It.
It could happen here. It's it's the podcast that's happening here. That's not why we called it that. But you know, such as such as such, such as such as the world uh. And today I'm going to be talking about one of one of one of our I don't want to say rare, but we're we're doing one of our
how do we put the World Back Together? Episodes And in order to do that, I'm going to be talking with Mira and Koran, who are two organizers for the Dual Power Gathering Bidwest that's happening in what like two months ish. Yeah, it's Coryan, Mira. Welcome to the show.
Hi.
Thanks, it's great to be on.
Yeah, it's great. It's great to have you too. Okay, So I guess I should I guess we should start with so this is this is well, I don't know if seconds the right term. The first of these happens last year in Indiana? Is it last?
Ye?
Yeah, I was last year. I had to I had to make it. I had to do a quick checking my memory to make sure that twenty twenty two was in fact last year, and we haven't. Somehow, So we got to the twenty twenty four. Already, Oh boy, things are things that things are going great here. But yeah, I wanted to, I guess start with talking about what the dual power gathering is and yeah, like what what what happened at the first one and how did it go?
Yeah, so dual power gathering. I guess maybe a thing to start with is what is dual power?
Yeah, we haven't talked about that in a bit, Yeah, I can. We explained it for new people.
The maybe the best way to put it is something that maybe a lot of people have heard before, which is building a new world in the shell of the old. So we live in a society, right unfortunately, So there's a lot of institutions that we have to deal with, and for a lot of people it's essential to rely on these institutions because there's not other options. And as anarchists, it's kind of our goal to build those other options. And dual power is that building a second power in
opposition to the state powers. So you know, like tech stuff, so internet, mesh, networks, just alternative infrastructures, alternative medical care. Though I'm sure that specific phrasing can imply something else which I did not mean, but.
It's just.
Working with communities to try to not rely on the state. And so dual power Gathering is bringing together, you know, a bunch of people from orgs and independent activists and honestly people who just want to get involved and don't know a lot to help build those counter structures. And honestly, this cool Zone Media brought a lot of people went to the podcast from last year, so it seems like your audience really really likes this stuff.
I'm sad. I'm sad I wasn't able to go to last year's I was in the process of like setting up for and then I had a COVID scare. It had to like lock down for like an entire week in it, and it turned out that I didn't have it. But I mean, I'm very sad.
I preferred that you didn't spread COVID.
Yeah. I was like, you know, okay, let let's let's not like endanger people's lives. That seems better than in fact doing that.
And on that note, since there's been questions both other events, we will be having mass requirements and at the event to make sure the immunal compromise people are not being excluded. I want to make that clear.
Yeah, and this is this is like you know, so I like the last one from my understanding, you like, you know it was it was a bunch of it was a bunch of people like camping in the dunes basically, And is this one also going to be sort of like mostly an outdoor thing.
Yeah, so it's going to be We're not just going to say the location here and you can find that out through registering, but the location is just near Chicago and it's similarly outside. It's a big open space, not a lot of trees, which is sad this year. But yeah, it'll be mostly camping, but there's cabins and people can stand in hotels nearby.
Also.
Yeah, so I guess okay, we've taught, we've talked a bit about what dual power is and sort of building this kind of counterpower and building you know, like and like I guess I just want to say a little bit like these are like dual power institutions are just a lot of the things that you know, just we talk about building or like people you know or we've been involved in building and these are these these can be things like tennis unions like different like different well
different like regular unions like caucuses and unions. I like mutual aid networks like worker centers and so's. You know, there's also for things that can be involved in this by so now now now having gotten we've gotten through dual power, we've sort of gotten through gathering, but we should I should, Yeah, I want to ask a bit more about like what what Okay, what what happens at the thing when you go to it?
Yeah. So it's built on the unconference model of doing things, which in essence is able to kind of counteract the idea that we need to have a sort of structured event that's you know, you do this at this point, you do this at this point, you do this at this point. It instead is meant to be built more towards libertarian socialist principles, and it is where people are able to kind of build their own agenda from the start of the event and kind of structure their day
how they want to. So you can talk to these people to go to a skill sharing event on stop the Bleed training. You can talk to these people to go through a skill share event on how to facilitate meetings. You can talk to these folk to learn a bit about anarchist history. You know, just all these different things that can be formatted however that you may so choose, and that are all kind of happening at the discretion
of people who are involved. So it's very much so just up to you to build your own day, and of course you can also talk to other people there if you need some help. Plenty of the organizer is involved are more than willing to help out and you know, lend people a hand in figuring out where everything is and what they might want to do and what other
people are doing start their day around. But at the core, you know, it's built around individual choice, autonomy and just a non hierarchical method of going by it.
So I can talk a little bit more about how that looked practically from last year. So the first night I wasn't there, so I can't talk much about that, but it was it was just mostly getting to know everybody. People were coming and throughout the night because work and
all that on a Friday. But then that Saturday, after breakfast, which I don't even remember, it was like oat meal or something, we got together in this assembly area and brought out whiteboards and marked out days and people like just stuck up what they wanted to talk about in a session on the board in a time slot, and then we got everyone to figure out, you know, which
ones of these can be condensed. You know, do two people have similar ideas, can they talk about how they might want to have a session together, And then people just chose which sessions to go to. We kept the whiteboards up so people could see what was going on and where, and that worked out pretty well. I think the biggest concern from that was people wanted to go to everything. We simply did not have time, and they were like, can we make this a week And I
think that's pushing money wise. It's expensive enough to rent a campsite for a weekend, but it has.
Like just a bunch of land they have sitting around they want to give to us for this.
If you can, if you can make whatever ranch or farm you have like accessible for people, then yes, please reach out for future gatherings. But the most important part I think was that the gathering model allowed all different groups there who had similar interests. For example, there was a POC caucus to self organize. There's also like a sex workers group. They were able to come together on their own figure out what's going on. And it wasn't
based on what organizers thought was important. It was based on what participants thought was important. And I think that also facilitated a lot of networking. You were able to see, hey, there's a DIY medicine circle going on in this campsite. Well I'm going to go maybe stop by. I might not say the whole time, but I'm going to check it out. See if I'm interested, see if I like
I like the people there. And it allowed for especially newer folks to interact with veterans veteran activists and just engage with stuff they might have only felt interested in slightly and actually get involved and contribute. So yeah, that's how it practically went for the unconference, and we didn't hear that many complaints about it, accept that it maybe some time sessions were not time, like the time was too short or too long, or that it wasn't like a week or two.
Yeah, I mean, you know, and then that that's stuff that like it's especially the first time you're running an event like stuff, stuff like that happens, and you know, we can okay, this is I have not an enormous
amount of experience running like panels and stuff. But like I've done it, and it's like God, getting the timing right is really hard and very annoying, but it's you know, this is this is a this is a thing that subsequent events will can and will sort of iterate on and get better at, because you know, I guess what what what what what of One of the things that we are in fact learning at these is how to do these things that you know, I guess in this way hasn't been done before.
Yeah, and it's not i mean not technically not been done before, but not done it this way. Yeah, like like those crime think convergences or like the bashback.
But yeah, yeah, well I think it's an interesting thing too, on a sort of like I don't know, I think I think there's a way in which this is in some sense kind of getting back to like older like models of anarchist organizing that kind of like I'm not gonna say they disappeared, but there'd been sort of less of them due to like, you know, we just sort of like political shifts and like shifts in the way people organized and like just what kinds of stuff were
happening at any given time and so you know, and I think that the consequence of this is a lot of people sort of relearning or you know, relearning and inventing things that like had been known. But you know, ever, ever, everyone's working through it together, and you know, it turns out we're like we're pretty good at building things.
Yeah.
Yeah. Like one thing that I think is really cool about DPG that kind of shines through is seeing how something like building an event like this, Like when I first got involved, you know, I pictured building an event like this is a huge ordeal. You know, it was you needed all these big connections, You needed to know a guy who knows a guy who knows a guy,
and needed so many different resources at your disposal. It never really hit me that this could be something that just regular people could just up and decide to do. It's not to say it doesn't take a lot of effort and work. It does, but it's still ultimately something that is in the power of people to do if they really set themselves onto it and are able to find enough helping hands, both physically and in terms of
the actual event. So it's like it's really cool to see just everyone coming together in the organizing process and
it just being a very organic, natural thing. It's like, I don't know, you see it a lot with like other specific events I've done food not bomb stuff, and I've seen it there too, but like it's different when it's something that you typically for Sea, at least I did for Sea as like, oh, you know, building a whole weekend long event, you know you need, yeah, have corporate big shots doing that, you know, how can you expect the little guys to do that?
And Yeah, it's also cool to see people just jump in and help who might not even have other organizing experience. This last year too, near the end of the planning for the gathering, there were so many people joining little circles on planning food and transportation logistics and how can I contribute? And I think the resounding result was people finding political hope. That was a term I heard a lot from from individuals who both went and helped organize
the last one. And we're hoping to create a similar, similar thing this time.
Yeah, and that's something that like, I don't know, I think I think everyone can use a bit more of
right now. In a sort of in a very sort of depressing and bleak, like there's there's there's a lot of bad there's a lot of bad stuff happening, and the ability to generate hope, and I you know, you could even think of it in sort of in just in terms of like morale, right, Like it's it's really really really hard to actually achieve or change anything if everyone has just sort of given up already, and you know, like being around other people and being like planning events
with people and doing stuff with people like is a very very good way to you know, just sort of break the kind of like existential dread and like depression of like living in and you know, sort of hopelessness of like living in in in this like dizzy aster that we've all been thrown into.
Yeah. Something that somebody had mentioned at the last gathering that really stuck with me was that because of the uprising and COVID, most leftist organizing was formed through trauma bonding. Yeah, And it was really nice to form relationships outside of traumatic incidents and they felt longer lasting and much safer than relationships built during crisis.
Yeah. And I think, you know, I mean, I think like I think that's just sort of important along those lines to remember, is that like like building relationships. There's
a decent extent to which that's just all organizing is. Yeah, yeah, I mean it's it's not all organizing is, but it's it's a really important part of it, and the way that people are able to do this, especially in the wake of a bunch of like, you know, i mean, really sort of traumatic and horrible experiences people went through, like yeah, glad we have a better way to do this.
Yeah, Like, stuff like this is essentially well some of the only things that give me a sense of optimism for the future, because those who know me know I tend to be a very pessimistic person. I don't look at current events, to put it concisely, and say, oh, wow, things are going pretty topsy turvy out there. I'm so.
But when we have stuff like this going on that's just built at the level of, hey, we're people trying to make things better and prevent the chaos from the outside world and the world around us from just consuming everything, It's like it gives a nice sense of the community and a nice sense of hey, we're not alone in this, and that maybe tomorrow things will be a little bit better than they were today.
Yeah, it's especially important in my opinion. I the first gathering, I was not living in a city as I do now. I was living in not a city that people in big cities would call a city. I was in Nebraska, and.
I was going to make a joke about Davenport or something, and that's kind of Daport.
Yeah. So being able to meet other rural organizers in various places, especially honestly the Appalachia region, which I did not realize was so related in their struggles, was important because no matter how much I wanted to network, there wasn't really that opportunity as much as there is in cities. And in cities there's a doesn't mean you're necessarily meeting more people or people that you necessarily would like to
organize with. There's just there's often more need and not necessarily more anarchists.
Yeah. Yeah, And I mean, you know, it's something we've talked about before, but we we've basically built it. Well okay, well, I say we we didn't really build this, but this wholsom that we lived in, the social system that we live in has been built sort of very specifically and very deliberately to isolate people. And yeah, and you know, there's the sort of functions in different ways depending on
sort of geography and like regional stuff. But yeah, like I think, I think this is you know, an important tool to sort of break that and to bring people together and to bring like I don't know, like I think, I think like another part of this we haven't talked about as much as like just like really incredible things happen when you bring people together from struggles that like
turn out to be very similar. But like aren't like aren't usually involved with each other, Like aren't you sort of like not like I haven't haven't been able to sort of like link up before you get very sort of like I don't know, you get a lot of really interesting sort of like ideas and strategic stuff from it.
Yeah, Like one thing that I've noticed, especially and because I've done a lot of small town rural organizing, is that you can kind of easily develop like very isolating
communities and isolating radical cultures and like specific regions. And it's not a great pitfall and full into because you miss out of developments that might happen else sort of nice out of a lot of other things that might happening in other regions and even beyond just regions going into specific intersectional issues like different different organizers who might focus specifically on racism versus corphobia, versus ableism. Then there's
all things to learn from each other. Yeah, there's all interconnectedism. When you tie that into interconnectedness of different regions, there's just a big need for things to be kind of like a large web of connectivity instead of just you know, oh, things are kept separate and now we're stuck developing on our road and that's that's never fun.
Yeah, and you know what, I guess start circling the sort of back around to the cecific events. The thing that y'all are doing to combat this is the is the Dual Power gathering in Midwest. So I wanted to talk a little bit about like, well, okay, when is this happening and also what are the plans so far for what it's going to look like and what people are going to be doing.
So it's August seventeenth through twentieth, and this year is going to be pretty similar to last year. And you can also look at Dual Power West, which had their gathering earlier this summer. There's a good if you go to Sabo Media, I think it's sabomedia dot no blocks dot org or whatever the no blogs addresses. You can look it up. They did a good report back on how that went, and we'll also have a documentary if people want to learn more.
Sorry that's sidetracked, but we'll we'll put links to that in the description.
So right now we're soliciting a lot of people to come and bring what they have to offer to the table. We are in the end stages of setting everything up and getting everything connected, and part of that is we want people to bring over what they want to share, you know, skills, they want to share cool things they've learned about leftist history, things that are important to know for modern day society, intersectional issues, discussions, basically anything that
people could think of that might be worthwhile. Come on over, bring it in. We'd love to talk to people and hear more about it. So in terms of specifics so we might have planned that is where we're currently at. We're aiming for it to be like last year in that it's a skill share event and a discussion. Like I said, of discussions and just a way for people to you share what they know with each other. And a few of us currently involved. You know, we all
have our own ideas. I personally want to talk about unions and kind of be like, hey, unionize your workplace, but that's more so just me and that it could be up to anyone, but what they want to do, kind of building off the Young conference model. It's if people want it, and you know, it's not like how to be a fascist one on one, then it's welcome.
Some things we predict that will happen at the gathering will probably be circles on trans healthcare and abortion care. Given recent events. Well it doesn't even it's not really recent feeling anymore. But that plus, I think much more community defense is coming up because of those, and I think as always there's all the DIY folks who come in last year. Pretty cool, and I might overemphasize how much that's a part because I'm also one of those
DIY people. It's a problem and an addiction at this point, but like you know, people who wanted to just build their own car, it's cool stuff. Yeah, the the random expertise of people coming was wonderful, and that all came together in ways I don't think anyone could have predicted, like literally the showing how to use batteries and how to like in a correct way chaining them education. I have an engineering degree. A lot of this stuff was so new to me in a very good way, and
I hope that similarly will come back. We can never predict leftists are wild. You never know if they're going to take to something. If we don't even know if certain people liked it because they just dropped off the mat because they were, you know, just walking to Denver
or something after the gathering. But I think the gathering is our focus has been on getting people to network, and so I think what we've planned besides food, which I think we can talk about in a second, is just making sure people come away with the relationships we've talked so much about already, and trying to give people the opportunities explicitly to socialize, because we also know that people tend to be not very friendly when approached in
maybe every day organizing, even though you say they should be. Maybe, but life stressful, and I don't blame people, So we're trying to make it a very friendly environment for talking to other people and trying to maybe make that the only other structured thing in the day besides meals.
Yeah, well, I guess I should also say that, like you, if you can do something cool and you want to go show people that something cool, you should in fact do this because it rips.
Please just for me, like.
Please calm and show us some cool stuff, like there is so much opportunity for amazing things.
Yeah, and I guess you know, speaking of basic things, Yeah, we should talk about food a little bit because you know, food important part of all human societies.
So for food, we're aiming for it to be petered. Vegan food from local restaurants along with various cooked meals as well is what we're kind of shooting for. So we're going to be covering three meals a day breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and aiming to have enough to cover everyone for the three days of the gathering.
Yeah, and if food we have doesn't work, we also have plans to make sure that we can accommodate people. This is not far from other It's not like out in the middle of nowhere. We'll be able to access various stores and stuff. A lot of the gatherings would rely on the typical way of just having I don't know, some gatherings just have the food happen, they just say, well, foods on the group and that's fun and all, but we also want to ensure that there is food.
And that there's like veganaction for people, which is absolutely yeah, and stuff like that. Do you do you have anything else that you want to talk about about the event before we close out?
Yeah. I'll just say too that we are aiming for this event to be accessible to folk with disabilities, folks with children, essentially to anyone that wouldn't be interested. We want to be accessible. On our website we talk a bit more in detail about specific ways in which the site itself is disability accessible, and we also invite folk to if there's any suggestions, concerns, anything of the sort for how we can make this more accessible for people,
more welcoming, more open. We invite people to come and low us know. We're still learning and still trying to do this better. So anything we can improve upon, please let us know, because we want to do right by folk.
And on the note of families and kids, youth are absolutely welcome. We have some families in well, some parents specifically in the organizing right now. We hope we want kids to be able to be as involved as they
want to be. Last year, I think that it ended up working out with the kids that were there and they're amazing and you can see that in the documentary too, But we want to make sure that's something we actually plan for this time, to make sure that they don't feel excluded and also that parents are able to fully participate. And yet you can see more on our website which is Dpgmidwest dot org.
Yeah, well, we'll have links to that in the description too.
Yeah, and on there you'll see linked is our open collective where if you go there you can There's a variety of options on there, which might be overwhelming. There's a donation option if you can't come but would like to donate, and then there's tickets they don't you can use pseudonyms. It's pretty anonymous. It's fine the but and you don't have to pay necessarily. But there's a suggested donation listed on there so that we are able to afford the campsite and people don't have to pay too
much upfront. Two, the camp by the campsite, I guess rent the campsite for the days and get food and stuff, and then there's options to get reserve a spot in a cabin. If there's still spots left, we don't need to have a reservation, but we're trying to make sure that it's that we're prioritizing people with those access needs. And of course our emails also listed on both the Open Collective and the website, so that'll probably be the
main source for info. We also have a collective account despite the problems.
Yeah, right now, do you learn learn offset do that? People, It's good, you will go far.
Yeah. God, I'm thinking about making a tumbler because what's happening. But the Yeah, it's also at DPG Midwest, uh, at Collective, at.
Social Yeah, and once again, this is running from August seventeenth to the twentieth. And yeah it sounds interesting. Go sign up and yeah, yeah, thank you too so much for joining us. Why am I saying us? Sorry? I just I just reflectively do the US and then I'm like, wait, hold on, hold.
Time there's the Royal WE and the Anarchist US.
Yeah, and I'm I'm I'm excited. I don't know. I may be there, I may not be. It depends on a bunch of scheduling stuff that I have very little control over, but yeah, other people should go. It's gonna be a good event. And yeah, thank you to again.
Thank you, thank you.
Yeah, this has been It can happen here. You can find us in the usual places if they still exist by the time this episode comes out. Oh yeah, we have. We now have the Cooler Zone media thing. If you don't want to listen to the Reagan ads or like, I don't know, a bunch of other ads for podcasts or whatever weird things playing right now. I think I've been getting casino ads lately, which is kind of interesting.
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