Destroy Something Conventional

Sometimes rebellion looks less like a raised fist and more like refusing to plant the same field again.

Three years, three months and three days ago, I quit my job, moved to the western slope of Colorado, and eventually set about destroying some perfectly conventional hay fields.

Yes.

Destroying them.

There were no barricades. No corporate headquarters engulfed in flames. No Guy Fawkes masks ordered from multinational retailers and delivered conveniently to the revolutionaries' front doors.

Just a guy standing in a field deciding not to do what the field was designed to make him do.

Turns out rebellion can be disappointingly agricultural.

Before this, I worked in GIS for the state of Idaho. I spent a lot of time around maps, data, government, and the peculiar machinery humans construct to organize themselves.

Eventually, patterns become difficult to ignore.

Government has systems. Corporations have systems. Agriculture has systems. Your employer, your bank, your grocery store, all systems.

Most arrive in your life already running.

Nobody asks whether they make sense. You are taught how to participate.

After enough time watching resources move through those systems, another pattern becomes visible:

Something enters.

Something is extracted.

Something must be replaced.

Repeat.

Eventually my intuition produced an unusually concise systems analysis:

GTFO.

So I did.

And being gainfully unemployed gave me time to discover something inconvenient.

It is much easier to criticize a system than to stop participating in one.

The field was working perfectly

That was the problem.

The land I ended up on had been managed according to a familiar agricultural formula.

Grow alfalfa. Feed cows.

Grow corn. Feed cows.

Or cars.

Remove whatever does not belong. Till the clay. Plant. Fertilize. Irrigate. Harvest.

Repeat.

Nothing sinister is required.

The system works.

Water enters through gated pipe and moves across irrigation marks cut into the soil. It feeds the crop, but it can also carry sediment, nutrients, and organic matter away.

The crop leaves.

Fertility leaves.

So fertility is added.

Machinery needs fuel. Seed comes from somewhere. Replacement nutrients come from somewhere. Outputs go somewhere else.

Water comes in.

Resources go out.

Inputs replace them.

The field keeps producing.

Once you stop seeing a field as a green rectangle and start seeing it as a system of flows, the question changes.

It stops being:

How much can this field produce?

And becomes:

What must this field consume to keep producing it?

That is a much more interesting question.

So I broke it

Not with fire.

That would have photographed better.

I simply stopped accepting the assumption that the field needed to remain what it had been.

We brought in goats.

Plants that would normally be classified as weeds became forage.

Water stopped being something to move through the property as quickly as possible. I started experimenting with ways to slow it down, spread it out, and keep more of it in the landscape.

Trees appeared.

Shrubs.

Perennials.

Soil stopped being the brown substance responsible for holding crops upright and became part of the machine itself.

The objective changed.

Instead of maximizing one output, the experiment became building relationships between outputs.

Water feeds plants.

Plants feed animals.

Animals feed soil.

Soil holds water.

Roots create structure.

Organic matter accumulates.

One process becomes an input for another.

At least that is the theory.

Reality retains veto power.

Plants die.

Water goes somewhere unexpected.

Equipment breaks.

Weather ignores the plan.

And goats possess a supernatural ability to identify the one plant you desperately wanted them not to eat.

Good.

Failure is information.

The question is not whether I can build a perfect system.

The question is whether I can build one that becomes less dependent on outside inputs as it matures, rather than more.

Rebellion is easy. Replacement is hard.

There is a romantic version of rebellion where you identify the machine, throw a wrench into it, and stroll toward the horizon while something explodes behind you.

Very cinematic.

Unfortunately, destruction is the easy part.

The harder question is:

What replaces it?

If the answer is nothing, necessity eventually rebuilds the old system around you.

You still need food.

Water.

Shelter.

Energy.

Some reliable method of turning Tuesday into Wednesday without civilization becoming an elaborate group project nobody prepared for.

That changed the way I think about rebellion.

Refusal matters.

Replacement matters more.

If a system is extractive, fragile, exploitative, or simply absurd, refusing to participate is only half the experiment.

Build something else.

Even if it is tiny.

Especially if it is tiny.

Grow something.

Repair something.

Share something.

Learn something you were expected to purchase.

Turn waste into an input.

Make something last.

Change one dependency.

None of this overthrows anything.

That is not the point.

It changes your relationship to the system.

And enough altered relationships create something large systems have historically found inconvenient:

People who do not need quite as much from them.

Destroy something conventional

So yes, I am destroying the hay fields.

But the grass was never really the target.

The target was the assumption that because a system already existed, my role was to keep operating it.

I have no idea what these fields will look like ten years from now.

Some experiments will work.

Some will fail spectacularly.

Some future version of me will probably stare at something I built and wonder what sort of idiot thought that was a good idea.

Excellent.

That is the work.

Observe the system.

Understand the flows.

Find the dependency.

Change the relationship.

Build something in its place.

Then watch what happens.

You do not need permission to experiment with the little piece of spacetime you happen to occupy.

And occasionally, you may irritate someone who is extremely comfortable with the way things have always been done.

That is fine.

Experiments tend to do that.

See you in spacetime, traveler.