How To Exit The Empire Pt. 3 - Tech & Media
Disconnect your tech and disrupt your information flows
Welcome back to Exiting the Empire Series
Read parts 1 & 2 here:
This 4-part article series was inspired by Andor, the Star Wars show.
I’m an ecovillage designer, and I’m locking in on how to disconnect from the empire that is currently crumbling around us by using village-scale solutions.
If you’ve seen Andor, you’ll know how disturbing it was to watch the empire spin a completely false narrative of “terrorism” on the planet Ghorman while they shamelessly moved to exploit the mineral resources that they needed to build their superweapon, the Death Star.
It was especially distressing because of the realism.
Surveillance, propaganda, and the exploitation of personal data are shaping up to be the most alarming way the modern empire exerts its control.
So of course, the 3rd exit is tech, data, and media.
Because if we don’t build our own media infrastructure inside our communities, our stories will continue to be told by institutions that do not understand or value them.
Don’t Just Unplug, Build
I’m not a hacker, I’m a village designer. My lens is social technologies.
There are already some great guides out there on how to disconnect from the tech giants, including this one from Other Worlds Catalog. “De-googling yourself” is already a major trend with plenty of how-to’s online.
That is not the focus of this article.
Instead, I want to talk to you about the village-scale media systems we can build as we outgrow the old system. Because as one of my readers quoted to me, “Fighting drains, but building sustains”.
Down the line, I promise you a case study on the solarpunk tech experiments we’re running in my own sustainable coliving community in California, like building locally hosted AIs and our own offline internet.
Exit 3: Tech & Media
Exiting the empire requires not just land sovereignty or resource sovereignty (as I talked about in parts 1 and 2), but digital sovereignty.
And the narrative monopoly represents a major artery of the empire.
Having access to the truth is a deciding factor in the success of any rebellion
Ask yourself these questions, which come from a recent Andre Henry video:
What does the system depend on?
How are we providing it?
What happens when we withdraw that support?
This is a great framework to ask yourself again and again in the discourse of exploring how to “build the village and starve the empire”.
I would argue that the 4th question is, “Now what can we build instead?”
My answer is a parallel circulation of information.
The Role of Disruptive Media
I’ve come to believe that media is one of the most decisive terrains of this historic transition.
Across eras, resistance movements tended to:
Disrupt centralized communication channels
Build parallel decentralized networks
Expose or disable surveillance infrastructure
Shift to analog networks when centralized tech was compromised
The White Rose leaflets in Nazi Germany were a key distribution of anti-fascist communication.
In the Soviet bloc, the self-published Samizdat dissidents avoided the state’s publishing technology by returning to typewriters, carbon paper, and hand-to-hand distribution.
And then there was the Polish Underground State, which created entire shadow universities, courts, media, and education systems outside authoritarian control.
In recent years, movements in places like Nepal, Bangladesh, and Madagascar have demonstrated how digital-native tactics—algorithm swarms, symbol compression, and meme warfare—can rapidly shape public perception. If we care about building resilient, ethical movements, we need to study how these dynamics work, not to manipulate, but to understand the terrain we’re operating on.
I highly recommend the How to Resist Substack for incredible mutual aid and resistance tactics, documenting real world strategies.
Anti-authoritarian media tactics are skills we need to have, and media can be used to not only tell the full story, but to dessiminate the skills we need to outsmart the empire.
Right now, it’s clear that independent media ecosystems (that are still highly visible) are what we need for a better rebellion.
Here is why this matters specifically for villages.
Building Village-Scale Media
I’ve been extremely meditative this past week on what is necessary to make the village model more mainstream.
Right now, it comes off as a reckless leap into an alternative lifestyle. The perceived risk of social entanglement in community is considered greater than the pain of being isolated and extorted by the empire.
Community is foreign, thus dangerous.
My diagnosis: the shift is still too scary because it’s not perceived as safe or normal, and the narrative around community is still framed as a threat.
Even though there are already thousands of established, global village projects that prove it’s healthier to live in community, people are still deeply skeptical.
Villages have struggled to take hold in mainstream culture not because they are impossible. They fail because the story of them is distorted and mocked before people ever encounter the reality.
If we want villages to be perceived as the viable, safe, and intelligent social redesign they are, we cannot wait for legacy institutions to tell that story for us.
I’ve decided what’s under my control to do next.
The Terrenity Village Media Studio
As a village builder creating media in service of a solarpunk future, I’m starting a media studio inside my own community.
The studio will have capacity to record audio and video projects, as well as specialized tools for printing analog resistance materials.
I’m going to use a solar power array to charge a jackery for power, and set it all up in what is now an underutilized, informal music/storage room.
The tangibles:
free educational content
offline archives
open source village stock media
long-form documentation and short-form dissemination
analog materials and object-based memes
My strategy is to infiltrate existing institutions (by licensing educational content), and creating a repository of media that can be used by others to spread the village model.
I’m also making it available to my community members, who specialize in topics like community real estate, shared ownership models, mutual aid networks, and more.
This will be just one node in a future network of village-based media studios.
I’m moving to Europe by the end of the year (because yikes, USA) to start another regenerative village project, and will build a 2nd studio there using the funds generated from the first. Then, I will launch a program that gets more place-based community creators equipped to tell the real story.
Terrenity will run this program to empower creators in different communities to:
Document your experiments
Archive and distribute your learnings (and keep offline twins)
Train internal storytellers
Own your distribution channels
Create locally-hosted media nodes embedded in place
Right now I’m fundraising for the first media studio that will immediately empower 16 creators to produce content that builds the village and starves the empire.
I’ve been planning this media studio for awhile, and finally decided to make it public. In the few short days since I launched, we already have 53% of the funds raised.
If this vision resonates, you’re invited to help build it.
You can contribute to the first Terrenity Village Media Studio, or become a paid subscriber and participate in sustaining this work long term.
Founding partners in the media studio share in the upside. Details are available at the link.
If you’re a creator who wants to participate in this media initiative, fill out this form for opportunities to connect and build more parallel media together.
This is a great project. I'm looking forward to learning how it works out. Technology has a firm grip on us and everything we do—and that's a precarious place to be. Thank you.
This is a great article! Thank you!! I am going to share in the divine feminine app community where we are all about creating parallel tech universes!!