I think I’m circling a concept you could call stack survivalism, as opposed to regular fully off-grid survivalism. Where you plan against scenarios of various sorts of non-robustness and jankiness rather than full-on, theatrical charismatic megacollapse.

(like “things ordered from China not getting through” or “rolling blackouts” or “toilet paper shortage”)

The stack is far more robust that collapsniks secretly hope it is, but far less robust than “this is fine” denialosts/normalcy larpers.

Early Covid was very revealing: in a crisis, you need time more than money, and ability to get things done in ways besides paying for them. Like being on twitter and getting early warning to beat the stock-up rush by 2-4 weeks. Or having a 3D printer and able to print shields.

Regular prepping is like a mix of waterfall planning for a very specific scenario (Costco 5-year food supply pallet anyone?) and Soviet 5-year plan command ec0nomy mindset at first estimation scale. It is overkill in anything short of a sudden step-function overnight collapse.

Stack survivalism is more like chaos monkey outages of random bits of the world you depend on. Some general principles have already become clear.

For example: You are more vulnerable where you’re a corner case (eg: insulin supply, mask protocols for people who can’t wear masks)

Another is that days and weeks matter more than months and years. Over months and years, the stack reconfigures in unpredictable ways that you have to adapt to live, closed-loop, by improvising. But over days and weeks, your preparedness makes a bigger difference.

First few minutes: physical fitness

First hour: grab bag

First days: emergency supplies

First weeks: flexible potential of your home base (eg: tool box)

Months: active productive abilities (bread machine, 3D printer...)

Years: skills in your head

The stack is “normally” like 95% reliable. 2 sigma.

Let’s say a level 1 crisis is where it drops to 68%. 1 sigma reliable. Or 1 in 3 routine actions is disrupted.

You need stack observation capabilities customized to you, to monitor this percentage from your lifestyle POV.

The “news” is a model of situation awareness for an industrial world. 40y ago, your stack observation ability was:

Daily newspaper/TV for “local” and “national” news
Phone grapevine
Step out in street and chat with neighbors
Walk around neighborhood

It was an environment of low variance in both individual needs and abilities to prepare. Now both have become very high variance. AND these traditional sources of sigint have become very noisy. By the time a signal gets to them, it’s either too late, or the get it wrong.

Now besides social media, there’s a lot more you could do.

For example: monitor a basket of goods on Amazon for stock-outs. People already do this to track sales/discounts. Why not crisis early warning?

State of the art: walk to local supermarket and check toilet paper level

Also more physical instrumentation. Those with air quality sensors can respond more individually to forest-fire and pollution risks. Those with oximeters can manage Covid risk better.

U. Arizona caught a Covid outbreak early with sewage monitoring (shows up early in stool)

That last one reveals a specific weakness in normal prepper mindset. If you only have a nuclear option of fleeing to your cabin, bunker, or New Zealand mansion, you’re not ready for milder crises where that’s an over-reaction. Apartment buildings with shared sewage surveillance?

Autocorrect typo: first estimation = domestic https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1300207171628490753

I think you could sort survivalist postures by locus of self-preservation concerns. The hard-preppers are me-and-my-family sovereign individual types. Everybody else in trade-or-fight zone. This affects their planning. For example undervaluing shared risk mitigation tactics.

At the other extreme, it’s the communitarian survivalists. “We’re all in this together, no matter what.” This has its own blindspots, like the practically existing levels of trust and alignment, variance in needs and abilities, level of endemic strife.

Problem with both extremes is that posture towards others becomes a matter of values rather than empirical judgment. Which requires observation capabilities throughout the stack. If you can measure the right things, your approach needn’t have a libertarian or socialist flavor.

You can adapt to actual social conditions rather than theoretical. Your prepping model need not have Hobbesian or Rousseauean priors that haven’t been updated since 1800. You can construct state based on today.

Live example: Portland shitshow related stuff already appears to have caused some smaller incidents here in LA. How to respond?

Monitor on Twitter?

Rush out for more toilet paper?

Run around looking for open gun store?

Look for cabin in woods on Airbnb?

The better your stack instrumentation, the more calibrated and continuous your response can be.

What we’ve learned from Covid is that the right assumption is continuous partial collapse, not rare binary state changes. And your response likewise should be continuous partial resiliency tuning, not a two-state switching curve between full-blown lockdown mindset and normalcy.

Pre-enacting the coming gradually darkening ages for fun and profit. Buy my teachable course “stack survivalism 101”

Yep this is it https://twitter.com/meanderingexile/status/1300229349820362752

Amen https://twitter.com/meanderingexile/status/1300230320160038912

There’s also similarities to a cold war condition between you and the world. It’s a backdrop of tension that may get to you anytime, but if it not, you can continue in surreal normalcy. Like the Cold War was just normalcy with a side of polonium-tip umbrella assassinations.

There’s surprising similarities between stack survivalism and gig economy career management. Pragmatic prepping is a series of life gigs rather than work gigs. Transition from ordinary life to continuous partial collapse life is a bit like transition from paycheck to gig life.

In the gig economy, you see surge pricing coming, and you go live. In stack survivalist living you see a toilet paper outage coming and you stock up.

I wonder how many people with bunkers are pissed that things are bad but not bad enough to retreat to bunkers. If I had a bunker I think I’d unconsciously be hoping for a chance to use it. And kinda hoping for the Real Thing™ instead of just a bunch of stock-outs and slow mail.