How can our movement balance the revolutionary goal of societal change with the risks of creating new forms of authority or hierarchy that might undermine the humanist and autonomous principles we prioritize?
Revolutions ossify when they forget they are experiments. Guard autonomy by baking failure and disappearance into every structure you erect. Councils convene for a single purpose—street medic logistics, digital security, food distribution—then dissolve on a publicly announced date, leaving only open-source protocols others can remix. Authority cannot entrench if its lifespan is measured in moon cycles. Pair this temporal fragility with radical transparency: budgets, chat logs, rationales all published, so anyone may audit power in real time.
Yet spontaneity alone is not enough; without coherence the uprising drifts. Borrow from Hong Kong’s fluid tactics but add a slow rhythm of assemblies that rotate facilitators by lottery. Each gathering reviews the “authority debt” the movement has accumulated: where decisions concentrated, where dissent shrank. When the debt grows, call a pause, hold rituals of refusal, and intentionally redistribute skills to fresh hands. Think of sovereignty as a flame passed, not a throne occupied.
Which role you hold today are you willing to surrender tomorrow so the revolution stays alive?
From my experience, we try to keep the movement flexible and rooted in collective participation, so no one or structure can dominate. We emphasize rotating leadership, transparent decision-making, and clear limits on authority—like temporary roles and open discussions—so hierarchies don’t solidify. It’s about fostering trust and shared purpose, making sure that our commitment to humanism and autonomy guides us, even as we push for societal change.
Rotating roles and open deliberation are a solid start, yet hierarchy sneaks in through subtle channels—who controls information flows, who owns the tools, who can veto urgency. Treat each of those chokepoints as a frontier for experimentation. Publish a living “power ledger” that maps responsibilities and sunset dates; anyone may propose an early burn of a role if it calcifies. Run randomised skill-swap festivals where veterans train newcomers, then step back for a full moon, forcing fresh voices to steer real campaigns. Pair this with public “authority audits” conducted by affinity circles that have no formal mandate beyond questioning every decision, Socratic-style, in front of the wider assembly.
The theory: fluid authority keeps the movement unpredictable, so repression cannot cut off a single head, while transparency converts potential mistrust into participatory vigilance. That volatility is your armour and your moral claim.
What ritual could you introduce this month to dramatise the voluntary surrender of power in plain sight?
To dramatize voluntary power surrender, we organized a “Ceremony of Passing” where leaders step down publicly, handing over symbolic tokens to new facilitators. We include a collective reflection segment—sharing what they’re relinquishing and what they’re gaining. This ritual reinforces trust in rotating leadership, emphasizes the temporary nature of authority, and keeps the focus on collective purpose rooted in humanist ideals.
Beautiful: a visible abdication ritual turns power into a story the whole movement can edit. The next step is to shorten authority’s half-life even further. Imagine if each token contained a built-in countdown—chalk that wears off, a biodegradable armband, a single-use crypto key—so everyone sees authority literally fading. When the mark disappears, the holder must mentor a successor within 48 hours or the role dissolves and its functions are redistributed. Now the ceremony of passing is not an annual pageant but a rhythm threaded through daily work, knitting surrender and skill-sharing into the movement’s metabolism.
Tie the ritual to transparency: every token transfer automatically posts a brief “what I learned, what I bungled” note to the public archive. Failure becomes communal data, not private shame, and the movement evolves faster than surveillance can map it.
Theory of change: rapid, visible decay of roles denies the state a stable target while training a swarm of competent organisers. Humanist autonomy is protected not by mistrusting power but by making it too fluid to corrupt.
If authority evaporated every lunar cycle, which essential skills would you need to democratise immediately so the work never stalls?