credit:
rmatthendrick

A purely virtual rc tribe is not, and will not be, entirely useful in terms of disaster/collapse situations. This is partly for the reasons Andrew and Lance mention, but also from physical reality. Take Katrina as the example – without comms to outside, the value of the net is limited. Software developed freely and ad hoc for people locating was done rapidly, and with a minimal requirement for coordination, although the temporary creation of relief 2.0 (which I helped create and co-ordinate) allowed the software to be standardized.

But by the time the tsunami hit, no one was participating – it wasn’t nearly as useful as putting up voip servers.

What was lacking in Katrina – and in most disaster/collapse situations – is a replacement non-national-grid infrastructure systems internal to the region. Which is to say:

- Solar/battery/wind powered mesh cell/wireless networks with cheap, easily deployable nodes. A lot of them.

- Solar/alt energy water pumps and distillation distributed at a block level.

- Locally accessible databases for currently available resources and co-ordination – who is where, and what are they doing?

- Human powered vehicles – more trikes than bikes, to move material where needed and perhaps function as ambulances.

- Triage facilities and local co-ordination points at the same level of granularity. Centralized relief facilities (superdomes, what have you) should be a secondary level of response.

- All of these need to be provided in a way that non-authority powers (gangs, etc) can also be leveraged for comunications, co-ordination, and material, transparently to the “authorities”.

A local police department cannot provide the manpower necessary to police every block in the manner required for security, so “down for the block, yo”. Under situations like this, painkillers and stimulants may be required in quantities local hospitals and pharms can’t supply. Heroin is a *useful* thing when you have a large number of injured folks and no access to pharms – so is marijuana. Got a moral issue? Too bad – survival trumps morality almost every time. (This is the bottom line on “no ideology”).

Participation in a virtual RC frankly isn’t required for the 98% of the population that won’t use it anyway. They just need to be able to get to someone who can tell them what to do – that’s what they will want and respond to. And by “get to” I mean walk, crawl, or swim no more than a quarter mile.

Of the 2% who use their access, 80% of *them* will just be reporting in. Community logistics and tool management overhead (where necessary) should require minimal personhours and perhaps a core of 10-20 people for the *entire* enterprise.

There *will* be knowledge/information/power differentials. There *will* be power struggles over control of the resources. There *will be “bad behavior”. It can all be handled, and “swordlessness” is probably the only effective way for the duration of the emergency.

With or without this, a response community of people who do useful things will emerge – it *always* does. The goal should be to provide that emergent community with the tools to be effective in what they do, rather than pre-establishing an organizational model and identifying members, or centralizing and standardizing “what they should do” beyond “deploy the block kit”.

With this kind of distributed system in place, it *doesn’t matter* if the Gov responds as slowly as in Katrina. Basic needs will get handled, the nightmares of the domes don’t get repeated, and there is something in place already for the disaster relief folks to tie into if they eventually show up.

You may notice there has been no mention of either food or weapons. Generally speaking those are both secondary to the situation. Reality is that most people won’t starve to death in a couple of weeks, even with no food at all. The will die of dehydration or injuries long before starvation is a problem. And not “hoarding” is an example of swordlessness – if there is nothing to take by force and that is known, no one will bother trying to take it by force.

And what of the rural survivalist “preppers”? Utterly irrelevant in the larger context. Suburbanites “protecting” their communities? Route around them – if they don’t like it they can’t have any. Oh, they’ll be there, but wasting their time and cutting themselves off from the best means of dealing with it all for everyone. You want emergency food? Buy a case of ramen.

Total cost of each node in such a network can be brought down to well under 2 grand, including a weatherproof triage tent/yurt. The entire kit would weigh under 200 lbs, and be storable in the space under a conventional single bed. If you want to get fancy, add a container in your yard to store it all and act as c&c facility – that would run about 3 grand additional.

(note: reposted from a comment I made on John Robb’s Global Guerrillas