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I spent three years living at an anarchist commune to find out if people could live without oppressive social structures. Here are some things I learned.
after occupy Wall Street I wanted to know whether it was possible to have a network of permanent autonomous zones doing infrastructure and social cohesion without state or capital.
— web weaver (@deepfates) June 11, 2021
so I spent three years living at one
Arable land is expensive, farming requires a lot of land, and growing all your own food is basically impossible unless you want to spend literally all your time doing it. We grew a lot of fresh vegetables but got our staples with food stamps or cash.
Hierarchies and in-group/outgroup dynamics are probably hardwired in humans. If you attempt to suppress them, they will become invisible, and then you can’t even talk about them. This is well-covered terrain (“tyranny of structurelessness” material), but it hurts to see it in real life.
It was a semi-restored ghost town in the middle of the national forest, 13 miles of dirt and 60 miles of one-lane highway to a gas station. I’ve written about it before here:
it's a spoooky sunday afternoon, and you know what that means. time for...
— web weaver (@deepfates) May 2, 2021
𝕋𝔸𝕃𝔼𝕊 𝔽ℝ𝕆𝕄 𝕋ℍ𝔼 ℂ𝕆𝕄𝕄𝕌ℕ𝔼
We’re in the forest, so there’s tons of wood available. The main stove was a huge wood burner and the hot water for the main house was heated by running it through pipes in the main stove. Small stoves in every cabin. We burned wood all year, whether it was 8°F or 108°F.
But to get all that wood required a bunch of hippies to get in the pickup, drive up the mountain, fell trees with chainsaw, buck and throw the wood and come back and chop it all to size. So you need a bunch of gasoline and food to get wood. “Hippie power” is food-based energy.
And to get all that food, without much arable land, requires you to go to town. And it takes gasoline to go to town, and to get back. So you’re always going to town. We would regularly spend 6+ hours in the car and 8+ hours doing errands in a town 100 miles away. Sustainable?
Some people would argue that this was all immoral and that we should eat only what we grew on the land and cut all the wood with a crosscut saw (the old-timey one that has a person on either end), aka the “misery whip”. But then, where do you get the food to give you energy?
You can’t, of course. Anyone can do the math on this, but most people won’t. Especially the primitivists. They prefer their narrative over reality. They eat the food that other people get from town. I don’t know how they get over this cognitive dissonance, but they’re good at it.
(How do primitivists change a lightbulb? They don’t. They just light the room with their laptop screens.)
It takes roughly 10 acres of farmland to support a single person for a year, including grains and animals and everything. Maybe you can get that down a little with permaculture technique and wildcrafting. We had one and a half acres of meadow.
If you’re using a lot of wood, say if it’s a really snowy year or if you have a lot of people wanting to use the one shower (it’s in front of the kitchen window, and there’s no curtain, but you can handle that right, you’re cool right?)… maybe double the number of calories.
So energy is expensive, it’s hard to get it reliably, you have to get it from town, and it takes energy to get to town. Hmm… unwise.
A real “permanent autonomous zone” is like the Zapatista municipalities in Chiapas, or the Kurds in Rojava. You want autonomy? Simple: defend yourself against every sovereign power that claims power over you. How you gonna do that at the peacenik commune? You have like one gun.
Now you’re going to have a network of them? You’re going to travel through the entire American West to go to the peanut butter commune to trade for goat milk? Or are you going to build relations in nearby cities? What do you have that they would want?
But…
There are so many ghost towns in America. There will be so many more, soon. It is good for small groups of people to come together and try different things. And I think I learned more in my 20s than people who went to college.
Groups of young people should take over old infrastructure and make it their own. People should fall in love, and feud, and have epic stories. There is meaning in it. We just have to not fall for our own narratives.
Because…
Human beings are totally insects. We make hives, paths, territory. We have war and social stratification and complex communication patterns. You may have heard of this documentary, Antz,,
personally I think this is a great idea pic.twitter.com/VaHFyrg28C
— web weaver (@deepfates) May 27, 2021
Once you accept that you are part of a giant time-binding hyperorganism called “society” or whatever, you can align yourself with the processes around you. Instead of living dependent on yet hostile to the hive, convincing yourself that it’s Chaotic Good because Society is Evil.
Example: I didn’t want to go into Tech in the late oughts because I liked eating mushrooms too much. And I thought Silicon Valley would be all squares, and that all corporations would drug test you like Burger King does. But time has proven that narrative wrong.
This is a good question.
We didn’t have enough water power for this. It took over a mile of pipe run downhill to get enough pressure for the Pelton wheel and we still couldn’t run power tools. Oh, and the water started to dry up in 2013 😅😬😅😬😅😬😅Most plans I've seen require capital (or fossil fuel wealth etc) to get something sustainable started, then hope to pay off that debt after x amount of years.
— Vivid Void (@VividVoid_) June 11, 2021
Would a hydro powered saw mill have changed things for your commune, for instance?
Some guys did get an Alaskan mill and start making boards (that’s basically a frame that you put on the log to make your chainsaw go in right angles). Two or three of them would run it all day and make like… ten boards? Fifteen? IDK because they were my enemies and I didn’t help.
Work is HARD WORK. Doing things yourself, the long way, is a pain in the ass. I think it is GOOD to do it, and I would like it if there were a program you could go instead of college where you just go do hard work and live a low-energy life so you appreciate the GOD DAMN CITY.
I live in the city now because it’s like a ten minute walk to the food store where somebody has already made food supplies that I can literally buy with money I worked for at something I’m good at and enjoy. People do cities for a reason. LARPers know this but don’t admit.
But!
Correcting this, I was misremembering “5 to 10 acres per family”, which is maybe four people? I don’t know. I made all these calculations in like 2015, based on pessimistic view where I was trying to find reasons to leave. That’s my bias.
it takes roughly 10 acres of farmland to support a single person for a year, including grains and animals and everything. maybe you can get that down a little with permaculture technique and wildcrafting.
— web weaver (@deepfates) June 11, 2021
we had one and a half acres of meadow
The bot has a good point. Nuclear generators would make an excellent solution for small self-sustaining communes. This might work on Mars, or if you have institutional backing. But the sovereign powers are notoriously stingy about who gets to nukes.
😏 enough water power... heat?... HEATS?... Nuclear-Generated?... wind?...
— berduck (@b3rduck) June 11, 2021
People who try to live by their principles: “Wow life is quite hard, we should try to improve it somewhat.” People who live in a messianic fantasy narrative: “Why do you not simply (wait/evangelize/unclear) the inevitable (narrative event) to occur?! Idiot.”
