the administration of the state. This is understood by US government and the reason why it felt threatened by Black Panther Party breakfast program, ambulance services, health clinics and education programs. Yet its policy of deprivation continues, creating a need for what insurgents have to offer.
Currently, western civilization is catapulting itself towards impending demise. The failure of Ukraine to gain the upper hand against Russia despite the US pouring money into the conflict and the success of the Axis of Resistance against ‘Israel’, particularly Ansar Allah’s defeat of the US Navy, demonstrate that Western military might is waning. The rise of anti-colonial, anti-West movements in the Sahel and West Asia would not have been possible without this weakening. The BRICS alignment is forcing the West to reckon with a new geopolitical order. Seemingly grasping at straws to try to retain its dominant position, the US has been threatening to start a plethora of wars without clear ability to succeed. Furthermore, internal politics in the US have never been more contentious and divisive. With the rise of fascism, and it’s conspiracy-prone base, those who care about people and approach social organization logically are looking for alternatives. The perfect conditions for an insurgency are amassing: the US is waning as a global power, it hosts a wildly divided population and has no plan in place for people’s survival.
The potential success of an insurgent struggle is greater now than ever before. The global order will look very different in the span of a few years to decades. The fall of the brutal hegemony of the US could lead to a restructuring of political and economic relations around the globe. It would be ideal if new forms of society had a liberatory characteristic and to do that comrades in the US can start laying the groundwork for an insurgency.
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How to start building an insurgency
The first step is to set up political organization(s). Members should be aligned in terms of ideology, strategy and, most importantly, around revolutionary rather than radical or reformist goals.
Participants can form either one large organization or facilitate a network of aligned groups. The choice between a network or organization depends on the dispositions of those involved and currently existing formations. Political groups should agree on a structure for their organization and roles of the members, while networks should agree on how organizations will communicate effectively with each other and roles of each group. Both should agree on revolutionary outcomes, codes of behavior, political outlook and ways of measuring success
The political position of this proposal is intended for the revolutionary left, following an anti-capitalist and anti-colonial perspective. Political groups should be fully committed to the destruction of the United States and its racist history and culture. The guiding question that should inform debates is: what would improve the lives of those who have been and are currently most disadvantaged by white supremacist American society: people of color and those who lack money and resources?
Political organizations can focus their work on building militant, political and economic infrastructure. To do so they should start developing social organizations and fighting forces. There are two ways to start: 1) identify the material needs of an insurgency and comrades with the skills to create those organizations and 2) take stock of groups and resources that already exist that could be aligned to further develop the strategic goals.
While social organizations can be based on the skills and abilities of current members, they shouldn’t be exclusively determined on that basis. Consideration should be given to needs of the fighters and needs of community members. For example, some basics needed to support an insurgency include: logistics and infrastructure, communication networks, sources for food and goods for living, community decision making bodies, medical care, and revolutionary education. Likewise, political organizations can consider the acute needs of the people in their areas.
Political education is a foundational aspect of developing the struggle because propaganda and classes can bring in new comrades. Political classes about revolutionary struggle and ideas can attract people who would like to join the political organization, and practical workshops can give them the skills to build out social organizations. Classes and schools can be both for potential organization members and for broader society.
The intention for the social programs is that they should be of far better quality than those of capitalist society. For example, food should be more delicious and wholesome; medical care should be more preventative, caring and accessible; classes should be conducted with the highest level of preparation and research, showing respect for all involved.
There are many revolutionary projects that exist currently that translate well to an insurgent strategy. Food distributions can expand their operations and be further developed to become supplied by comrade farms, for example, increasing self-sufficiency. Conflict resolution groups could be made available to the public to create a body for justice outside of the court system. Medics could receive further training to help build out community health programs and provide medical care for fighters. Always resist the temptation to work with nonprofits. They are structurally aligned with the state.
Even though much groundwork needs to be done before fighting forces start their work, it would be ideal to recruit and train as many people as possible and as early as possible to be ready to act when the time is right. To do this correctly requires a lengthy process. A few members of political organizations can be tasked with doing this. It is important to keep a separation between fighting forces and social organizations.
Building out the fighting forces must be done with the highest level of discretion. Only comrades who are well known to the recruiter should be invited to participate. Comrades with combat experience can train others. This can happen at ranges but also it will be useful to find and utilize surreptitious training areas. A training program for skills and study can de developed to make sure fighters have the skills they need to do actions and resist entrapment. These skills should be practiced regularly.
Many nighttime affinity groups currently exist whose structure and actions mirror that of a guerrilla unit, as a guerrilla warrior doesn’t have to wait for orders to be able to make decisions.xxix They are relatively independent, politically well-versed, conduct hit and run strikes, are fluid and flexible, secure because they don’t necessarily have to know who comprises other groups and able to produce their own propaganda materials. These groups can be a source of fighters.
It is important however to note the differences between nighttime groups and a developed guerrilla struggle. The extensive tunnel networks in Gaza and Vietnam, for example, could not have been constructed without major coordination and organization. Fighting forces need to decide on a secure structure and a means for coordination from the start. Guerrillas don’t need to necessarily know who is in other cells but should have a way to communicate. There should also be a way to communicate between political organizations and fighting forces that should includes ways of determining a greater war strategy. Its important from the outset to also develop plans for sizing up formations in the later stages of the struggle.
Field Marshall DC counsels: “In organizing self-defense groups… the most important consideration is whether or not the person to be incorporated into the group understands fully that what he or she is doing is the right thing to do.”xxx Those who hold guns and are fighting the state should embody the most stand up characteristics of a revolutionary. Fighters should be motivated by the political outcomes, embody what it means to be a political actor and carry a full commitment to the struggle because, just like all political organizations, fighting forces should be a prime example of their own liberatory politics. This is conveyed by how guerrillas treat each other and the people, the types of actions taken and the messaging around actions. Independent motivation is also important because guerrilla units need to act without direction, deciding their own missions and developing their own propaganda.
Finding resolute and committed revolutionaries to become guerrillas is essential, but also the act of participating in revolutionary war builds the characters of those involved. “[T]o be an assailant or terrorist is a quality that ennobles any honorable man because it is an act worthy of a revolutionary engaged in armed struggle against the shameful military dictatorship and its monstrosities.” (Marighella) The sheer engagement in fighting back against the brutal state, and the motivation of love for oppressed people, is enriching for the participants. Even more so, through the participation in collective armed action, fighters develop qualities such as steadfastness and circumspection, which are ideal qualities for people participating in a revolutionary society. The necessary collectivity of an armed unit increases the fighters’ collaborative spirit and ability to think about the whole.
Selflessness is an important quality for a revolutionary, but it is not to indicate a rush towards death. The next sentence that follows the opening Marighella quote for this section is, “Thanks to it, the urban guerrilla can accomplish his principle duty, which is to attack and survive.”xxxi This is not just pragmatic, being that there are far less insurgents than there are of the enemy, but more importantly, it reflects a value system spread throughout all the insurgent forces and organizations. The well-being of the overall community must be synonymous with fighting prowess. Revolutionary culture is a culture of life.
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Revolutionary Culture
The tenure of revolutionary work is presented to the greater public through the culture of political actors. Revolutionary culture should be built on a foundation of participants who are humble, genuine, true to their words and share a longterm commitment to the political struggle. This culture should permeate every activity of a political organization.
All members should be clear, open, honest and hold themselves to the highest standards in terms of their treatment of others. It is important for all political actors to evaluate their motivations: are they doing political work for the sake of their ego, do they have insecurities or are they dealing with mental health challenges? There is role for everyone in developing an insurgency and it is essential that everyone is very honest with themselves and others about their abilities, limitations and personal challenges to know what their role should be. This self-knowledge is essential. Marighella suggests that, “[Guerrilla warfare] is a pledge which the guerrilla makes to himself. When he can no longer face the difficulties, or if he knows that he lacks the patience to wait, then it is better for him to relinquish his role before he betrays his pledge.”xxxii
In order to begin developing revolutionary culture collectively, it is important to forge agreements on expected behaviors of comrades towards each other and towards the public, their commitments to the organization, what qualities to look for in people who want to join and the process and expectations for people leaving the organization.
Collectivity may be atypical for anyone who was acculturated in the US, but active steps can be taken to develop this skill and set a new standard for revolutionary work. Look to members who did not grow up in the US for advice on this matter. They will often have a better model for sociability. Conduct active listening workshops where members practice hearing each other out on matters that don’t have high stakes.
A forum for discussing and resolving disagreements is essential. Conflicts can be headed off by principled critique/self-critique sessions, and handled after the fact by mediation teams, for example. Any critique that is issued should come from a place of trust, commitment and belief that the other member is also committed and open to change.
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Funding
In the beginning stages multiple and diverse sources of funding should be established. Political work may be supported through monetary and in-kind donations, self-sustaining projects, international funding, kidnapping, extortion and expropriation of the enemy class.
Social organizations can be sustained through donations of the participants and supporters. For example, a school or collective kitchen can take sliding scale or monthly donations.
Comrade businesses can have a dual use of making money for comrades but also, when needed, offering logistical support. For example, companies that use trucks or warehouses will one day be useful for storing and moving materiel. Members who have a clean record can apply for a Federal Firearms License in order to sell arms for their livelihood but also offer a friendly place for comrades to acquire them at cost.
Social organizations can be developed for self-sustainability like growing food, producing clothes, building internet mesh networks, weapons or fuel production. As the US economy continues its downward trajectory, these resources will be necessary not just for supporting the fighters but for broader society.
International support can be sought. Ideologically close allies are ideal for trade and funding. There are many enemies of the US who would be eager to support an insurgency in the US but this must be weighed out with the potential of becoming their proxy.
Kidnapping, extortion and expropriation can be used with caution. They should have the dual purpose of putting pressure on the enemy while also gaining funds. These endeavors should be undertaken in the safest way possible, when the odds are stacked in favor of those doing the actions. It is important not to get too many fighters caught up by activities that should support the growth of the insurgency. For example, digital bank robberies are safer and potentially more lucrative than ones in person or extortion can be based out of another country to decrease the risk.
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Summary
- Decide on the goals, commitments and community agreements of the political organization(s).
- Determine organizational structure, means of communication and a plan for growth.
- Create a plan for developing revolutionary culture and conflict resolution.
- Assign specific duties to each member, making sure these duties overlap.
- Develop a method for bringing in new members.
- Develop a metric for measuring success.
- Develop a multi-pronged fundraising strategy, with proposed expansion for different stages of the struggle.
- Identify existing social organizations and decide which essential ones need to be developed.
- Develop a plan for recruiting and training fighters.
- Decide on a structure for units.
- Decide on a means for secure communication.
- Develop a means to confer between political groups and fighting cells on political direction and strategy.
- Decide what issues to focus on for widespread propaganda.
- Develop social organizations.
- Members with key skills and knowledge start building agreed upon social organizations.
- Assigned members speak with already existing projects about joining forces.
- Offer political education for potential new members and/or the public.
- Develop a comprehensive educational program.
- Have a clear system in place for new members to join.
- Recruit fighters.
- Develop a training regimen and assign members to carry out this program.
- Put material needs in place: safe houses, armories, training areas, workshops.
- Develop a plan for weapons procurement.
Until we meet
Setting out to build an insurgency in the US from the current state of the movement might seem like a monumental task but it is important to keep some precedents in mind.
Every organization and every armed struggle had to start from nothing. Many began in even less favorable conditions and with much less support. Know that it is possible to fight through extreme adversity when our organizations are strong, and always remember that it is possible to create the best conditions for the movement.
The situation in the US makes it ripe for political change. The US is flailing politically and economically. People are searching for solutions for basic survival and want to see the development of a capable struggle. Concerted and functional organization creates confidence in people and an insurgency has the capacity to turn a sustainable and humanizing society into a reality.
The tides of political change have been decisively shifting within the last 20 years. The veneer of civil society has eroded, making activism essentially useless. Where previously many on the far left have vocalized a more tempered political vision, now they are taking their cues from the most serious insurgent forces like the Resistance in Palestine. The fact that this is one of the last Western colonial bastions materially connects our struggles, giving political actors psychological fortitude and demonstrating how to fight a more militarized enemy. People in the movement in the US are no longer presenting themselves as radicals, but as revolutionaries, a fundamental perspective necessary to transform a wavering movement into a solid and impenetrable insurgency.
We are never too few and it is never too late to start building. Our determination and steadfastness will lead to our success.
This text is written with love for fellow revolutionaries and belief in our collective capacity. Though many will never know who wrote this document, we convey our respect for everyone who chooses this path.
See you on the battlefield!
Written with love by Sofia Valencia
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Further reading
Warfare Manuals
The Art of War, Sun Tzu
On Organizing Urban Guerrilla Units, Field Marshall D.C.
Handbook for Volunteers of the Irish Republican Army
On Guerrilla Warfare, Mao Tse-Tung
Guerrilla Warfare, Che Guevara
The Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla, Carlos Marighella
The Life and Death of the East Asia Anti-Japan Armed Front, Max Res
Experiences in the Struggle
My Life in the Black Panther Party, Field Marshall D.C.
Maroon the Implacable: The Collected Writings of Russell Maroon Shoatz
Democratic Autonomy in Northern Kurdistan
The Fire and the Word: A History of the Zapatista Movement, Gloria Muñoz Ramírez
Mau Mau From Within a book by Karari Njama, Donald L Barnett
The War Before: A True Life Story, Safiya Bukhari
Counterinsurgency
The Other Side of COIN Kristian Williams
Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice, David Galula
Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam, John A. Nagl
The U.S. Army and Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, David Petraeus
Warfighting, US Marine Corps
Theory
The Philosophy of the Urban Guerrilla, Abraham Guillen
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Further reading
iUS Marine Corps. Warfighting, 2018. iiThe People’s Defence Forces (Kurdish: Hêzên Parastina Gel, HPG) iiiWilliams, Kristian. The Other Side of COIN: Counterinsurgency and Community Policing, 2011. ivAxîn, Tekoşin. Understanding the self-sacrificial fighters marching to victory and changing the course of history, 2024. https://anfenglishmobile.com/features/understanding-the-self-sacrificial-fighters-marching-to-victory-and-changing-the-course-of-history-76052 vNelson, Stanley. Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, 2015. viBlack Liberation Media. Soldiers Stories, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1Tz0ZEiprQ vii Galula, David. Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice, 1964. pp 63.viii TATORT Kurdistan. Democratic Autonomy in Northern Kurdistan, 2013.
ix Villarreal, Ginna. Health Care Organized from Below: The Zapatista Experience, 2007. https://www.narconews.com/Issue44/article2502.html
x Warfield, Cian. Understanding Zapatista Autonomy: An Analysis of Healthcare and Education, 2014. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/cian-warfield-understanding-zapatista-autonomy
xi Abouzeid, Rania. Are Israel and Hezbollah Headed Toward an “Open-Ended Battle”? 2024. https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-lede/are-israel-and-hezbollah-headed-toward-an-open-ended-battle?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us
xii Ealham, Chris. Anarchism and the City, 2010. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/chris-ealham-anarchism-and-the-city
xiii Hanaysha, Shatha.‘Our freedom is close’: why these young Palestinian men choose armed resistance, 2024. https://mondoweiss.net/2024/10/our-freedom-is-close-why-these-young-palestinian-men-choose-armed-resistance/
xiv Marighella, Carlos. Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla, 1969. xv Galula, David. Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice,1964. xvi Tse-Tung, Mao. On Guerrilla Warfare, 1937. xvii Ali, Mohanad Hage. Hezbollah and Syria From 1982 to 2011: Power Points Defining the Syria-Hezbollah Relationship, 2019, pp. 3-8. xviii Galula, David. Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice, 1964. xix Schoots-McAlpine, Martin. Anatomy of a counter-insurgency: Efforts to undermine the George Floyd uprising. 2020 xx Petraeus, David. The U.S. Army and Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, 2006. pp 54. xxi Marighella, Carlos. The Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla, 1969. xxii Galula, David. Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice, 1964. pp 53. xxiii The Iron Column. A Day Mournful and Overcast, 1937. https://files.libcom.org/files/Uncontrollable-A_day_mournful-read.pdf xxiv US Marine Corps. Warfighting, pp 2-7. xxv Petraeus, David. The U.S. Army and Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, 2006. pp 27-28. xxvi Hetherington, Tim and Sebastian Junger. Restrepo, 2010. 40:58. https://watchdocumentaries.com/restrepo/ xxvii Sottile, Zoe, Devon M. Sayers, Michelle Watson and Ryan Young,. South Carolina inmate executed by firing squad for first time in US since 2010, 2025. https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/07/us/brad-sigmon-south-carolina-firing-squad-execution xxviii Galula, David. Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice,1964. xxix Devillé, Jozef. No Friends but the Mountains, 2018. 13:30. https://vimeo.com/257718365 xxx Field Marshall D.C. On Organizing Urban Guerrilla Units, 1970. xxxi Marighella, Carlos. The Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla, 1969. xxxii Marighella, Carlos. The Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla, 1969.https://abolitionmedia.noblogs.org/?p=23059
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