Invoking "Bunker Buddies"

It’s dark times, friends. And also exciting times. The old world is collapsing and we need to build the new world as quickly as we can.

I’ve got an idea for new cute little project, and if you know me you’ll know how many projects I’m already working on. It doesn’t need much, just another person to “invoke” it with me.

Quick Summary

This project is called Bunker Buddies, a local club you can join that meets to discuss and support each other in increasing household food storage. It’s about real food resilience for a future of shocks, but it’s also about creating a fun, safe and inclusive atmosphere to talk about emergency preparedness in a way that playfully dispells the mucho image of the isolated prepper, and instead leans into community solidarity.

This project is within the context of privledged folks in developed western nations, in particular “Australia”.

The Problem

We live in a world of increasing likelihood of massive shocks to our system, but everyone around us - from government, employers, businesses, and often friends and family - acts like it’s going to be business as usual.

• There’s an increasing chance of environmental shocks caused by the climate crisis, with the risk of rising temperatures and changing weather patterns destroying harvests.
• There are geopolitical shocks, the most obvious being US and Israel’s warn on Iran causing oil and fertiliser shortages, that we’re still yet to see the effects of in the subsequent growing season.
• There are economic shocks in general caused by our economy’s addiction to endless growth causing it to being unravelling as we cross planetary boundaries and growth of real material productivity cannot be sustained. The AI bubble and it’s likely collapse is just one example of financial markets being disconnected from the real economy that supplies our material needs.

And yet, (in developed western nations) the narrative is that acting like any of this is real makes one seems like a unstable conspiracy theorist or “prepper”. The sheer incongruence between the terrifying things we read in scientific articles about environmental risks, even boring ones like IPCC reports, and the day-to-day reality of “go to work, shop and pretend everything is normal” is maddening.

This incongruence often leads to powerlessness, dispair and escapism.

Meanwhile, far-right (fascist) popularism is offering a solution to many. It loudly proclaims that yes indeed, things are bad, and offers a solution (blame the immigrant, the queer, the disabled) and that message is speaking to many people because at least it is conguent with the fact that things are bad.

The Solution

Bunker Buddies will be a fun little club that lets a small group of people meet in the real world, and talk about these issues together while taking real material action to increase their food storage. The group that meets would be limited to about a 8-12 people, with the idea that if it was popular, more groups would start.

Practical food storage

The focus on food storage is not just an psychological trip to move from dispair and incongruence into action. It’s genuinely useful. While individual hording in a crisis isn’t pro-social, people slowly building up a long term store of food can be. By developing experience in safe storage, rotation of stock, preservation, and adapting diet we develop a resilience in participating households that means they don’t need to lean so much of scarse supplies during shocks.

In the future, we’re probably going to need 6-12 months of food storage locally for everyone, everywhere. That should occur at multiple levels, in households, commons and community, and should not leave everyone behind. Having a few people practice this at home is not a holistic solution, but it does help, and it can chance the way that we relate to food in ways that might influence housemates, friends, neighbours and suppliers to do a bit of the same.

Reclaim the prepper narrative

We need to reclaim the image of the prepper from the libertarian right. We do this in two main ways:

De-macho the image

By making the imagery, language and process used by this group very different from the hyper-militaristic and mucho vibes common to much prepping, we privide an alternative pathway for those who are worried about the polycrisis. The suggestion for Bunker Buddies is a juxtaposition of prepper ideas and words (the idea of “bunker”, “collapse”, etc) with cute animals, rainbows, and earnest friendliness. Imagine a colourful website, with header imagery featuring cute and queer looking woodland animals helping each other into a bunker.

Re-focus on community

While starting from the position of self in order to give people permission to “just start”, Bunker Buddies should build a focus outwards towards community and solidarity. It could develop a culture of sharing food, perhaps with explicit goals to build up enough bulk food storage that a certain amount is expected to be shared.

This isn’t necessarily the best or only way to get people into community solutions. Mutual-aid groups are in many ways more important, and many people might be more drawn to those. Bunker Buddies is designed to engage people who are feeling a bit afraid, and a bit isolated, and gently move them towards community.

Space for feelings

The group is a place for discussion, and for some might be their first chance to begin to feel safe around others who have some of the same fears about the world.

To make this work well, in particular without relying on a single expert facilitator, some simple shared processes might be needed to bootstrap group norms. Inspiration can be taken from 12-step groups. The group creates space for acknowledging the problem, it doesn’t practice toxic positivity (despite the cute animal pictures), but it does relentless support each member of the group to move in the direction that feels better for them. It’s is mostly not a group project, it is a support-group for your household projects.

The “Invoking”

I like to think of this process of invoking as calling new things into being. They will then grow and change and become something we didn’t expect through the collaboration of everyone who shows up.

The goal here is to just try this out with a single, small group in a specific local area. I’d personally like to be part of the group, so would prefer it to be in the inner north of Naarm.

I’m looking for a collaborator to call this into being with me. Ideally someone I am not already working on one of my other projects with. We would do something like:

• Create a simple website
• Create a flyer
• Put flyers up around our target area, advertise online
• Hold space for a small, chill gathering once a month, for a trial period of six months.

No technical skills are required, I or one of my fellow geeks can build the website.

If this speaks to you, drop me a line.