Daniel Pinchbeck's Plot to Save America

Psychonaut Daniel Pinchbeck has an interesting post, "The Plot to Save America," with an interesting lede, "Building a Parallel Society in the Face of Authoritarian Collapse." Here's how he begins:

We need a plan to save America that doesn’t rely on waiting around for the Democratic Party to undergo a transformation. That may never happen or may not happen in time. A plan requires a final goal, a long-range strategy, and a short-term tactical roadmap. We have the basic plan but, as of now, we lack capital or manpower to execute on it. Feel free to comment, critique, and so on.

Let’s explore the basic gist of it here. In writing this, I seek help from readers with financial resources. Also, I don’t mind if this inspires others to undertake such an initiative without me, although I do think my input would be helpful. I built a prototype many years ago with The Evolver Network. At one point, we had sixty local community groups and a rudimentary media infrastructure, but we ran out of financial support before we could find a successful formula. I also spent ten years writing How Soon Is Now, which explores how to engineer a systemic transformation of post-industrial civilization, responding to the threat of ecological collapse, among other aspects of the metacrisis.

The lion’s share of the capital we need to execute our plan should come from the mid-tier of successful wealth-holders who have liberal sensibilities as well as empathy for poor people and those made to suffer needlessly. We can call these people the Managerial Professional Class (MPC), or the upper middle class — people with a net worth, roughly, of anywhere from $500,000 to $50 million. They are a group that the Right is explicitly targeting for demolition or at least demotion, although they don’t seem fully aware of this yet. We need to build class alliance between the PMC, knowledge workers or cognitive laborers, working class people and farmers, against the extractive vampires sitting at the top of the system and sucking the life-force out of it.

A bit later:

One important piece is digital identity. The Internet was originally designed without establishing a secure container for user’s personal data and identity. This turned out to be a tragic flaw as it allowed for-profit companies to own user’s data and use it for their financial and political purposes. A secure protocol for digital identity and personal data will be a crucial element in any new digital infrastructure.

Ultimately, we intend to build a parallel social structure and governance system, integrating new methods of decision-making and value exchange, outside of the stagnant two-party duopoly. This network must prove its utility by providing immediate, tangible benefits to people’s lives (such as access to shared resources, whether tools or land or services). This may seem like an overly-ambitious goal, but it should be noted that projects able to galvanize the mass populace or, eventually, command billions of dollars of investment often propose wildly ambitious goals at the outset. One example is Elon Musk’s dream of settling people on Mars, despite the incredible cost and impracticality of such an enterprise.

What we’re envisioning is a decentralized, member-driven platform that builds over time:

• A governance system inspired by Audrey Tang’s work in Taiwan, enabling participatory decision-making at scale
• A self-sovereign identity layer, where members control their data and digital presence
• A media ecosystem that restores trust by linking all content—articles, podcasts, videos—to their verified sources
• A tokenized, regenerative economy, experimenting with tools like negative interest rates and peer-to-peer exchange systems
• A legal and advocacy arm to protect members’ rights and represent progressive values in policy arenas

Over time, the network may assimilate physical territory—forming an archipelago of autonomous zones to host events, research projects, and community living experiments.

Pinchbeck then goes on to review some possible models: The Iroquois Confederacy, Democratic Confederalism in Rojova, and Digital Democracy in Taiwan. My ongoing Kisangani project is similar in inspiration. My recent working paper, Kisangani 2150: Homo Ludens Rising, is about such a parallel society. But the Kisangani project is primarily conceptual and fictiona. Pinchbeck is in it for real. I urge you to read his post.