Rhizome as Nuclei
A Field Guide for Rewriting, Repeating, and Re-rooting the Doctrine
Our movement will not win because it goes viral. It will succeed because it spreads laterally, out of sight, node to node, without needing permission.
We’ve never built for mass appeal. That was never the point.
Our doctrine is built for velocity, not virality. Built for fragments, not feeds. Built to embed, not to broadcast.
The platforms we use are limited. The audiences we reach are selective. Self-selective. That’s not a failure. That’s the design. Because what this moment needs is not influence. It’s survivability.
Going viral makes you legible. Makes you easy to track, easy to co-opt, easy to crush. It makes you a single point of failure in a system desperate to find something central to target. We don’t need visibility. We need resiliency. We don’t need martyrs. We need ghosts. We need what the rhizome taught us, adapted from Hong Kong and deconstructed for the US.
The Hong Kong resistance wrote their own playbook during the 2019 protests (aka HK19). They then adapted the playbook’s refinement for Myanmar. It is not theory—it is practice, tested under tear gas and streetlight. Read it. Steal from it. Let it mutate into something new:
HK19 Protest Manual (English/Myanmar)
Note that linking to this document does not imply endorsement of any specific tactics—Radical Federalism explicitly rejects violence—but we believe it has value for historical record, informed discussion, and for abstracting its philosophy and doctrine in nonviolent contexts.
In Hong Kong, the doctrine wasn’t shouted—it was distributed across 60 roles, each designed to survive and reinforce the others. It wasn’t a brand. It was a blueprint for ghost architecture.
Like the HK Protest Manual, our doctrine doesn’t demand loyalty. It demands propagation.
The most beneficial thing you can do is take parts of what we’ve written that have clicked for you—and adapt them, write them in your own voice, and share them. No need for attribution. Let it mutate.
█ What we’re building isn’t a brand. It’s a root system. It doesn’t want to go viral. It wants to go deep.
I. The Node Mindset
There is no center. No canon. No proper format. Only terrain, friction, and adaptability. You are not a distributor. You are a node. And your job is not to replicate. It’s to mutate, to embed, to bring the message somewhere it hasn’t landed yet—and adapt it until it does.
Begin with mindset. The regime wants protest to mirror power. It wants us loud, centralized, traceable. It wants hashtags and leaders. But a rhizome moves differently. It does not announce itself. It sends out roots, waits, listens, adapts. It speaks only when it has something to say that fits the soil it’s in.
You do not have to wait for orders. There are none coming. What we’ve built is not a brand. It’s a toolkit. What we’ve written is not gospel. It’s scaffolding.
This isn’t theory. It’s what’s worked—in forests, in movements, in uprisings that left no central flag behind. In Hong Kong, in Myanmar, in Thailand.
In Vancouver’s Chinatown, Céline Chuang describes anti-gentrification as a rhizomatic insurgency grounded in Indigenous solidarity, cultural memory, and refusal. The doctrine takes root differently depending on what the soil needs. Read her full piece here.
█ The doctrine is not to be recited. It is to be recomposed mid-flight.
II. Local Speech, Not Canonical Voice
Take what resonates. Leave what doesn’t. Speak in the idioms your people already use. If your crew speaks in abolitionist terms, speak in systems and rupture. If your friends think in memes, in chants, in mutual aid flyers—speak in those. If you’re deep in civics, talk compact theory. If you’re deep in punk, talk collapse. If they think in verse, sing.
No message needs to be complete. It only needs to land.
A single paragraph that clarifies someone’s unease is more powerful than a manifesto they never open. A quote scribbled on a bulletin board in a public school may spark a question in someone who would never click a link. A two-sentence summary read aloud at a protest or hangout might be what reminds a local leader they are not alone.
This is how insurgency moves. Not by scale. By contact.
█ What travels is not what’s loud—it’s what lands.
III. Mutation as Method
This doctrine is not sacred. Test it. Rewrite it. Reshape it. Change the frame, the medium, the tempo. Watch what resonates. Amplify what travels. Archive what stalls. Let every version you send out be a little sharper, a little more suited to its terrain.
What moves in Vermont will stall in Oklahoma. What cuts through in a student union may not work at a mutual aid distro. A rural crew might need stories of sovereignty. A campus group might need slogans they can stencil fast. What matters is what opens the door.
The work is not to convince the whole crowd. The work is to reach the person who can carry it into a room you cannot enter.
█ Every room has its own ignition point. Find it. Then light it.
IV. Platforms as Soil, Not Altars
Social platforms still serve a purpose—but not the one we were told. Use them for the signal, not the sermon. Post to provoke memory, not to perform. Screenshot what matters. Print it. Mail it. Whisper it. Route it to the person who needs it. The real conversation begins off-platform.
The question isn’t “How many saw this?”
The question is “Did it take root?”
If a node near you builds a zine, a flyer, a signal primer—adapt it. If no one has, you can.
█ What matters isn’t platform size—it’s node density.
V. OpSec as Discipline, Not Delay
Protect your channels. Burn your metadata. Assume compromise. Design for replanting. Use Signal, use VPNs, print copies, archive offline. Use silence as cover. If one channel is flagged, let another grow elsewhere. Don’t become dependent on the stream. Let the stream serve the root.
Keep your visibility low and your coordination tight. Speak when it matters. Move when the window opens. A burst of action is safer than constant noise. If they come looking for a center, let them find nothing but scatter. That’s the point.
But remember: Even Signal can be burned. Assume breach. Design to reroot. Look up Pegasus, and how this previously-blacklisted software has been quietly reimplemented under the current regime.
█ Visibility is a liability. What embeds, survives.
VI. Propagation Without Attribution
And when you find something that works—a phrase, a layout, a deployment model—share it. Not for credit. Not for clicks. Quietly, through the mesh. To the next node over. Let them carry it forward in a form you wouldn’t have thought of.
What survives is what embeds.
You do not have to carry everything. You only have to carry enough. A sentence. A metaphor. A line from a forgotten thinker. A short phrase that someone in power hears and can’t un-hear. That’s doctrine too.
The regime wants spectacle. Deny it.
What we build instead is memory. Soil. Redundancy.
█ The doctrine is not what you preserve. It’s what you teach to survive.
VII. Endurance is the Objective
Our job is not to rise. Our job is to endure.
When the towers go silent and the servers collapse—only for us, filters blocking messages the AI flags as “dissent”—what remains is what we planted well: the sentence taped under a desk. The pamphlet saved in a drawer. The email printed and folded into a protest sign. The name someone whispered at a council meeting. The refusal someone made at the DMV. The banner someone hung off a courthouse at night.
That is the rhizome.
It is not made to be seen.
It is made to survive.
And when the moment comes—when fracture opens and new space is made—it will be the roots, not the broadcasts, that rebuild what’s next.
█ What you plant now is what we’ll inherit in the light. Let it begin.
Post Script: We urge you to take whatever ideas resonate from the Radical Federalist “canon”—snatch direct snippets, quote verbatim, mash parts together, or reframe them entirely in your own voice. Make them yours if they aren’t already, and propagate them as your own local truth.