Tootfinder

Sealioning cultists are swarming like muggen and earn the same treatment.

RE: https://social.seattle.wa.us/@divestspd/116938691728026126
Really hoping for an update.

RE: https://mstdn.social/@MaryAustinBooks/116936000385533547
Best be ready to back up those words with more than votes or they're gonna get ignored.

Multiple times, apparently...
https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/111/#r1427

They have done similar stuff with warehouse workers in the past:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/amazon-under-fire-for-software-that-recommends-firing-workers/

Huh, there's a deleted article claiming that Amazon has been firing people with AI:
https://web.archive.org/web/20251201000000*/https://www.yeetmagazine.com/at-amazon-employees-are-now-fired-by-artificial-intelligence-the-future-of-work-or-just-cold-tech/

RE: https://kolektiva.social/@Hex/116941380970260366
Precies dit:
"Cars didn't replace horses. Cars replaced walkable cities, tram lines and mass transit, and children playing in the streets."
En steden geven steeds meer het goeie voorbeeld in het (weer) leefbaar maken van de stad.
-door autoverkeer terug te dringen-
(Uiteraard hebben AI en auto's ook voordelen, maar laten we beiden vooral inzetten waar dat zinvol is)

The Amazon "replacing HR with AI" stuff is also public knowledge:
https://www.fastcompany.com/91565321/amazon-is-taking-human-out-of-hr-ai-chatbot-app-aza

I know Amazon has been frantically replacing HR with AI, and I know that they have also been firing otherwise top performers who are on medical leave. But it seems like it would be difficult to figure out if they did exactly the same thing without a similar leak.
https://www.reuters.com/world/meta-used-ai-target-workers-with-medical-conditions-layoffs-former-employees-2026-07-14/

🎨 12 built-in themes: patina, classic, simple, nord, solarized, kanagawa, tokyonight, lavender and four Catppuccin variants. Custom themes are TOML files mapping Sublime scopes to styles — ANSI names, hex colors or 8-bit codes, plus bold and underline. Themes can extend other themes.

I had a dream I was watching a documentary called "A History of Genocide" that basically had this premise. There's an Öcalan quote in Democratic Confederalism that I'm gonna have to track down again where he said something along the lines of "States are easier to rule when they only have one culture, so there's an implicit force driving all states towards genocide."

As I listen to the Revolutions podcast mini series on 1848, it's hard not to fixate in the ways in which the Liberal obsession with nationalism and national borders planted the seed for the genocides that followed. Liberals are still confused by why genocide is a persistent problem, as though liberalism itself should have fixed it. "We must establish more liberal institutions," they believe, "like the ICC, so that we can hold people accountable."
But genocide is simply a property of nations and borders. Nations have always be arbitrarily drawn and diverse groups of people have always lived together. I grew up with the balkanization of post-soviet Russia and post colonial Wars in Africa. Conservatives (that is, classical Liberals) would talk about how these people were simply uncivilized or somehow genetically predisposed to conflict. But the Bosnian and Rwandan genocides were similar to the Liberal violence implicit in nationalism from the beginning. The Bosnian Genocide was quite specifically a product of the Liberal nationalism of 1848.
There are still people in the world whose culture is defined by migration. These cultures do not recognize the legitimacy of borders because borders make their culture impossible. The very existence of these lines, and their necessary enforcement, is genocidal to pastoralists and other migratory people.
You literally cannot have borders and not be committing genocide. Concepts of national identity just add to the genocidal push, targeting ethnic minorities. Ethnicities defined by not having a nation of their own, such as Roma and non-zionist Jews, are, like pastoralists, permanently threatened by these imaginary lines.
And now, people look at the genocide ICE is carrying out, at the terror and murder, and they blame Trump. But Trump is simply the avatar of forces far beyond his comprehension.
Every liberal needs to look at their beliefs and realize that these murderous policies are implicit in the very concept of a nation.

I will never not boost this. He traded so many lives for his own.

RE: https://todon.eu/@CrimethInc/116913952636548872
When this specific phase of history is over, and, perhaps, we've turned NWDC into some artist space like Seattle's Inscape, we'll put a statue of Willem in the center of the garden where those buses once were. It's not something he'd probably have liked much, but memorials aren't for the dead. They're for the living, to help us remember what to aspire to.

I will also point out that, if you are accessing a system illegally then you have no recourse if someone exploits vulnerabilities in your scraping infrastructure via illegally exfiltrated data.
I do vulnerability research against AI systems for fun, and I use things like robots.txt as a warning. Fail to respect it at your own peril. You have been warned.

But I would warn anyone circumventing anti-LLM protections that, as the tide turns against #LLM usage and "#AI" as a whole, that it may become politically useful for some state AGs to score political points. Those political points may come by putting you in prison, or, at the very least, dumping lawyers on you and ruining your life. An AG doesn't need to win to score points for their political party or to virtue signal. All they need to do is build a case against you. Because the CFAA is *so vague* it's easy to make something plausible enough that it won't get thrown out immediately.
So if the gentile "please don't do that" isn't enough, maybe consider this.

Working in computer security, I've learned to be *real fucking careful* about this law and have heard of it being interpreted *very broadly.* If a client of mine described a system to circumvent access restrictions like this I would fire them. But assuming I didn't fire them, I would
1) tell them to shut it down immediately
2) tell them to talk to a lawyer.
LLMs, as a class of user, are clearly not authorized to access the information. By circumventing access controls, they have "knowingly accessed a computer without authorization." Those access restrictions exist to protect against various damages, including bandwidth use and "intellectual property theft" (another concept I'm not a fan of, but anyway). By violating those restrictions they could open themselves up to legal liability.
Now, IANAL. My job is to describe risk. That's a sufficient risk. It actually doesn't even matter if you'd win the case in the end, a lot of people just can't afford to fight.
But, in this case, it tends to be powerful people, for whom the law does not apply, abusing people who neither have the protection of the law nor the money to just ruin someone's life with a flood of lawyers.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1030

RE: https://tldr.nettime.org/@tante/116908308620011433
Though the DOJ clearly says that it would not prosecute this type of action, as it doesn't align with their objectives, this is a pretty clear violation of the CFAA (18 U.S.C. §§ 1030). It otherwise qualifies in every way as a federal crime.
I'm not a big fan of laws but I do think it's worth noticing that some people end up in prison for decades doing shit like this while other people face no consequences at all. (Which, I guess, actually illustrates why I'm not a fan of laws.)

I want Mike Duncan's "Revolutions" but covering the Spanish Civil War, China, Cuba, Algeria, Vietnam, and the various anti-colonial struggles, then come back to France for May 1968, and a few others, maybe ending with the Zapatistas, Rojava/DAANES, the Gen Z uprisings, and maybe introducing Myanmar.

Some old white dude decided to jump all over yelling "Ackchyually, no one forced you to buy a car!!", and I'm just blocking. This shit is so easy to research. Like, yeah, people were forced to buy a car by minimum parking zoning that spread out cities, mass transit being (very intentionally) destroyed, and giant cars that murder people. There are actual laws that very intentionally made things worse, and then there's the intentionally created prisoner's dilemma of ever expanding car sizes.
This shit is extremely easy to research. At this point I'm just assuming it's trolls or the type of people who would be like "but no one has *proved* smoking causes cancer" back in the 90's. Yeah, that was a thing, and they sounded *just fucking like these people today.*

I wonder if anyone can think of *other* images that represent justice without state power.

And like, I'm not even against "threatening" symbolism. I'm against using symbolism aligned with Liberal state violence.
There are *much* better symbols that can still be interpreted as threatening. For example....

Honestly, I really like writing code. As I'm writing, I think about ways to put things together, ways things could change. I run across awkwardness that reveals internal design problems. Just sitting and writing code puts my mind in a really calm and creative place.
An LLM just slams out code. A lot of the time it's garbage, but it's never creative. It's never making something beautiful or challenging. And if you're using an LLM to generate code you're missing that.
Now, there's plenty of boiler-plate code that can be automated effectively. But even automating that that is suppressing a signal.
Code doesn't exist to make computers go. It exists to communicate what the computer is doing. If you just want to make a computer go, you write assembly (or perl, I guess). But if you want to communicate ideas then you use a language that facilitates that.
Programming is a creative process, and statistics aren't creative.
I've been on medical leave for a while and I'm finally getting back to getting my feet under me (which is also why I haven't written human language stuff in a while). Last week I spent a bunch of time coding and I didn't realize how much I missed it, or how much I got out of it.

RE: https://kolektiva.social/@Hex/116891026406639288
Yeah, I'm not done with this. How dystopian is it that so many people are physically trapped in their houses, that a whole society feels like it's just fine to wholesale sacrifice the safe mobility of children, the elderly, and people with disabilities, so everyone who can drive is able to sit and wait in long lines of giant metal boxes that pump out fumes that are literally making huge parts of the planet uninhabitable for humans.
What the fuck is this shit?? But yeah, sure, cameras are the problem here.

It makes a solid case for the latent fascism of cars, but I would argue that cars actually play an even more active role in creating fascism. Which, I am actually arguing in the essay that I need to get back to writing.

Oh look, someone wrote the "cars are fascist" essay I wanted to write and it's pretty good:
https://brockpress.com/editorial-is-the-automobile-fascist/

Why yes, I *am* writing that bicycle anarchist manifesto and I am on the section about how American motonormitivity reinforces white supremacy. Why do you ask?

Fuck Robert Moses. I'm not saying it for any particular reason, other than that I was reminded that it is a thing that should be said, at least daily, by at least one person, for the foreseeable future.

I'm not even the first person to say things along this line either:
"Another motivation for reducing the steel intensity of modern society is to limit the consequences of geopolitical conflicts. The more steel we produce for peaceful purposes, the more steel becomes available for war and destruction. Remarkably, the production of military equipment is absent from modern steel statistics, and if mentioned, its share is very low. However, in times of war, steelmaking facilities switch to producing steel for military purposes. The steel industry can thus be converted into a weapons industry at any moment, and there is now a lot more steel production capacity available than there has ever been in history."
https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2024/03/how-to-escape-from-the-iron-age/ buried in the last footnote.
Oh, and that article also shows the math that proves that there is no way to move to EVs without absolutely blowing through the carbon budget. You have to switch to bikes and trains. There's literally no other way to keep an even close to habitable planet.

I need to write that "Bicycle Anarchist Manifesto" I've had in my notes for a while.

That's not even getting into my perennial favorite thing to point out: civilian reliance on cars unifies the interests of the population with the military.
US military domination of other countries *relies on cheap oil.* (And also the petrodollar, so oil use globally). If your life is dependent on cheap oil, then you are more likely to support invasions that promise cheaper oil, or oil subsidizes to drive down prices.
But wait, there's more. The auto industry itself is a fungible asset for the military industrial complex. Factories that make cars can pivot to making tanks and aircraft during war time (as they have). The existence of this infrastructure increases the probability of war.

Orwell's dystopia was walkable. He could not have imagined anything as bad as a society built for cars instead of people.
And, FFS, oil literally funds global fascism. It is the lifeblood of the movement. Hitler's obsession with making every German a driver and getting rid of bikes was not a coincidence. He *hated* bikes. Fascists almost universally hate bikes and mass transit while praising cars. This shit is actually extremely bad and makes for a society that's easier to control. And people still seem to think Elon Musk's mobile surveillance boxes will save the world. Cars are fascism all the way down.
Bikes and bike infrastructure makes for a society where you see and interact with other humans *all the time.* Cars and car infrastructure makes for a society where you interact with machines instead of humans. Cars make people more isolated, which makes people easier to control.

Humans should not operate cars. They are too dangerous. But it's been so normalized that everyone thinks they just have the inalienable right to fling their murder box around everyone else.

Like, actually fuck cars. They have always been bad for everyone. They have been Orwellian shit for a long time, but it's always the rest of us that suffer.
I actually think this is a good wake up call. These things will *always* be a problem. Cars being perfect for controlling people is a geometry problem. The technical element just makes the rest easier.

RE: https://infosec.exchange/@briankrebs/116890719090826544
Maybe it's time to build society in a way that doesn't require you use giant, people crushing, mobile surveillance units that require legal documentation to operate, every time you want to go get milk.

I honestly can't think of any time when "states rights" has been a good thing, but I'm always down to learn something new.

RE: https://mastodon.ar.al/@aral/116866547547121657
In general, if you're championing the rights of states, especially over the rights of people, you're probably on the wrong side of history.

So excuse me if I'm a killjoy, but I can't really get behind that symbolism.
Here's your regular reminder...
https://crimethinc.com/2019/04/08/against-the-logic-of-the-guillotine-why-the-paris-commune-burned-the-guillotine-and-we-should-too
This isn't to say that I don't want change. I just *actually* want change.

I get that everyone loves the guillotine imagery right now, but it's probably worth reminding everyone that The Terror wasn't a leftist thing. It was a centrist thing. The French Revolution wasn't a socialist revolution, it was a Liberal revolution. The Jacobins were radical liberals.
There's an ideological rythme and meter that flows through history. Where Robespierre killed those to his right but killed far more to his left, so has the Liberal state always done exactly the same. And where the result of murdering away the left ended with a reactionary dictatorship in France, so has the American Revolution ultimately played out more slowly but with the same results. Not with guillotines but with prisons, not with the Committee of Public Safety but with the FBI and COINTELPRO.

What's the best punk version of Daloy Politzei?

RE: https://social.seattle.wa.us/@divestspd/117284498575165892
Which again, is the reason cops exist. In the North, they developed to be a publicly funded private army of guards for capitalists who wanted to externalize the cost of maintaining massive wealth disparity through violence. (In the south they came from the slave patrols.)

Just, you know, hypothetically

"To test what the software could actually see, WIRED extracted the models from the camera’s files and ran them against test images and footage recovered from the device."
This means you can also take the model and evolve adversarial images that it identifies as people to disrupt image processing. Some models will only detect a limited number of targets, so a couple of high probability targets could block others from even being detected.

Honestly, this is awesome. I'm hoping for a follow up where someone uses that API key to Rick roll every cop in the US.
https://www.404media.co/hackers-stole-flocks-camera-software-revealing-how-the-company-tracks-cars-and-people-2/

One of those notes is that China may well be doing the modern equivalent of Charles De Gaulle buying American, but this time it's releasing open models.
Another note is that people can be both evil and incompetent, and that the systems of control that have been built over the last several thousand years have evolved to be extremely resilient.
I think there's also a tendency to ignore emergent intelligence, or at least to assume that it must not be as smart as individuals. But the emergent intelligence of the capitalist system should not be underestimated. Even when run by the least many of the least competent people in history, the system can be quite adaptive when it comes down to self-preservation.
The point is not to try to out think it, because that's actually impossible. The point is to design systems that can think faster.

I have a few notes on this video, but I think it's worth watching if you have the time. Benn Jordan just makes great stuff, regardless of any of my critiques.
This touches on AI, and gives a reasonable explanation of how things are coming together to make a more authoritarian reality. It also helps explain why the bubble may not actually pop.
But I did say I have some notes...
https://youtube.com/watch?v=4FZy1lBNykA
https://invidious.nerdvpn.de/watch?v=4FZy1lBNykA

I mean, really, what comes to mind this time of year?

Obligatory 4th of July post for all who celebrate

RE: https://kolektiva.social/@Hex/116820478254056968
Wow, I realized I totally neglected to mention Acéphale.
"As the Nazis rose to power, an unusual anti-fascist named Georges Bataille tried to create a secret society and a religion. Acéphale aimed to create a "headless" society by creating a religion that would carry out a metaphysical assault on fascist ideology."

To continue on the spiritual tangent, here's a playful cosmology:
https://anarchoccultism.org/hex/a-psychedelic-cosmology
Or maybe your gig is creating a DND world together. I don't know. Spirituality is intensely personal. You do you. Now back to the list...

I've always just really hated the framing of LLMs "stealing" culture. That's such a capitalist framing.
But maybe I'm making a connection that's too abstract or doesn't feel aligned for people who have more direct experience. So if you have a more direct experience and this feels off, please let me know.

The thing about training an #LLM on human culture and then renting that culture back isn't that it's "Intellectual Property Theft." There's nothing wrong with sharing. There is something wrong with framing LLMs as piracy. That's a completely different concept.
When a powerful group of people takes the writing, the art, the music, various parts of a culture and then make some bland reproduction that lacks all the meaning and essence in the original, then those powerful people profit off that mess while the people who made the original stuff are erased, marginalized, and made to suffer, there is a different term for that.
The term everyone is looking for is "appropriation."
I'm not saying this is the same as other forms of cultural appropriation, but there are definitely enough shared elements that we should revisit that conversation. Perhaps some folks who thought the idea was silly when the idea first came up may feel differently now.

And yeah, just for the record, my perspective on guns is different from most folks. I disagree with both individual gun ownership and government regulation of firearms. But that's a whole different thread that I'm not gonna expand on.

Just started listening to this one, and I'd absolutely recommend it. It's great.
It's really hard to explain how complicated beliefs can be, especially to folks in an urban bubble. The truth is, part of my anarchism came from listening to #rural folks. I didn't really live in a big city until I was like 18, but I came to those places already with a set of liberal biases.
Some of the things I experienced in those places pushed me towards being a Communist. But there are some strangely anarchistic tenancies, even in those who profess to be politically the opposite.
My stance on guns was largely shaped by understanding and extending the arguments of rural gun owners. They continued to evolve long after, but it took actually listening to break through my liberal biases and understand the ways in which gun control can actually intersect with other forms of oppression. There is a lot more nuance than I had grown up to believe.
And it goes both ways. Conservative gun owners have absolutely no intellectual against anarchist gun arguments. They're generally either gonna fall into racism that you can talk about, or start to radicalize left. There are plenty of similar pathways.
But also, not everyone in rural areas is conservative. There are plenty of rural anarchists and communists. They just get buried under stereotypes.
Anyway, this has been great to listen to and I'd recommend it.
https://www.tangledwilderness.org/strangers-podcast/talking-to-rural-conservatives

And yes, substack. Unfortunately Urban Cycling Institute is on substack. =/

There is more to #SolarPunk than solar panels and bikes. What we are talking about is being part of a living world. The hegemonic culture is one of hierarchical domination.
But many of the the cultures that hegemony suppresses bring a vibrancy to life. I don't buy yeast from the store, sealed in a plastic packet, a coffin for a living thing. I feed my sourdough. I am obligated to it, in a relationship with it, as the culture is reliant on me for it's survival. It speaks to me, with smell and color. I must pay attention. I have to learn it's nature, how it grows and eats at different temperatures informed by different times of the year. Mushrooms, yeast, kiefer, plants, independent things, things I can't control, life that is intertwined with my own.
But even my #bicycle speaks to me, which is something I hadn't considered until reading this and thinking about that framing.
It is not simply that "we need a different economic system." What we are talking about is a fundamentally different interpretation and experience of the world, from the hierarchical structure of death to a web of life, where even "inanimate" things become imbued with agency.
https://substack.com/app-link/post?publication_id=2936873&post_id=151655646

Once a bunch of companies are firing people (perhaps for reasons they don't even understand), other companies will do the same because mass firings will be taken as an economic indicator. Partially, this is companies seeing other companies "tighten their belt," which smaller companies may read as an indication that larger companies are predicting an economic downturn, and because mass firings may *cause* an economic downturn.
It's easy for folks to jump from descriptions of how economic power works into conspiracy theories about economic control, but the simple fact is that it's often very easy to explain the way that small intentional manipulation by class conscious people can cascade into large emergent behaviors. This all happens without any centralized control.
That is *specifically* one of it's greatest strengths. It is not a coincidence that conspiracy theories would lead you to ignore this specific strength.

#DearLazyWeb #Hackers: I'm trying to do some bug bounty work. I need hosting for payloads, callbacks, etc. Are there any hosting companies that are (1) relatively cheap (like, under €20/mo for basically a raspberry pi level of compute and very low bandwidth), (2) not fucking total shit evil companies like AWS, and (3) won't ban me based on an IDS flagging security stuff coming from my instance?

Most capitalists, as a class, don't think "oh, we should fire people to make sure we don't lose control." But, as here, a few people do. All it takes is a few because you have highly class aware companies like BlackRock, which own enough stock to just force boards to force CEOs to lay people off. Strongly worded letters from private equity can kick off firing sprees in FAANG. Everyone else just follows their lead because "they must have some information we don't" or "they're smart, so we should follow their lead."
It takes a very tiny portion of the capitalist class to maintain the system. It mostly acts without any centralized control channel. That's one of the the things that makes the system so stable.

RE: https://kolektiva.social/@HeavenlyPossum/116840912865012486
Just in case you were wondering why people were being fired while predicted "AI" productivity gains hadn't manifested, it's the same thing.

I had a weird dream where I was talking to someone at some kind of ceremony, I think a funeral, where I had timidly painted my face with clay as part of some ritual. This person was talking about how far society has come while our brains have not caught up.
Imagine if your ancient cave dwelling ancestors were dropped into this world of cars, office hours, budgets, climate change, and AI. They would be absolutely freaking out and struggling to understand things all the time... Just like you are now.
Society teaches us to suppress these emotions. You're supposed to be OK with giant metal boxes flying around you in rumbling stampedes, but you feel it in unexplained anxiety. You're supposed to just fit your life into tight little bounds that ignore weather and season, but you feel it in more unexplained anxiety and depression. We are all part of something so big and complicated we can't make sense of it, we cannot possibly comprehend it all, it is simply too much to fully grasp the implications of our individual actions within global capitalism. Should we be surprised by our urge to simply destroy it, by the anger and desire to simply "smash" something far more complex than can be met with simple violence?
Some part of my brain was trying to remind me to be compassionate to myself. Perhaps that reminder can be useful to you as well.

Holy shit, I'm in the anarchist library! This is cool!
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/hex-m-hell-transitliberationism

This is the petroleum age. It orders our world. It is at the heart of the military industrial complex that maintains the global hierarchy. Cars are not only a symbol of social hierarchy, but a mechanism to maintain it.
That age must end if humanity is to survive. When it ends, the wealth disparity it enabled must also collapse.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/gas-price-protests-worldwide-9.7346031

Softbank trying to figure out what to do about the goose memes, June 26, 2026, colorized

To be clear, I don't think this is a model to emulate but I do think it's an interesting little corner of history worth exploring.
The whole "human sacrifice" thing is a bit much, but I guess it depends on who is being sacrificed. They were going to sacrifice one of their members (which they never did), and that seems a bit silly. Now, if they were gonna sacrifice a Nazi, that might be a bit different.
That said, if you decide to go down *that* path absolutely do not tell me. Do not ask for help. Do not file paperwork. Just keep being your weird self and make sure to write a memoir after all the shit is over... cause I wanna read that crazy shit.

That's a whole other rabbit hole to go down, but the point being that "start a religion to fight fascism" is an idea that goes back to classic fascism.

Yes, also EVs.

Ban cars.
#FuckCars

Something something, I am not a lawyer but I'd love to have a lawyer chime in. Speaking of which, all of this crazy stuff would benefit from having legal support. Consider your networks when you think about this.

OH! I forgot the whole "out of band" thing. Let me get into that.
When you put all this together you have a business owned by a church (or, in the Dutch case, an FFI) to interface with capitalism and then a community that's collectively controlled via the legal entity of a "church." (Again, I like the word "coven," but I'm trying to use the legal definition here.)
This gives you a community that exists partially outside of the dominant system. If this seems like a new idea, it is absolutely not. There are very insular religious communities all over. Many are really oppressive cults (go watch Wild Wild Country), others are insular religious communities (for which there is a lot of legitimate criticism, but I'm only talking about decipherability here) such as Haredim or Mennonites. In some ways Tribes match this also, with various tribal governments organizing things for members.
In all of these cases, there exists an element that is outside of the dominant system. This becomes somewhat "invisible." How well do you understand the inner workings of an Amish community? How much do you think a CEO cares or thinks about them?
There are many hidden worlds that only become revealed when they become a problem (such as when a cult leader tries to take over a county by spraying e. coli on a bunch of salad bars.) This can be good if you're trying to build a new society without attracting the attention, but insular communities can also permit abusive dynamics that could otherwise be identified by the larger society. So keep the risks in mind, and be active about preventing them. Hierarchy is dangerous, but hierarchy in hidden groups can be especially dangerous.

And that's basically it. You only need like 9 of these, and there are 11, so you have some flexibility. Wow, that was a lot to type.
Go find 3 other weirdos, put everything together, and see what happens. It's probably worth it to compare what you come up with to an existing legal church:
https://www.ulcseminary.org/irsqualifications.php
You could also just start a ULC church if you're so inclined. They have templates you can use already. It's up to you.
I'll drop more things here if anything comes to mind. Otherwise I'm gonna loop back with all the folks who reached out and make sure they're tagged.

- Schools for the preparation of its members
Congratulations on graduating "how to start a religion school." I know it was hard to read all my crazy shit, but you did it. Now go into the world and make it weird.
Yeah, "school" is not well defined. Anarchists do this shit all the time with skill sharing meetups and stuff. You can figure this out.

- Sunday schools for the religious instruction of the young
Yes, radicalize kids. Also, provide child care once per week. I'm just gonna leave this here, and you figure out what to do with it:
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/emma-goldman-the-child-and-its-enemies

- Regular congregations
and
- Regular religious services
Just meet regularly. "Regular" is not defined, but monthly, or weekly would be good. You figure out what that means, but it does need to be predictable. That's less about legal stuff and more about the fact that you need some kind of predictable cadence for any type of organizing.
ULC says "Our ministers congregate online in the forums and in other places online. They meet regularly, as our forum is available 24/7."
Now, "congregations" and "services" can be different or they can overlap. People can "congregate" for services. A lot of anarchists would already qualify for both just by way of monthly general assemblies.
But services can also be different. You could, for example, regularly post some ideas to a specific mastodon account or to a specific hashtag as a "service" and then people can "congregate" on a specific server. That would, as far as I understand it, qualify.

- Established places of worship
This can be the hardest one. In the US, I think this needs to be open. A TST group I knew about used to have some privacy around their space because of all the death threats, as I understood it. (I'm not going to go into a critique of TST. @… has tons of stuff to say about how they're shit, and you should listen.)
But you will need to define a space for worship. It's not uncommon for Quakers services to be held in someone's house. The Universal Life Church operates online in a forum. There are temples that have online services.
Hey, this is fun, literally nothing says that there couldn't be a church on Mastodon where the membership is made of anyone who's on the server. I mean, technically slrpnk.net could probably just become a church if they wanted to.

- Literature of its own
Write stuff together. Reference other stuff. If you're making an anarchist coven, then you can draw from literally the entire history of anarchism and adjacent stuff. I think you can figure this out.
You just need literally any text. Here's a zine I wrote that talks about all this:
https://ia601509.us.archive.org/3/items/exit-dystopia-8up/Exit_Dystopia-8up.pdf
Or like, reference The Parable of the Sower trilogy. Whatever, as long as it's written down somewhere that you can point to.

- Ordained ministers selected after completing prescribed courses of study
You've read through this whole thread. Congratulations, you're ordained! Wow, that was a lot of hard work. I'm glad you made it. Now you can call yourself "Reverend" or "Jedi" or whatever the fuck you want. Make yourself a little document in Paint with your name on it, print it out, and frame it.
Seriously though, it can be that simple. It just needs to exist and end with some kind of accreditation that's tracked somehow. That study can also be "forming the coven" and the tracking can just completely overlap with the legal paperwork needed for the whole "ecclesiastical government" bit.

- Organization of ordained ministers
This can just overlap with your "ecclesiastical government" or just your membership. There are plenty of churches, even Christian ones, where the distinction is non-existent.
There is an expectation that "ordained ministers" go through some sort of process of learning. But anyone who's familiar with Evangelicalism knows how incredibly low that bar actually is.

- Membership not associated with any other church or denomination
I'm just gonna throw this one away. Distinct membership in only one religious organization is a distinct property of western Christianity. It is not impossible within "Eastern" belief systems, for example, to simultaneously be a member of multiple faiths, and as such one could be a member of one or multiple other churches or denominations. Being both Buddhist and Christian, for example, is not necessarily strange *outside* of Christian supremacist societies.
But if you want your membership to be distinct, you do you. I'm not your dad. Probably. I mean, my kids aren't on social media yet and I don't know if they'll ever read this. But maybe I am your dad. I'm still not telling you what to do. Also, in that case, I love you.
Anyway, moving on.

- Distinct religious history
Where does your religion come from? Maybe you're pulling from other traditions that go back thousands, or tens of thousands, of years? Or perhaps not. If you're reading this I'm going to assume you might be anarchist, so I'll just leave this right here:
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/erica-lagalisse-occult-features-of-anarchism
You may also have your own text and history. Great ;)

- Formal code of doctrine and discipline
This is just "what your objectives are." It can be as simple as ULC's "Do That Which is Right" or it can be much more complicated. You would figure that out with your group.
Personally, I would choose something like, "make life as easy as possible for caretakers." I've talked about this in the past. If you focus on care taking then you are feminist by default, you help everyone *at least once*, almost everyone twice, and most people 3 or 4 times:
- Children with supported caretakers do better
- Elderly people with supported caretakers will have a better quality of life
- Parents always need help and will do better when they have it, and the more kids the more support they need
But hey, I'm not here to tell you what to do. You can figure your own things out. (Technically, that last sentence could also be a legitimate formal code or doctrine, so we can move on.)

- Definite and distinct ecclesiastical government
This is explicitly defined in your legal documents. It's the way in which you "govern" things that are legally owned by the "church." If you're going to start a church with some people, you need to have a way of working together. The more formal you are about writing all this stuff out, the easier it will be when you *inevitably* have conflict. (Conflict is normal, so everyone should expect it.)
I also wrote something up about this. Again, it's an example (using the term "coven", because I like it more) so take it for what it's worth:
Group agreements are collectively defined rules that describe how members should interact. They may function to simplify interactions, ensure access needs are met, or to protect against the emergence of hierarchical behavior.
You can use the following prompts, or define your own:
- How should we interact with each other?
- What are your access needs?
- What would help you feel safe and respected?
- How should we deal with conflict?
- How do we deal with unanswerable questions?
- What is the process by which we update these agreements?
Write down these agreements. Edit them until you reach consensus. If it isn't possible to reach a consensus, the group may need to break apart to form separate covens.
Keep these available to refer to as they may be needed during services. These agreements will change over time. Keep them updated and be sure to check in regularly, perhaps even through a specific yearly ritual, to make sure they all still apply and no more are needed.

Now, I don't especially like the term "church" so I may use something else... like "coven." You can do what you want. But I happen to have already mapped out an example. (It is exactly that, just an example, so take if it's useful, change if you need, and don't stick to anything too closely.) Oh, this mapping also means that you would, for religious reasons, only be allowed to work under capitalism 4 days a week instead of 5.
Given the increases in productivity over the last 100 years, a 4 day work week is a completely reasonable expectation. If we have to annex Monday for the weekend by force of religion, so be it. It is rightfully ours anyway. If enough people try it, this will probably work. If it doesn't work, it just needs more people.
The Practice of Worship:
It is recommended to break down worship in to three sections: the functional, the communal, and the spiritual. It is also recommended to break these across multiple days. A common structure for some Christian churches is to take 10-15 minutes for announcements (Functional), an hour or two for services (Spiritual), followed by (Communal) coffee, tea, and cookies for an unspecified time up to two hours after. When starting or working with limited time a single compressed model like this may work, but it's not optimal.
- The Functional
The purpose of this section is to address the functional needs of the coven. Block out time (less than 90 minute blocks is recommended) to go through reports and updates from those involved in the Dispensary, Library, Works Committee (infrastructure), and Services Committee (providing services internally and, potentially, externally). Talk through any additional announcements, including those from other covens you may be federated with.
It is helpful to include unstructured communal time, such as shared meals, during or after functional meetings. As the federation grows, more time will be needed. It is recommended to break functional meetings, work parties, and such across multiple days. When a federation becomes sufficiently large, it is recommended to take every Monday, on top of Saturday and Sunday, as a third day of community and worship.
The scope of the functional spans 3 realms (which may be more-or-less fluid): the personal or family, the coven and federation, and humanity itself. It is up to each coven and individual to negotiate how to allocate the three days of the weekend once we have liberated Monday from the work week, but it is important to reserve it for one of these three. However, some people must work on weekends. Medical personnel, for example, cannot conform to a standard work week. While the work week should be universally restricted, which specific days are used will be up to the specific coven and their members.
A functional meeting can start with an agenda like the following:
Functional Invocation
Announcements
Report Backs
Dispensary
Inventory Check
What is low
What is empty
What is expiring
What is needed
Funds status
Library
Inventory Check and Items needing return
Library acquisition requests
Funds status and budget check
Works Committee
Upcoming projects
Subcommittee updates (Following the Works Committee agenda)
New committee formations
Funds status
Services Committee
New capabilities announcements
New needs requests
Subcommittee updates (Following the Works Committee agenda)
New committee formations
Funds status
Task Check
Breaking the Circle
This agenda is a suggestion for those who don't know where to start. It can be adapted or ignored as appropriate.
- The Spiritual
Spirituality is necessarily an undefined space. It is deeply personal. Each individual taking time to share their own personal spiritual experiences can help each connect with each other. This experience of connection can itself be a spiritual experience. It may also be useful to read esoteric, mystical, or philosophical texts together as type of "book club" and share thoughts. Others may draw from their own knowledge or traditions. This is something that must be defined together within a group.
- The Communal
The communal aspect of the practice of worship bind the coven and federation together. Within the community we find joy and release, connection and comfort. The coven is where we turn in times of need, and where we share our hopes and dreams.

- Recognized creed and form of worship
The practice of "worship" is not necessarily theistic. There are plenty of secular churches, such as some of those from some Buddhist sects and Secular Humanist ones. You just need something that says what you believe.
Perhaps, what you believe is that "the system is dying and we must work together to create an alternative system." That's kind of all you need. Now, if you're reading this, then I might recommend your "practice of worship" look a whole lot like the "housing coop that looks like a convent/monastery," with a library and dispensary managed by the "Church" and "regular services" (we'll get to that) which are just the types of general assemblies/organizing meetings that you need to keep such things going. But I'm not here to tell you what to believe and how to practice it. ;)

Distinct legal existence:
This is a distinct legal entity, such as an LLC. Your "church" will need a governing body to run the legal entity it's formed under. However you decide to do this, it must be spelled out clearly in filing forms. There are a lot of ways to "govern" a community, and, since diversity allows evolution, I'm not going to describe any of them.
Basically, all you need is *some* legal incorporation. This is important for the legal aspect (if you are trying to subvert the legal framework within the legal framework). You will need this in order to own bank accounts and property collectively, and you may need this to remove or reduce the influence of the dominant system on your collective governance of finances and property.
If you, on the other hand, just have a communal squat that operates economically entirely in black markets then I don't know why you're reading this.
(Fun fact, which I'm skipping to because I don't want to forget it: As I understand it, The Church of the Subgenious skipped a lot of this by including "paying taxes" in their definition of their church. They pay their taxes every year, and the IRS rejects their payment, which proves they're a church. OK, back to what I was talking about...)
Edit: One thing I forgot about this. There must be *at least 3 /unrelated/ people* named on the legal documents. That is the minimum number to be a legal church.

Under US law, a "church" is only really defined by the IRS (as far as I'm aware). This definition lists 14 attributes, of which a church is expected to have 9. They are as follows:
- Distinct legal existence
- Recognized creed and form of worship
- Definite and distinct ecclesiastical government
- Formal code of doctrine and discipline
- Distinct religious history
- Membership not associated with any other church or denomination
- Organization of ordained ministers
- Ordained ministers selected after completing prescribed courses of study
- Literature of its own
- Established places of worship
- Regular congregations
- Regular religious services
- Sunday schools for the religious instruction of the young
- Schools for the preparation of its members
https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/churches-religious-organizations/definition-of-church
Let's talk about each one now, and a bit later we'll talk about examples of systems existing now and how they become essentially "out of band," "invisible," or otherwise "indecipherable" to the dominant system....

RE: https://mastodon.me.uk/@ChrisMayLA6/116811916966370492
This, but the Children of Kali version from Ministry for the Future.

Amsterdam feels like Las Vegas right now and I want everyone in a car here to know it's their fucking fault.

RE: https://todon.eu/@CrimethInc/116800863729420473
Anyone not familiar with the Haymarket Martyrs, Sacco and Vanzetti, the Seattle Grand Jury Resisters, etc, might want to spend a bit of time learning about how history has drawn a pretty straight and unchanging line.
The murder and torture carried out by the state in the past cannot be undone, but there is still time to prevent yet another flood of injustice.
We can all look backwards and clearly see the mistakes of the past. But can be so much harder see the present clearly, even when it's so incredibly stark as this.

There are also some really interesting anarchist adjacent ideas, or things that I would probably label as anarchist even if folks wouldn't self-label. Awra Amba is fascinating and worth learning about all on it's own.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=feYv2wZFbb0

And, yeah, there are both anarchists in Ethiopia and anarchist adjacent ideas. This was a good interview. I'd love to read or listen to more (if anyone knows any):
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/anner-an-ethiopian-anarchist-perspective-on-the-war-in-tigray

At some point, someone's gonna combine these and it will be fucking hilarious.
https://stateofsurveillance.org/news/captured-logs-hackers-claude-codex-companies-2026/
https://github.com/cyberpapiii/chipotlai-max
https://thehackernews.com/2026/06/researchers-build-self-replicating-ai.html
Bonus hilarity if it's a Butlerian Jihadist.

It seems as though I'm always too involved with my life to remember solstice. This, even as my body remembers by waking up to bright morning sun and my kids remember by not wanting to sleep while the sun is still out. I feel as though life would be so much easier if we didn't live in a society that disconnects us from the rhythms of life.

The first record of the parable commonly known as the "Blind Men and the Elephant" showed up around 2500 years ago, in a Buddhist text from India. At this point it's pretty commonly known. I assume that most folks reading this will be familiar with some variation of it.
If not, it's essentially a story about people who have limited information making assertions about something: one man grabs a tail and says, "it's like a rope," another the trunk and says, "it's like a snake," a third the leg saying, "it's like a tree," and so on. Later variations are less kind to the men, having them not simply report their findings, but fight over them. The first English translation draws a parallel to religion.
This comes to mind for me, because social media has a tendency to incentivize us to make those hard assertions, to dig in, to argue our perspective as part of a spectacle. Free and federated social media isn't structurally that different from corporate media, so the incentive models built to maximize engagement by maximizing conflict tend to leak through the similarities in the user experience and the conditioning of other platforms.
I didn't really come here to critique the fediverse, but rather to remind everyone, "no one sees the whole fucking elephant." We are limited and there are necessarily some things so big they will never be individually comprehensible. Any system that relies on us all agreeing cannot possibly respond to those big things.
We can see that concretely if we look at the difference between "democratic unity" and "diversity of tactics." In the first model, everyone either agrees or gets forced to behave as though they agree (at least on some issues). That's how liberal democracy works. Diversity of tactics (which systematically described, for example, in the "St Paul Principles"), on the other hand, let's people align on goals without needing to agree on exactly how to achieve them. The reality being that often there are multiple "correct" paths, and sometimes those paths can only work if multiple paths are taken in unison.
No one sees the whole elephant. We won't even see the elephant later. People will still be arguing about the elephant long after it's gone. But if you want to get rid of the elephant, you're gonna need to accept that you can't comprehend it all and you're gonna have to figure out a way to work together that doesn't require a unified approach.

Someone else pointed out that I left out a whole bunch of racism stuff. I also realized I totally left out the settler colonialism aspect of cars which... there are books about.
Looks like I'm gonna need to revisit this a lot after I do some more reading.
Speaking of which, if you feel like there's something missing here please feel free to point it out. I know it's not exhaustive (just exhausting(.

Listening to the Revolutions podcast and there are so many things that happened based on some mistake or misinterpretation then cascade faster than anyone expects. Honestly, after all the evil shit the oligarchs are doing, I really think it'll end up being some obscure parody or just misinformation that kicks off the insurrection in the US.

Our resources are controlled by a cult that's demanding that we have faith in their impossible god.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12559-012-9124-9

RE: https://nerdculture.de/@tynstar/116781190514549458
I want everyone to realize that we have no evidence that such an intelligence is computationally possible.
Edit: this seems to be a parody quote or misattribution based on some folks checking the actual video for the quote.

Alright, I fucking wrote the first draft. Now I'm tired.
Something something #FuckCars
https://hexmhell.writeas.com/transitliberationism-a-bicycle-anarchist-manifesto
Edit: also the usual. Editing is welcome, feedback, fact checks, typo call-outs, are all greatly appreciated.

RE: https://mas.to/@gabrielesvelto/117270282547424238
I think this is the correct answer. "Quick! Force us to slow down so we have an excuse to reduce our spend before we run out."