In anticipation of the AGAPE Seminar & Studio’s relaunch this January 2025, I am publishing a series of dispatches revisiting the histories, theories, and proposals that emerged in our earlier gatherings. These installments serve to refine and expand the key concepts that will inform our forthcoming sessions, setting the stage for deeper dialogue and collective inquiry.

This final installment synthesizes the takeaways from previous entries and prepares us for the Seminar & Studio’s first session, scheduled for January 26, 2025.

Empire’s Next Moves

Empire, as a transhistorical system of domination, is currently consolidating its grip over emerging faults in its system, adapting to crises of legitimacy and resource depletion. Drawing on its historical resilience, Empire’s strategies focus on fortifying its architecture of domination. These include intensifying surveillance capitalism, expanding its planetary technosphere, and integrating new hegemonic players like China into its overarching logic of control. Key areas where Empire is poised to act are outlined below, followed by a framework to begin developing maroon countermeasures designed to resist these strategies.

Refinement of Surveillance Capitalism

Empire is advancing toward a deeper integration of human behavior, affect, and desire into its systems of control. Surveillance capitalism intensifies, embedding itself within the most intimate dimensions of life to appropriate and externalize the costs of social reproduction. Through AI, biometric surveillance, algorithmic governance, and the pervasive pornoscopic logic of social media, Empire commodifies attention, emotions, and desires as instruments of extraction and domination. Exploiting intimacy as a site of profit and regulation, it enlists individuals in their own surveillance and subjugation. Autonomy is systematically eroded as aspirations, relationships, and ways of being are recalibrated to serve the imperatives of capital accumulation.

This refinement of surveillance capitalism hinges on normalizing digital ecologies that integrate augmented reality, virtual spaces, and algorithmic decision-making into everyday life. This “metaverse” will serve as a platform for behavioral optimization and commodification, distracting populations from material exploitation while deepening their integration into systems of control. These digital infrastructures will reinforce hierarchies by gatekeeping access to resources, visibility, and power

Fortification of the Technosphere

Empire is doubling down on its grip over emerging fractures by leveraging speculative technologies under the guise of progress and security. Carbon capture projects, heavily funded by venture capital and public subsidies, perpetuate fossil fuel dependency while offering the illusion of ecological repair. Simultaneously, tech consortiums are reshaping the military-industrial complex. By integrating AI weapons, autonomous drones, and surveillance platforms into defense strategies, these technologies expand Empire’s capacity for violence and global control. Framed as efficient solutions to climate and geopolitical crises, these systems entrench hierarchies of power and resource extraction, ensuring that the technosphere continues to serve as both a tool of domination and a barrier to systemic transformation.

Reconfiguration of Multipolar Hegemony

The shifting balance of power, particularly the rise of China and BRICS nations, does not signal Empire’s demise but its reconfiguration. Empire will attempt to co-opt these emerging powers into its global systems of racialized capitalism and ecological extraction. The rivalry between hegemonic blocs (e.g., NATO vs. BRICS) will be framed as geopolitical and ideological competition, yet their underlying logic—extraction, domination, and ecological devastation—will remain aligned.

Expansion of the Carceral State

As dissent grows amidst ecological collapse and socioeconomic inequality, Empire will expand its carceral systems. Border fortifications, mass surveillance, predictive policing, and militarized suppression of protest will target both marginalized communities and movements challenging systemic domination. Prisons and detention centers will serve as laboratories for new methods of control, and sites of sexual violence, reinforcing global apartheid and suppressing any attempts at systemic transformation.

Exploitation of Crisis Narratives

Empire will weaponize crises—climate disasters, pandemics, economic instability—to justify emergency measures that erode rights while consolidating control. These measures will be framed as necessary for public safety, sustainability, or economic recovery, obscuring their role in reinforcing hierarchical power structures. The increasing precarity of life under Empire will be exploited to normalize compliance, presenting Empire’s systems as the only viable solution to escalating crises.

Suppression of TEK and Resistance Movements

Empire will intensify its suppression of Transformative Ecological Knowledge (TEK) and grassroots resistance movements. TEK, which embodies practices of ecological care and regeneration, will be dismissed as backward, or romanticized and appropriated without credit. Simultaneously, movements advocating for decoloniality, Indigenous sovereignty, and ecological justice will face heightened repression, as their frameworks directly threaten Empire’s logic of extraction and control.

Maroon Countermeasures

To confront Empire’s escalating strategies of domination, maroon countermeasures must expand in both scope and scale. Rooted in the enduring traditions of marronage—practices of escape, refusal, and (re-)creation incubated within the Black radical tradition—these countermeasures operate along a continuum of resistance and transformation:

Petit Marronage: These are dispersed, everyday acts of defiance that erode Empire’s control. By reclaiming stolen time, cultivating autonomous zones, and subverting oppressive systems, petit marronage manifests as vibe shifts and pack formations. These subtle yet vital disruptions nurture autonomy, care, and relational resilience while sustaining life within Empire’s fractures. Petit marronage is the quiet persistence of refusal, laying the groundwork for larger transformations.
Grand Marronage: Radical ruptures that break decisively from Empire’s machinery, forging entirely new worlds of possibility. Historically, grand marronage appeared in the formation of maroon societies or the ultimate rejection of bondage, as enslaved peoples leapt into the unknown rather than submit to domination. Today, grand marronage manifests as mass movements: collective upheavals that dismantle systemic hierarchies and open pathways toward liberation.

These modes are deeply interconnected. The persistence of petit marronage creates fertile ground for bold ruptures, while the transformative energy of grand marronage inspires and amplifies everyday refusals. Operating across scales—personal, relational, and collective—maroon countermeasures weave entangled pathways of resistance:

Shifting Vibes: At the most immediate scale, countermeasures cultivate everyday acts, affects, and attitudes of refusal and care. A guerrilla gardening practice, a mutual aid call, or a fugitive planning party can reclaim time, space, and resources from Empire’s grip. These subtle realignments disrupt oppressive rhythms, creating openings for new possibilities.
Forming Packs: Building upon individual acts, affects, and attitudes, countermeasures assemble dynamic relational bonds among those who engage in them. These packs connect dispersed efforts into cohesive communities, fortifying resilience and amplifying the capacity for sustained resistance.
Moving Masses: At the largest scale, countermeasures catalyze collective actions that channel distinct and seemingly disparate communities together into confluences. General strikes, land reclamations, and mass uprisings are not isolated events, but the culmination of entangled efforts. These movements align dispersed acts of resistance, transforming fractures into pathways for systemic change.

Each countermeasure must align with the contours of Empire’s next moves, converting its mechanisms of control into opportunities for subversion and liberation. Through this interplay of refusal and transformation, maroon countermeasures embody a living resistance, cultivating autonomy and solidarity while dismantling the hierarchies that sustain domination.

So let us ask: how might we disrupt the refinement of surveillance capitalism, undermine the fortification of the technosphere, challenge the reconfiguration of multipolar hegemony, resist the expansion of the carceral state, expose the exploitation of crisis narratives, and defend TEK and resistance movements from suppression? How can we shift the vibe, form resilient packs, and move cohesive masses to counter these evolving machinations of Empire?

Empire’s Next Moves