Movement Pattern :: Collapsing The Waveform – Center for Militant Futurology

Contrary to how it is often perceived, historical change is not a consequence of landmark events or big ideas, mostly it is a result of a lengthy chaotic process, a throwntogetherness of countless factors (geographical, cultural, biological, quantum etc.), as well as miniscule but consequential changes in the behavioral patterns of humans and other living beings. Even the smallest change in the most infraordinary forms of doings can have huge and lasting effect.

It might start with just a single being, doing something different, just the teensiest thing that queers the patterns of usuality. And sometimes slowly, sometimes explosively, a new movement crystalises, a kind of social choreography, like a flutter of sparrows, or waves breaking or the light green eruption of a forest in spring, and — a new pattern emerges. Let us give a few examples from the nearest future.

2025: A group of surrogate mothers from India, Laos and Thailand establish Gestational Worker of the World, a global revolutionary movement, with the stated goal of reclaiming the means of reproduction. For that purpose, GWW are instrumental in the founding of more than 30.000 gestational communes all over the planet. In these, children are shared between primary parents, often 3 or 4, and a multitude of significant others, based on the idea that a child belongs to no one, but themselves — socially, genetically and culturally, and that we all, in a way, raise each other.

2020: The nurse Nicki Alhajjah embroiders her hourly salary on her uniform with red thread. Before long she is looking at an official reprimand. The next day, 20 of her colleagues embroider their uniforms in solidarity. The differences lead to intense surprises, which does not diminish when the doctors suture their salaries on their coats, soon joined by porters and cleaning personnel. There are many discussions, but in the end, most agree that the differences are fundamentally unjust and clearly bizarre. The movement spreads like the wind, which is not uncomplicated for people outside traditional wage jobs. There are huge strikes under the slogan EQUAL PAY FOR ALL. Income sharing becomes a thing. In autumn, there are 1.5 million t-shirts from H&M, which after 3 washes, display a message in big pale letters. It’s the hourly wage of the Bangladeshis who made these popular garments: 0.20 € / hour.

2029: Scientists make several breakthroughs within the field of consciousness research, making telepathy a skill easily learned. An unexpected consequence is an abnormal growth in the right supramarginal gyrus, leading to a form of hyper empathy, which makes suffering of other beings or living systems physically unbearable for the host. In 2031, the first empaths gather in a planetary reform movement under the old slogan of activist and hyper empath pioneer Fannie Lou Hamer, NOBODY’S FREE UNTIL EVERYBODY’S FREE.

2020: Climate activists arrange a blockade against a coal shipment in Massachusetts. This leads to similar protests in many other planetary locations – all against the fossil infrastructure. Transport of oil and coal is shut down, there are blockades against construction of gas pipelines, tar sand mines and power plants are sabotaged. Local communities take a stand, it becomes increasingly difficult for the fossil industry to find train operators, mine workers, ship captains etc. Simultaneously, the extraction industry gradually loses the parliamentary support, which had shielded it from criticism and attacks for decades. In 2024 the last fossil extraction operation on planet earth closes: the coal mine Peak Downs in Australia. Indigenous activists start using the exposed stratigraphy there to teach children about geological activism.

2015: A woman from eastern Aarhus begins to knit dishcloths to herself and her friends after reading about how single use cloths produces micro-plastics that end up in the most vulnerable parts of the planetary ecosystem. Very soon, she gives up meeting the demand and starts sharing the knitting pattern instead. Many grandmothers start knitting for their extended family and friends. Sales of single use dishcloths plummet, and the knitted version becomes the norm. Thus, aware of micro-plastics a lot of people begin to talk about how car tires are responsible for 20% of the total micro-plasticspollution. 7 grandmothers from Lolland starts Generations Against Cars, which absolutely explodes, and the electric cargo bike becomes the preferred mode of transportation.

2021: Latin American women starts occupying overexploited plots of lands. Their intention is to revitalise and grow them for locally based regenerative production of food. They gather seeds, old local varieties, they grow food and plant trees. Governments starts to expropriate and hand over land to local chapters of the movement. In the territories formerly known as Denmark, land is handed over to the New Cooperative Movement in the wake of a series of scandals involving antibiotic resistance and groundwater contamination. This scaffolding of autonomous food production all over the world, turns out to be very valuable when the markets finally collapse in 2027.

2023: Copenhagen secede from the state of Denmark after long periods of conflict relating to migrant and climate politics. The Copenhagen Commune is proclaimed and soon followed by cities like San Juan, Seoul, Leiden, Essaouira etc. The old nations crumble, and The United Free Territories becomes fertile ground for rewilding and experiments with entirely new ways of living.

2026: The world’s first subaquatic communities are established off the west coast of Florida. The habitants are a mixed bunch of climate activists, illegal immigrant, neo-hippies etc. They spend most of their time regenerating ecosystems, such as seagrass meadows and coral reefs, water purification etc. But it’s their revolutionary research into communication with manatees and dolphins, that really shakes the world, and becomes the basis for the thousands of interspecies embassies now being established on coastlines all over the planet.

2022: Power is a weird abstraction. Often the power of a regime can seem absolute and total, and then suddenly it’s not. It might begin with just a tiny glitch in the spectacle, someone points out an injustice, another refuses to obey, and suddenly the ground seems to disappear under the feet of the powerful as if they are wheeling off a cliff like a cartoon coyote, as it happened in 2022 when China’s state capitalist regime collapsed into rubble from one day to the other.

2032: The International Congress for road workers in Helsinki unanimously agree to undo decades of fanatic surfacing of the planet, and in the following months begin to deconstruct and deposit roads and highways. Many become landscape artists and conjures hill- and mountain landscapes out of the humongous amounts of discarded road surfaces, uniting under the motto HARMONY, BEAUTY AND DEPOSITS. Others start laying single tracks through the expanses of the rewilderness. The Chinese wheelbarrow gets augmented with an electric drive and carries people and goods all over the world on tracks barely 30 cm wide.

2055: Most nation states are replaced by regular group therapy and refreshing dips in the oceans.