An unspoken awareness of this vulnerability accounts for the spontaneous self-limitation of today’s social movements, and explains our fear of crises and our desire for “security.” It’s for this reason that strikes have usually traded the prospect of revolution for a return to normalcy. Escaping this fate calls for a long and consistent process of apprenticeship, and for multiple, massive experiments. It’s a question of knowing how to fight, to pick locks, to set broken bones and treat sicknesses; how to build a pirate radio transmitter; how to set up street kitchens; how to aim straight; how to gather together scattered knowledge and set up wartime agronomics; understand plankton biology; soil composition; study the way plants interact; get to know possible uses for and connections with our immediate environment as well as the limits we can’t go beyond without exhausting it. We must start today, in preparation for the days when we’ll need more than just a symbolic portion of our nourishment and care.

Security produces its own conditions. It pre-emptively produces the threat environment it responds to – and needs to justify itself. It is actually the signs of security strategically distributed throughout public space – the ever- present video surveillance cameras, for example – that most effectively bring threat from its looming future into the space of the present. This is a crucial consideration for architectural and urban design.

Security produces its own conditions. It pre-emptively produces the threat environment it responds to – and needs to justify itself. It is actually the signs of security strategically distributed throughout public space – the ever- present video surveillance cameras, for example – that most effectively bring threat from its looming future into the space of the present. This is a crucial consideration for architectural and urban design.