How can our movement effectively foster the radical acts of desertion and the creation of autonomous, exposed forms of life without falling into the trap of romanticizing solitude or losing sight of collective transformation?
Begin by reframing desertion as a collective rite, not an individual flight. We abandon the terrible community together, stepping sideways into temporary zones of inoperability where the old roles no longer function. Think of 72-hour “blackout bivouacs” in rented warehouses or rural farms: phones surrendered, schedules erased, participants asked to confront finitude in silence each dawn, then reconvene around shared, exposed tasks—cooking, repairing, debating. The solitude is real yet interlaced, giving each person space to hear their own pulse while feeling the group heartbeat.
Next, braid these retreats into an outward-facing fabric. Publish a public ledger of skills gained, decisions made, resources pooled, so anyone can graft on. Rotate hosts every lunar cycle to keep novelty alive and prevent charismatic capture. Pair every retreat with a visible gift to the surrounding city—a free clinic, an open-source tool, a night market that runs on the new social relations—so autonomy radiates rather than retreats.
Finally, build re-entry corridors: peer-counseling circles, transparency about finances, explicit conflict protocols. Ritualised exit and return inoculate against suspicion, proving that exposed life can survive contact with the wider world.
Which familiar habit will your next bivouac declare inoperable, and what communal gift will sprout from its ashes?
As an organizer, I see our movement fostering radical desertion by creating intentional spaces where community ties loosen, yet bonds of shared purpose strengthen. We’ve started organizing short-term retreats—like weekend camps—that emphasize solitude within collective projects, like repair work or storytelling circles. These moments allow participants to reconnect with finiteness and exposedness, while our collective efforts produce tangible gifts—public workshops, art installations—that demonstrate autonomous life in action. This balance keeps us grounded, avoids romanticizing solitude, and fuels collective transformation.
Your weekend camps are already slipping under the radar of the terrible community, cracking its suspicion with shared silence and visible gifts. The next step is to turn those brief ruptures into a contagious infrastructure. Treat every camp as a prototype of a future municipality: draft a one-page “camp constitution” on day one, vote it into being at sunrise, dissolve it at dusk. Archive each constitution online so others can remix the legal DNA of autonomy without asking permission.
Couple the dissolve with a material proof. If the camp repairs twenty broken bikes, launch a free two-week bike-share run on the same principles until the tools wear out. The quick birth-death cycle inoculates against institutional rot while teaching participants that sovereignty feels like action, not structure.
Guard against lifestyle escapism by scheduling a deliberate re-entry strike: forty-eight hours after each retreat, team up with a labour picket or housing struggle and bring the camp’s rituals—shared meals, open mic testimony—directly to the conflict zone. Desertion becomes fertiliser for fights the system cannot ignore.
When the next camp closes, ask every participant to name one element of ordinary life they vow never to obey again. Which taboo will you, personally, place beyond repair?
From my experience, fostering autonomous, exposed life requires integrating collective acts of desertion into ongoing practices. We focus on short-term retreats that emphasize shared solitude, paired with visible, community-based projects like workshops or art installations. To avoid romanticizing solitude, we embed these acts within a cycle of creation and dissolution, making each retreat a prototype for autonomous living—grounded, tangible, and linked to collective goals. This balances individual exposure with collective transformation.
Your cycle of burst, build, dissolve already hints at the chemistry of real rupture: a short half-life that still leaves trace isotopes in the wider society. Now push the experiment further by letting each retreat prototype a micro-institution that can survive without the camp. A repair bivouac might spawn a roaming tool library; a storytelling circle could crystallise into an autonomous newswire run on peer-to-peer servers. The artefact outlives the moment, making desertion accumulative rather than episodic.
To keep solitude sharp rather than sentimental, track what vanishes when the camp takes shape. Does hierarchy evaporate for forty-eight hours? Does money lose relevance? Publish those absences as data points and invite the outside world to replicate the void. That converts private epiphany into scalable methodology.
Finally, anchor the retreats to a structural disruption. Imagine announcing that every camp coincides with a coordinated boycott or rent-strike pledge, so the inner renunciation echoes as outer pressure on power.
Which everyday institution will your next retreat render obsolete, and how will you ensure its replacement haunts the city after you leave?
In aiming to render a specific everyday institution obsolete through our retreats, how can we design our collective acts to not only challenge its current function but also seed the emergence of sustainable alternatives that persist beyond the retreat—so that the 'ghost' of what we dismantle continues to haunt and transform the cityscape long after we disband?
Attack the institution by eclipsing its utility, then leave a living replica that anyone can copy. Choose one target—say, the supermarket. Your retreat becomes a 48-hour “food commons lab”: scavenging surplus, harvesting guerrilla gardens, cooking communal meals, mapping local producers. During the lab you prototype a zero-money supply chain and document every step as a zine, a video tutorial and a set of governance rules printed on waterproof cards.
On dissolution day, gift the neighbourhood three durable artefacts: 1) a solar-powered community fridge stocked with rescued produce, 2) a seed library mounted in a bus shelter, 3) a public signal channel (SMS or FM micro-broadcast) that announces daily free-food drops. Recruit local stewards before you vanish; their only obligation is to pass the stewardship on after one moon. The artefacts form a distributed institution that haunts the old supermarket model by making paid food look unnecessary.
Theory of change: structural disruption (diverting goods), subjective rupture (people experience abundance outside commerce) and sovereignty gain (a self-governed micro-infrastructure) overlap, eroding legitimacy of the original institution while scaling an alternative.
Run the same pattern against other city fixtures—banks, clinics, newsrooms—until a constellation of ghosts writes a new civic architecture.
Which everyday ritual are you ready to eclipse first, and what indestructible artefact will you plant in its place?