Metacrisis Salon #12 · Cleaned Transcript
July 18, 2026 · Lightning Society, Brooklyn, NY
Recorded by Mike the pigeon, our tiny mic mascot. This is a cleaned and condensed transcript: filler trimmed, crosstalk smoothed, the shape of the night kept intact. It is not verbatim.
Download as .txtBen · Thank you all for choosing to be here on a Saturday night, after a flood warning, a tornado watch, and during the World Cup, to talk about power. This is Lightning Society, a 17-room community house across two floors; a few housemates are in the room if you have questions. Food and drinks are out, there are three bathrooms, and the guest Wi-Fi is on the wall.
The companion app for tonight is metacrisis12.dearcrisis.com. It's where you see who else is in the room, submit questions for the Q&A, find resources, and let the matchmaker give you an excuse to talk to a stranger. This is the twelfth salon; thirty or forty percent of you keep coming back. The series started because most events in New York are designed to help us escape our problems. This one leans in, so we can figure out what we might do about them together.
The agreements: welcome the stranger. Share the space and land the plane. Hold the tension without rushing to resolve it. Explore kinship over transactions. Thank the chefs. And real feedback is welcome; the second AC and tonight's dessert both exist because someone gave some.
Hope · Before the intellectual, a moment with ourselves. Close your eyes. How do you define power? If you had to distill it to a definition, what is it? And once you have it, notice how power makes you feel. In yourself, in a system, in a job, in a family. Hold on to that definition and check, at the end of the night, whether you leave with the same one you came in with.
Ben · Power shapes the world whether we engage with it or not. My frustration as an activist: you leave brilliant rooms with no idea what to do. So tonight is about the tools.
We read photographs together and the room called out the forms of power it saw. A woman in a sundress facing riot police in Baton Rouge: fearlessness, presence, the power of an image. A quarry in Bangalore with a temple left standing: extraction, and the stories that outlast it. The burning palace in Kathmandu during the Gen-Z uprising: people power; they won, and a 36-year-old rapper became president. A roadrunner at the border wall, and the Porto Alegre floods: our power over nature, and nature's answer.
My working definition: power is the capacity to act and shape outcomes. Practical Radicals names six forms, the instruments of change: ideological, political, economic, military and police, solidarity, and disruptive. Brené Brown adds four relational ones: power within, power with, power to, and the one to guard against, power over, the kind that runs on fear and coercion. The room paired up on which form each of us most wants to explore right now.
Stephanie · This comes from a class I taught for years at CUNY with Deepak Bhargava. Organizers kept telling us the same puzzle: we win legislation, we elect progressives, and we keep falling further behind. Part of the answer is that we lost the tradition of long-term strategy. The movement ancestors who had freedom dreams were killed, jailed, or pushed underground, and the academy and the organizing floor stopped talking to each other. The activists said there's no time for big pictures; the academics had no plan to win. Practical radicals do both: radical in the dream, practical about power.
Start with vision. What would the world look like if we were in charge? Many of my students get emotional at that question because no one has ever asked them. It's a muscle. Study the movements that wrote their visions down: the South African Freedom Charter, the Black Panther Ten-Point Program, Ecuador's Buen Vivir plan. Or make it concrete and dated, like the UAW's call for a general strike on May 1, 2028 around four demands: wages, health care, retirement, time.
Then name the moment. A vision without a plan is just science fiction. Conjunctural analysis is a sober assessment of the terrain: where are your people, what do you have, what does the other side have. Rigorous strategy is the bridge between the world as it is and the world as it could be.
The book traces seven strategy lineages: base-building, disruptive movements, narrative shift, electoral change, inside/outside campaigns, momentum, and collective care. Every large transformative movement has used all seven. No organization runs them all, so think movement ecosystem: find your lane, expect generative tension, and remember the mix changes with the moment. In the 23 red-trifecta states right now, that means much more collective care, base-building, and disruption than policy work.
Last tool: the Grassroots Power Project's long-term agenda. Current fights, stepping-stone fights, milestone reforms, structural transformation. The far horizon is where movements that compete this year discover a shared target, and every step checks the same three things: are we building power, building alliances, and waging the battle of big ideas?
Ten minutes in pairs and threes: do you lean practical or radical? Where are your strengths? Where do you actually talk strategy? From the shareback: several of us are radical in theory and practical in action. Radical carries charm in a young country with no tradition to lean on; practical takes explaining. Both sides study each other's playbooks. And one challenge to the whole frame: if we start from us versus them, aren't we lost from the beginning?
Stephanie · On that challenge: the book says underdogs and overdogs rather than us and them. The honest question is who benefits from the status quo staying put. And the defining feature of this conjuncture, here and globally, is rising authoritarianism.
One live answer is block and build. Block the authoritarian consolidation through a broad Coalition of the No, a united front open to anyone against the takeover, on the model of the front that helped defeat apartheid. And keep building through a smaller Coalition of the Yes, aligned on the long-term vision. Stay only in defense and the best you win is a blocked takeover and a lame alternative.
If you feel powerless, the power you always have left is solidarity: neighbor to neighbor, coworker to coworker. It's the base every other form is built from, which is why their oldest weapon is divide and conquer. Careful, mate, that foreigner wants your cookie. Blame immigrants, China, trans folks; split us by party, pay, and birthplace.
And we can divide too, aimed the right way. A regime you can't confront head-on rests on pillars of support: media, business, unions, police, civil service. Their coalition isn't natural; find the wedge. Project C, Birmingham, 1963: organizers mapped the white power structure, picked the business community as the vulnerable pillar, ran an economic boycott with near-total solidarity behind it, and the businesses came to the table on desegregation.
It takes an ecosystem. In New York: Hands Off NYC on neighborhood defense, May Day Strong building disruption capacity toward 2028, DSA closing in on 16,000 members, tenant unions everywhere. Minnesota shows the long game: groups that used to lobby against each other spent 10 to 15 years aligning calendars, contracts, and analysis, and that's what let them mount a citywide response when ICE came. Find your lane and go.
What moments right now are ripe for disruption?
Unions play an outsized role in reversing democratic backsliding, and non-union workers often have more room to act than they think: anyone can walk out. And the 3.5% finding: when about three and a half percent of a population stays consistently, actively engaged, the odds shift dramatically. The catch is the word consistent.
If the engine of extraction rolls on no matter who wins, how do we organize?
Drop the assumptions about who cares. Flight attendants are terrified of climate; so are Midwest farmers. The Twin Cities janitors partnered with environmental groups because members were climate refugees being poisoned by cleaning chemicals, and they won green cleaning and pollution rules in one campaign. Find the shared target.
What does the 2028 plan actually look like?
The UAW's stand-up strike won a strong contract but not the big demands, so they aligned their contracts to expire May 1, 2028 and asked other unions to join. A compression point across industries has far more power, and the demands can be legislative, like single payer. Meanwhile May Day Strong builds regional alliances, strike schools, and joint trainings now, with the midterms as the first test.
Is there a danger in only studying the past? What about AI?
Take the lessons, then tweak them for the moment. On AI: the labor movement has panicked about technology since the 1700s, so separate the fearmongering from the real thing. Most technology is good or bad depending on who decides. Fast-pass tolling replaced deadly toll-booth jobs, and the workers had no say. Democratize the control.
What about conflict inside coalitions?
Anticipate it, like organizers inoculate workers about what the boss will do. Build the systems before the conflict comes. Think in ten-year pies instead of one-year budgets. Democratize the decisions so compromises aren't dropped on members. And integrate deeply: shared staff, shared calendars, member to member, not just leader to leader.
How does a newcomer find a lane?
Change comes in long stretches of steady work punctuated by upsurge, and what we train for is the upsurge. Have leaders ready to move, systems of communication, the lawyers' and medics' numbers already known. You can't script it, but you can practice it, which is what tonight's scenario planning is for.
Organize freelancers around health coverage, starting with the Freelancers Union, after a 51% premium hike. Power-map who holds the ed-tech contracts in schools and find the wedge. Rank the fights that actually hit the system's pain points and share the map. Chase unlikely alliances in international convening. Gather people to name what this community is for. Bring the seven strategies to a Western New York environmental coalition. Map the NYC organizing ecosystem before Dear Crisis picks campaigns. And sit with the silence; metabolizing a night like this is part of the practice.
Salon #14, Taking Down Oligarchy, lands August 13 with Jeffrey Winters. An AI-ethics salon with Jeff Sebo is in the works. Dinners for the 99 hosts its first dinner at the end of the month. Earthling connects you to local nature and climate action, hyper-local to Brooklyn. Hope's Emergent Strategy reading club starts July 30, every other Thursday, hybrid. Ali leads the Strategy & Power Action Lab here on July 27, applying tonight through the DSA's fast-and-free-buses campaign. And the community itself: dearcrisis.com/join.
After the book signing, small groups drew three scenarios set around the November elections and had to answer one question: what do you do?
Scenario 1: The National Guard and masked ICE agents are sent to polling sites in tightly contested districts, including NY-17 and NY-4.
The first group assigned roles over pizza, then built "Melt ICE": drone partners feeding a live map of agents across 350 poll sites, hotel-worker tips, a message of "stay calm, vote on, document everything," a friendly presence of clowns and the Lions Club handing out pamphlets, a sign-maker printing QR-coded signs, a lawyers' hotline, and a plan to turn the win into stronger voter-rights law, capped by a drone show with an eagle.
Scenario 2: FERC reissues the Constitution Pipeline certificate and a "national energy emergency" overrides New York's Clean Water Act authority in NY-19, with resistance branded eco-terrorism.
The second group fought both moves at once: an injunction against the emergency declaration, then a networked get-out-the-vote push through Catskill Mountainkeeper, Seneca Lake Guardians, Sierra Club, Sustainable Tompkins, and Citizen Action, funded by a coalition of alternative-energy interests, with an open letter moving through every community organization in the district.
Scenario 3: The new House refuses to seat newly elected representatives from New York City on fabricated charges.
Two groups took this one. Between them: attorneys general from 25 states filing suit, school walkouts with civic-action reports for homework, public-sector work stoppages, a push to close the New York Stock Exchange for a week, a "do your job" meme campaign painting the blockers as sore losers, and the full New York delegation walking arm in arm into the Capitol, daring the police to arrest them.
Stephanie's critique · Group one did the prep work; when the crisis comes you want the data and the drones already in place, and they turned defense into offense. Group two mapped its ecosystem and built the alliance first. The Stock Exchange groups found the real centers of power: ask who can actually make your target move. Wall Street can. And a warning for everyone: lawyers are allies, but a strategy should never center on the lawyers. People power drives the campaign; legal is a piece, never the driver.
A group high-five that took three tries to land. Then mats folded, cans cleared, and the room everyone built put back the way it was found. If there's an action lab you want to lead, come talk to us. We want to empower the emergence here.