The United States federal government is closed. Whether it reopens or not is unknown at this time. As i write this, millions of people are in the streets across the country for No Kings protests. It's undeniable that everyone in these crowds opposes the current administration's plan to become a 'unitary executive' with unlimited power over the day to day function of the federal government. "No kings." This is a clear, unambiguous demand, but it isn't a rallying cry for the world we need to build.
One alternative to no kings is many kings. The right has a clear idea of what can replace both the republic we knew and the king we reject. Their idea is the network state, a vision of government that Gil Duran describes as "a blueprint for dismantling democratic societies and replacing them with privately run territories run by tech elites." They're trying out different terms to see what sticks with the American people, calling them both 'freedom cities' and 'startup cities'. Regardless of the marketing term they finally settle on, the oligarchs in Silicon Valley are planning and working overtime to install many new kings, not just one.[1]
There's a dangerous overlap between this dystopian vision and one of the visions for the future of the grid. With today's technology, it's more possible than ever to provide electricity for all — and it's also easier than ever to fragment our interconnected system into isolated units relying on modular, renewable energy technology. Indeed, within the standard two-party political spectrum applied to the US, you can find people in either party who are advocating for individual energy systems calling it energy independence, energy resilience, or doomsday prepping.
At the moment, as electricity bills continue to explode while incomes stagnate, the dystopian vision of privately run territories is already taking hold, one home at a time. Without asking about what a collective design for the future of the grid looks like, the push to deploy home solar and batteries is producing wider acceptance that, when it comes to electricity, an every-man-for-himself approach is best. The myth of rugged individualism has insidiously infiltrated our ideas about the very backbone of the energy system and reinforcing forces for social division.
The right does not envision a world for everyone today and is working hard to make their vision our shared reality. To reach their goal, on one hand, they're expanding the militarized parts of the state like local and federal police forces to disappear anyone, immigrant or citizen alike, and sending military troops into our cities to intimidate anyone who would object. And on the other hand, the right is destroying the social welfare parts of the state, like funding for food, energy, and hospitals. I'm already seeing people cut ties with our current electricity grid to retreat into individual, private, home-centered electricity systems, seeking a way out as internal emigres. This strategy is meant to literally divide and conquer, and we cannot help it succeed.
If you're someone who believes that the future is electric, we have a more difficult road ahead than ever to build a clean, resilient, and public grid. But we cannot reach that horizon by deploying more wind, solar, and batteries with a design that reinforce the right's dystopian vision for their cities and their infrastructure. It's time to be more specific about what your commitments to an all-electric future are: Is the future all-electric and all on your own? Does your vision overlap with a future of kings? What if you raced to meet your neighbors instead of retreating into yourself?
This is not a race we can afford to delay because we feel unprepared. While we must take time to build relationships rooted in principled struggle and trust, we must also recognize the physical demand of climate change; the pace of fascist power's growth; and the timelines on which our societies are being forced to fracture. But working together — racing to meet one another — can help us become less isolated, figuratively in these issue areas, literally in our information ecosystems, and physically in our local communities.[2]
There are many people already forming relationships and collectives that we will need to challenge the global vision of the network state. Here are just a few examples. Tenants are building a new federation of tenant unions to wield power and make decisions collectively, working to make housing for all a guaranteed reality in our lifetimes. In the public power sector, utility linemen practice mutual aid, planning for rapid response and traveling across the country to restore power after extreme weather and climate disasters. To protect their communities from the breakdown of the federal government, state attorneys general and democratically elected officials are trying new forms of planning and cooperation.
A world with no kings requires local democracy over every arena of life and rejection of the individualistic approach to the energy transition that reinforces oligarchy's blueprint for control over our lives. If we want a shared future, we must make the infrastructure backbone of our society reflect a shared fate. Making this future possible requires new organizing at many scales, from your neighborhood to the one next to yours; from your city to the next nearest city; and from your city to another city across the nation.[3] It looks like making sure you're not just talking about solar and batteries alone, as a positive force in any form, but talking about public power - interconnected, public ownership of all our electric infrastructure - lighting up green, social housing, all owned and operated by workers fighting the class struggle in your local communities.
At Drilled Media, Amy Westervelt has discussed the climate angle at length. ↩︎
One of the possible visions for how this could work has been outlined by geographer Andrew Cumbers, who argues that what we need to build is economic democracy. ↩︎
As i wrote last month, we can start by building an analysis and organizing along the very supply chains of the electricity system. ↩︎