Metacrisis Action Lab #1
Two Weeks, No Grid
Could your household make it fourteen days with no power, no water, no internet? The first Action Lab put a room of neighbors to work mapping the plan: bathtub to Berkey, Starlink to mesh, rice math to a backyard fire.
June 23, 2026 · Lightning Lofts, Brooklyn, NY
Made by AI from the write-up on this page, so the room reaches people who could not be in it. Not a podcast episode.
14 days
the survival window the night was built around
$35
a bathtub bladder = two weeks of clean water
Bug in
the default move when the grid goes down
What this was
Jessica Es ran the first Metacrisis Action Lab as a community-run working meeting. Everyone in the room named the one or two ways their household would break in a real emergency, and the group worked through the fixes together: water, power, communications, food, sanitation, and the neighbors you'd lean on.
The framing was deliberately concrete: not "the apocalypse," but Brooklyn after the next Sandy, or a blackout, or a pandemic where the smartest first move is to stay inside while everyone else is unprepared. The lab also introduced the Resilience Wheel, the map for the whole series: six wedges of preparedness crossed with three budget rings. The night stayed on the first wedge, water. The goal by the end was simple: leave with a personalized fourteen-day plan and a short list of gear to buy over the coming year, pooled where it made sense as a pod or block.
The session
How the night unfolded
Round of vulnerabilities
Each person named the one or two things their household is missing: water, food, medication, power, comms. COVID was the common reference point: the first time many had thought about canned goods at all.
Know your threats
What we're actually prepping for in Brooklyn: hurricane, flood, storm surge, a prolonged power outage, civil unrest, a virus or chemical agent. Most of them end the same way: sheltering in place, at home, for up to fourteen days.
The Resilience Wheel
The map for all six labs: six wedges (water, medicine & PPE, food, power & charging, communication, security & defense) crossed with three budget rings: Foundation, Built Out, Fortified. Tonight's assignment: the water wedge, at least the inner ring.
The 20-minute reflex
The night's mental drill trains the instinct before you need it: when disaster hits, your first thought is "I have twenty minutes to fill the tub."
The water ladder
From a LifeStraw in your pocket to a Berkey gravity filter at home to a bathtub WaterBob to community-scale barrels, layered so you're covered on the go, at home, and at the block level.
Comms when the towers fail
Starlink as a backup (it survives the grid but can be jammed), and NYC Mesh, the free, peer-to-peer, line-of-sight network where a single Starlink node could keep a whole neighborhood online. One household offered to rejoin the mesh on the spot.
Food, fire & sanitation
Calorie math (rice by the sack), a backyard fire pit and propane for cooking once the storm passes, and the unglamorous truth that toilets stop running the moment the water does, so plan the bucket.
Nuclear & pandemic edge cases
Fourteen days is also the fallout window; the city's Cold-War shelter signs are mostly old schools. And in a pandemic, NYC's crossroads geography is exactly why bugging in early beats waiting.
Meet your pod
A pod is two to six people who prep together, splitting cost, storage, and skills. One person owns water; others own comms, power, or security. Pick pod-mates by trust and geographic proximity. If you came solo, the pod exercise is how you stop being solo.
The household hub
Pool a communal fund, stage the gear as a shared "emergency node," and pass an easy proposal to buy it incrementally over the year rather than all at once.
Practice under stress
Stories from a mass-casualty triage simulation (half the room actors, half responders) and the case for inter-community survival training: the skills, plus the bonding that comes from getting through something hard together.
Facilitation & the long game
Liberating Structures (Troika Consulting, 1-2-4-All) to make decisions everyone owns; planting fruit trees and mapping foraging on Falling Fruit; a clothing swap; even practicing navigation without GPS.
What we walked away knowing
Reference
The cheat sheet
The reference tables from the session, rebuilt so you can come back to them. Tap one to open it; scroll sideways on a phone.
From the Archives
Coming up
See past events
Metacrisis Action Lab No. 2 · Jun 25, 2026
Off-Grid Comms with Signals Rising
When blackouts or overloaded towers take the grid down, the people who can still communicate are the ones who practiced. Hands-on with Meshtastic mesh radios and a four-layer comms plan.
Metacrisis Action Lab No. 3 · Jun 28, 2026
Rooftop Reciprocity
A bare Brooklyn rooftop became food, medicine, and pollinator habitat in an afternoon. A hands-on lab on growing resilience into the city, one corner at a time.
Metacrisis Salon No. 11 · Jun 6, 2026
How we build an Ecocivilization
The system extracts and accelerates because that is what it was built to do. A night on what an ecocivilization would look like, and how you grow one inside the shell of the old.