Regular prepping is like a mix of waterfall planning for a very specific scenario (Costco 5-year food supply pallet anyone?) and Soviet 5-year plan command ec0nomy mindset at first estimation scale. It is overkill in anything short of a sudden step-function overnight collapse.
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I think you could sort survivalist postures by locus of self-preservation concerns. The hard-preppers are me-and-my-family sovereign individual types. Everybody else in trade-or-fight zone. This affects their planning. For example undervaluing shared risk mitigation tactics.
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At the other extreme, it’s the communitarian survivalists. “We’re all in this together, no matter what.” This has its own blindspots, like the practically existing levels of trust and alignment, variance in needs and abilities, level of endemic strife.
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Problem with both extremes is that posture towards others becomes a matter of values rather than empirical judgment. Which requires observation capabilities throughout the stack. If you can measure the right things, your approach needn’t have a libertarian or socialist flavor.
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You can adapt to actual social conditions rather than theoretical. Your prepping model need not have Hobbesian or Rousseauean priors that haven’t been updated since 1800. You can construct state based on today.
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Live example: Portland shitshow related stuff already appears to have caused some smaller incidents here in LA. How to respond? Monitor on Twitter? Rush out for more toilet paper? Run around looking for open gun store? Look for cabin in woods on Airbnb?
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The better your stack instrumentation, the more calibrated and continuous your response can be.
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What we’ve learned from Covid is that the right assumption is continuous partial collapse, not rare binary state changes. And your response likewise should be continuous partial resiliency tuning, not a two-state switching curve between full-blown lockdown mindset and normalcy.
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Pre-enacting the coming gradually darkening ages for fun and profit. Buy my teachable course “stack survivalism 101”
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There’s also similarities to a cold war condition between you and the world. It’s a backdrop of tension that may get to you anytime, but if it not, you can continue in surreal normalcy. Like the Cold War was just normalcy with a side of polonium-tip umbrella assassinations.
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There’s surprising similarities between stack survivalism and gig economy career management. Pragmatic prepping is a series of life gigs rather than work gigs. Transition from ordinary life to continuous partial collapse life is a bit like transition from paycheck to gig life.
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In the gig economy, you see surge pricing coming, and you go live. In stack survivalist living you see a toilet paper outage coming and you stock up.
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I wonder how many people with bunkers are pissed that things are bad but not bad enough to retreat to bunkers. If I had a bunker I think I’d unconsciously be hoping for a chance to use it. And kinda hoping for the Real Thing™ instead of just a bunch of stock-outs and slow mail.
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