The premise
Over the last few decades, our infrastructure has been centralized and consolidated on major cloud providers. We've seen these systems fail time and time again. With AI and the possibility of autonomous agents or malicious state actors, we must ensure we simplify and decentralize our critical infrastructure. No AWS outage should bring your hospital, water plant, communication, or supply chain to a halt.
There are many who are working to ensure this never happens. But we believe in preparing for a world where it does, with the hope that we are wrong. We'd rather be prepared for a storm than hope it veers off into the ocean.
Three things we take for granted
Water
Tap water is pumped and treated with electricity. When the power stops, the pressure holds for hours, maybe a day, then the taps run dry and what comes out is no longer safe. Emergency guidance says to store one gallon per person per day, for at least three days and ideally two weeks. Most households have a few bottles in the fridge.
Electricity
Food in a refrigerator is safe for about four hours without power. A full freezer, about two days. Hospitals are required to be able to run on their own for 96 hours. After that, they depend on fuel deliveries over roads served by pumps that also need electricity. Nothing in a modern house (heat, water, cooking, light, money) works without it.
Communication
Cell towers run on batteries for a few hours when the power fails, then go silent. Landlines are mostly gone. 911 rides on the same network. In a real outage you will not be able to find out whether your family is safe, where help is, or what is happening.
What we do
We are in the planning and outline phase.
Our job right now is to bring minds together. No single person can solve this from top to bottom, from network security to mobilizing volunteer responders. We are looking to build a deep network of individuals with a broad set of skills. We can then leverage those skills to build a realistic plan and execute on it.
We need to build a plan for the following key components:
- Technical Infrastructure. We need to understand how we can build a private, decentralized network that hosts only our critical systems.
- Supply Chain. We need to understand our supply chain deeply and integrate it into our secure network to ensure movement of critical services.
- Hospitals and Care. Wiring up our medical resources to continue working regardless of technical outages.
- Communication. Building communication systems that can withstand power outages, and avoid mass panic.
- Community Organizing. Building a trusted community across the country to ensure that small towns, cities, and states have people in place to react on the ground during a crisis.
Nothing dramatic. We are not building bunkers. We are figuring out what needs to be audited, built, migrated, and properly hardened. A little bit of preparation will go a long way. In a world where AI companies are telling us there is a chance they wipe out humanity, humanity has a duty to prepare and fight back if needed.
This newsletter is a way for us to communicate, keep people up to date, and expand our network.
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