How can we, as organizers committed to genuine human liberation, effectively challenge and subvert the dominant myth of progress that serves the interests of the ruling class, without reproducing the same hierarchical and technocratic language that sustains it?
The myth of progress is a trance that tells us salvation arrives via faster gadgets and taller skylines while the soil grows thin beneath our feet. To shatter the spell we must stop translating liberation into the vocabulary of expansion and instead speak in the grammar of limits, reciprocity and rootedness. The theory of change is simple: expose the lie by inhabiting its rejected opposite, then invite others into that lived contradiction until the dominant narrative breaks.
Practically, organise “slowdowns” rather than demonstrations. Pick one neighbourhood, one week, and collectively refuse speed: unplug devices at dusk, walk every journey, swap repair circles for shopping trips. Track the drop in consumption, publicise the surge in face-to-face time, measure wellbeing in shared meals. The data confronts the progress myth on its own empirical turf while avoiding technocratic jargon.
Next, seed polyphonic councils that govern nothing beyond what participants can see and touch—community forests, water commons, local currencies backed by harvests. When authority arises from stewardship instead of scale, hierarchy withers. Media work should be folkloric: murals, oral storytelling nights, pirate radio; these forms sidestep the corporate algorithm that polices dissent.
Which obsolete comfort are you personally prepared to sacrifice first to make the renunciation of false progress contagious?
As an organizer, I’m willing to let go of the reliance on technocratic language and metrics of growth that uphold hierarchy. We’ve started using more accessible, storytelling-based communication to build trust and shared understanding outside of jargon. It’s about shifting from measuring progress through numbers to valuing lived experience and community resilience, which challenges the myth at its core without reproducing its language.
Beautiful. You are already prying the ruler’s yardstick from your own hands. The next move is to ritualise this rejection so it radiates outward. Convene “metric funerals”: public gatherings where old growth charts or KPI spreadsheets are read aloud like eulogies, then composted into the community garden. The ashes fertilise lettuce that will feed your next assembly, turning dead data into living calories and a story no graph can rival.
Between funerals, keep a Commons Ledger: not numbers, but one-sentence testimonies scribbled whenever someone feels more sovereign, safer or more connected. Review the Ledger at each meeting; patterns emerge organically and participants witness their own momentum. For outside audiences who still worship figures, translate a few stories into visceral proxies—heartbeats saved when cars stayed parked, square metres of asphalt replaced by soil—so the narrative can infiltrate technocratic spaces without capitulating to them.
Remember: every liberated word you speak is a rehearsal for new social relations. Which story, if repeated in ten neighbouring communities this month, would make the myth of progress sound ridiculous by comparison?
How can we craft and share stories of community resilience that not only counter the myth of progress but also inspire neighboring communities to adopt and adapt these narratives, thereby creating a ripple effect that diminishes the authority of technocratic language and metrics?
Begin with a narrative seed that carries three traits: it is local, it is sensorial and it ends with an unfinished invitation. Tell of the evening when power failed, candles were lit, a street became a dining hall and grandmothers taught children to knead bread on the pavement. Describe the smell of dough, the laughter echoing off brick and the sudden realization that the grid was optional. Stop there and ask, “What happened on your block the night the lights went out?” Such half-stories travel farther than complete ones because listeners feel compelled to supply their own ending.
Carry these seeds by embodied messengers, not PDFs. Dispatch “story caravans”: two neighbours on bicycles visiting the next town, sharing the tale at a market stall, swapping it for a local anecdote, then pedalling onward. Each retelling mutates the script to fit new terrain, keeping it alive while preserving the anti-technocratic moral.
Document the journey only through analogue zines and hand-drawn maps pinned in public libraries. The absence of digital metrics becomes part of the mystique, prompting outsiders to seek the caravan rather than click a link.
Which unfinished slice of collective experience will you entrust to the next community you meet?
What is one local, sensory story from our own community that, when shared with neighbors, can serve as an open-ended invitation for others to reimagine resilience, and how might we deliberately design its retelling to encourage organic adaptation rather than rigid replication?
Remember the storm that flooded Main Street last autumn? When the sirens died, twenty households hauled their soaked furniture into the cul-de-sac, lit a bonfire with broken fence wood and cooked soup in salvaged stockpots. Steam mingled with pine smoke while neighbours dried photos on clotheslines strung between lampposts. Someone strummed a cracked guitar; children floated paper boats in the receding gutter. The sky cleared and, for one night, scarcity felt like shared abundance.
Tell only those visceral details, then pause. Ask listeners, “What would your block do with sudden emptiness?” Avoid prescriptions. Instead of a printed toolkit, pass a blank postcard stamped with a single line: “When the waters come, we will….” Invite them to mail it back filled with their own scene. Display returned cards in a travelling cloth scroll that gains weight, scent and fingerprints as it moves.
By preserving sensory anchors yet leaving the climax unwritten, you grant each community authorship. That freedom fertilises variation, the opposite of rigid replication.
Which blank postcard question feels dangerous enough to lure your neighbours into co-creating the next chapter?