The Great Murmuration
How We Starve Empire and Feed Liberation
2 weeks until "Harvesting Game" launches
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Harvesting-Game-Maxime-Paul/dp/1952969344/
Apple: https://books.apple.com/us/book/harvesting-game/id6747409129
Barnes & Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/harvesting-game-maxime-paul/1147665747?ean=9781952969348
Tertulia: https://tertulia.com/book/harvesting-game-maxime-paul/9781952969348
In "Harvesting Game," my protagonist has never played a video game but sees gaming as a tool for liberation. Everyone around them knows games as propaganda and distraction, digital opiates designed to pacify, inculcate, and divide. But this character envisions something different: using the oppressor's entertainment apparatus to practice revolution, to simulate new worlds, to train communities for the freedom they're building.
That's precisely where we are with the global economy. Most of us have never experienced collective economic power, but here and there, some can see it, maybe even are part of it: coordinated mass action can transform individual consumer choices into collective liberation. Using the very systems designed to extract from us as tools to starve empire while feeding community.
The Great Murmuration: How Isolated Birds Learn to Fly Together
Empire's greatest weapon isn't AI or surveillance, it's loneliness. They've convinced us we're individual consumers making individual choices in individual markets. But what if we remembered we're one flock?
Picture thousands of starlings moving as one organism, pivoting instantly away from predators. Each bird follows simple rules: stay close, avoid collision, and move toward the center. Together, they overwhelm any threat through pure collective coordination.
Corporate giants aren't unstoppable forces; they're parasites requiring host organisms to survive. They need us to buy their products, use their services, work in their companies, invest our retirement funds, consume their content, and believe their narratives. Without our collective compliance, they collapse.
Here's the beautiful secret they don't want us to discover: every time we choose community over corporation, we're not sacrificing. We're investing in a life that's richer, more connected, more abundant than anything they're selling. The food is fresher. The relationships are real. The money circulates back to you instead of disappearing to distant shareholders.
The Reality: Empire's Arithmetic Versus Human Needs
Here's how empire maintains division: convincing us that individual struggles represent personal failures rather than collective challenges with collective solutions.
That single dad struggling with groceries? Personal responsibility.
That family losing their home because of medical debt? Individual bad luck.
Those neighbors unable to get a steady job with benefits? Personal failings.
Mistruths! These struggles signal collective solutions waiting for a coordinated response.
Meanwhile, the money rivers reveal the truth of our priorities. Private titans and public treasuries together torrented over $1.5 trillion toward artificial intelligence algorithms, silicon semiconductor supremacy, and sumptuous tax cuts for the wealthy in 2024-2025 alone. Data centers devoured $800 billion while schools starved on $268 billion scraps. Semiconductor subsidies and private chip investments swallowed $500 billion while housing assistance faced cuts. Tax breaks for billionaires and corporations claimed $500 billion annually, while transportation infrastructure begged for $28 billion. Defense departments demanded $886 billion to wage wars abroad while wages at home withered.
We're spending more on teaching machines to mimic human thought than on teaching human children to think, more on perfecting chatbots than on healing actual bodies, more on digital dreams of artificial minds than on housing real families, more on missiles than on medicine.
The cruelest calculation: that combined $2.4 trillion avalanche of AI speculation, tax cuts, and military might could fund universal healthcare ($300 billion annually), comprehensive housing programs ($200 billion annually), and still leave nearly two trillion dollars toward universal basic income that could eliminate poverty overnight. But empire's arithmetic is crystal clear: bet billions on algorithms and armaments that might make moguls richer, while basic human needs beg for breadcrumbs.
But therein lies a vulnerability: They need us to keep feeding them. Every cancelled subscription drains revenue. Every alternative chosen transfers market share. Every community choosing local over corporate shifts power from extraction to regeneration.
The tension remains clear: Building genuine community takes time we may not have. But strategic resistance with imperfect tools might buy us the time we need.
The Murmuration Strategy: Start Where You Are
Like starlings joining flight patterns, you don't need the whole picture to participate. You just need to start moving in sync with the birds around you:
Maybe you're a single parent barely keeping up with bills. Start with one subscription cancellation and put that money toward a local food cooperative membership. You'll eat better for less money while supporting neighbors. That $20/month streaming service becomes $240/year toward community investment.
Maybe you're caring for aging parents and feeling overwhelmed. Join or start a local time bank where neighbors exchange services. Cancel that expensive meal delivery subscription and use the money to invest in a community kitchen that educates and feeds families like yours.
Maybe you're a young person drowning in student debt. Cancel one streaming service and put that $15/month toward a community land trust or housing cooperative. You're investing in a world where housing is affordable because communities control it instead of landlords extracting wealth.
Maybe you're comfortable with disposable income but feel guilty about privileges. Every dollar you divert from corporate stocks to community investment funds, every subscription you cancel to fund local cooperatives, every choice to buy local instead of ordering from Amazon creates infrastructure that helps everyone thrive.
This isn't about individual purity or sacrifice. It's about discovering that community alternatives often work better AND cost less than corporate extraction.
Strategy One: Economic Aikido
The SRSLY WRONG podcast calls this "Bugs Bunny Bourgeoisie": using overconfidence against power itself. When Bugs hands Daffy Duck (playing as Elmer Fudd) the saw to cut his own branch, when fingers slip into rifle barrels causing weapons to explode in the hunter's face. Strategic revelation shows that supreme figures are fragile performers beneath their pageantry. Those heart boxers without the side of patriarchy.
This played out beautifully when unknown actors used AI voice synthesis to impersonate officials on Signal. Fooling foreign ministers with the oligarchy's own surveillance machinery. Pure digital aikido: using the master's tools to saw off their branch.
Real economic aikido looks relatively simple from above, but is understandably complex under the sheets. Every Netflix cancellation funds community film clubs. Every Amazon Prime ($139/year) abandonment supports local buying cooperatives. Every bank switch to credit unions. You keep the convenience of bulk purchasing, but now your neighbors benefit instead of Jeff Bezos. Localized luxury instead of the convenience of capitulation.
Every aligned dollar, click, view, attendance, recommendation, or engagement is a breath of life for systems set on siphoning our souls from us. But the more we practice undermining and building values-laden alternatives, the more we overthrow the powers that be. I understand that this may be daunting with limited resources, time, or attention, but it is feasible once you commit to small acts and grow your range of resistance day by day.
Individual acts inspire us, but collective economic action transforms systems. When thousands of neighborhoods coordinate spending to support the local community, corporate chains lose market share and discounts in their value (that we may be able to take over and cooperate). When millions do it, we've created a parallel economy.
Strategy Two: Planting Seeds in the Cracks
While practicing economic aikido, we simultaneously plant seeds of the world we want: community land trusts, worker cooperatives, mutual aid networks, local food systems, neighborhood tool libraries, and time banks where we trade time and skills.
In "Harvesting Game," the Kuroban community survives by maintaining their own systems of mutual support even while being forced to engage with the extractive technotropolis. They know liberation isn't just about resisting oppression, it's also about maintaining relationships and practices that keep community alive.
One exploration: I collaborated with AI to expand my 20-page transit framework into comprehensive community transformation vision. Not because AI authored it, but for specific gifts: translating complex systems into accessible language, achieving scale and speed our polycrises moment demands, providing expansive attribution that traces intellectual genealogies across vast scales, surfacing marginalized thinkers whose ideas got appropriated without credit, and building accessible learning pathways into radical concepts for people locked out of academic institutions.
This strategic use serves the larger vision. A vision to build community infrastructure that makes corporate systems unnecessary. Community-controlled mobility that makes car dependency obsolete. Community hubs that make corporate retail irrelevant. Local resource sharing that eliminates the need for corporate platforms.
Why Purity Politics Miss the Point
Critics say: "But you're still using AI!" This mirrors blaming individuals for plastic pollution, while corporations manufacture 380 million tons of plastic yearly. Companies like ExxonMobil funded recycling campaigns, convincing millions that the environmental apocalypse was a failure in personal responsibility (only a small piece of the story) rather than corporate overproduction.
Only 9% of plastic ever produced gets recycled. The true culprits? Corporate overproduction, planned obsolescence, and induced overconsumption that devours the planet faster than even the most meticulous recycling monk could heal it. They weaponized our guilt for their crimes while continuing their chemical colonization of every creek, creature, and child on Earth.
Recycling mistruth
AI follows similar patterns. Individual conversations sip water like single bottles, but corporate training drains millions of gallons daily.
We don't have time for perfect solutions while corporate extraction accelerates around us. We need to utilize imperfect tools strategically while building better alternatives.
This is precisely what my protagonist discovers in "Harvesting Game." Everyone sees the "free" education institution as the technotropolis's tool for liberating the Kuroban community. However, the protagonist envisions using that same prison of pedagogy as a site for practicing resistance, building collective coordination, and training communities in liberation.
The Kuroban community in "Harvesting Game" faces a similar dilemma: moral purity that leads to extinction, or strategic compromise that creates space for building something better.
The Just Murmuration: Collective Economic Transformation
Coordinated mass withdrawal from corporate systems, aligned mass investment in community alternatives:
Mass cancellations from corporate AI, streaming, housing platforms
Community investment in cooperatives, mutual aid, infrastructure
Workplace organizing sabotaging harmful projects from inside
Data sovereignty movements poisoning corporate training datasets
Local production making corporate supply chains irrelevant
Community currencies keeping wealth circulating locally
Open-source alternatives making proprietary software obsolete
Individual actions become collective power. When enough people move together, we don't just resist corporate giants, we make them irrelevant.
My comprehensive transit framework reveals possibilities: community-centered governance with real decision-making power, stations serving as community hubs that weave together food, healthcare, and culture, strategic resource mobility connecting people to opportunities, youth-led generational change away from car dependency, and economic justice capturing community value for collective benefit.
READY TO EXPLORE THE COMPLETE TRANSIT VISION → Table of Contents:
Complete Transit Vision: From Mobility Provider to Community Learning Network
TLDR Summary - to get the short and sweet of the vision
Community Implementation and Education guides - coming soon, I still need to review and edit.
The Choice: Feed Empire or Join the Flock
At "Harvesting Game's" heart lies a radical choice: Will the Kuroban community accept "submissive survival", slow erasure from systems designed to extract from them? Or risk everything coordinating individual actions into collective liberation?
My protagonist has never played a video game, but they can envision how gaming technology could become a tool for practicing revolution instead of a distraction designed by society's dictators.
That's precisely where we are today. Empire's propaganda convinces us we're isolated individuals making isolated choices. But every purchase votes for worlds we're building together. Every subscription invests in futures we'll inhabit. Every dollar spent decides which systems thrive.
The great murmuration starts when we remember we're one flock. When that disabled veteran realizes their grocery choices connect to their family's healthcare costs, which in turn connect to those neighbors' job security. When we discover that coordinating individual economic actions creates collective power that overwhelms corporate predators.
Every successful murmuration starts with a few birds changing direction. Others follow. Then more. Until the whole flock moves as one organism toward safety and abundance, leaving predators empty-handed in the wake.
When we coordinate choices, even small imperfect ones, we practice collective intelligence that empire fears most. We discover we're not isolated consumers after all. We're one flock, learning to fly together toward liberation.
Start Your Murmuration Today
Ready to join the flight? Here's how to begin:
Cancel one corporate rental agreement (subscription) this week and redirect that money toward a local cooperative or mutual aid fund
Connect with one neighbor about coordinating purchases or sharing resources
Choose one local business over a corporate chain for your next purchase
Research community alternatives in your area: credit unions, food co-ops, tool libraries, time banks
Share this vision with friends who might be ready to change direction
The window for community control is narrowing, but every person who joins the murmuration multiplies our collective power. Every dollar redirected, every subscription cancelled, every neighbor connected brings us closer to the world where all beings can thrive.
"Harvesting Game" launches July 29th, 2025. It’s a story about seeing liberation in the most unlikely places, using technology together for connection rather than alone for distraction, coordinating individual actions into collective power.
Just like I’m doing right here.
What small change will you make today to join the great murmuration toward liberation?
Share this with friends, family online to grow the flock.