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I think you missed something key within my response. I'm saying you have some people build out parallel systems, some people take more direct action. They're meant to complement each other. You have people actively interfering with state aims and operations at the same time as you build the alternative. That essentially creates the demand that is then captured by the movement. Person A interferes with the state mail system and then person B operates an alternative mail system. You don't need to have a majority, you just need a radical minority willing to actually take action. Some of this will happen naturally. It's basically like Konkin's strategy, but with actually interfering via direct action on purpose with state aims. Konkin is much more "Let the state degrade over time and then take over with parallel systems". I'm saying build parallel systems while striking back against those persons and organizations that cause the capture itself. The government lost its fear of the people because the people became spiritually captured with ideologies and theologies that are contrary to driving action towards a given goal when that goal is against an authority. The past couple millennia has led to a decline in the willingness to take action against the state. I'm trying to say we need to reverse that by correcting the limiting beliefs and shedding the theological and ideological constraints that are on us. Learned helplessness is a huge part of that. Don't need to take direct action or build parallel systems if I know I'm going to lose anyway (or I think it's theologically or ideologically immoral to take direct action), which makes me want to accept that I'll lose, which makes me lose. Responding to your broad enough point, you can just get people to target complementary, but different targets. You act as the elephant in the dark room people feel out and each think is a different thing. Also, you're not building or operating off of one system, you're building multiple. It's a chain link of concentric circles of organizations targeting complementary, but different goals. It's posting a bounty and letting 100 bounty hunters try to catch a target instead of paying one bounty hunter and hoping he succeeds.
Thanks for spelling that out, I did miss the complementary part. Different people working different fronts at the same time, with the alternative already there to catch the demand, makes a lot more sense than the way I framed it. I also really liked your bounty hunter comparison. It sums up the case for spreading the risk nicely.
Really glad to hear you'll write it regardless, dying to read it whenever it's ready.
The direct action angle makes theoretical sense, but the part that gives me pause is: unless you've already got a genuinely massive number of people ideologically on board, doing anything overtly disruptive just exposes you to something with an almost unimaginable amount of force behind it. And people don't actually hate authority itself, they hate specific people holding it, which makes that mass conversion a slow, uphill fight either way.
That's actually why Lysander Spooner's American Letter Mail Company sticks with me as the better model. He undercut the USPS so badly they had to drop their own rates to compete, real proof that a parallel system can work. But it's also a warning: the government still hunted him and his agents down with arrests and pressure on the railroads, and eventually just legislated a monopoly to shut him down for good. Even a purely peaceful, "just build something better" approach got crushed once it actually worked.
Which is why we need to be careful even about how we build these things. The good news is we've actually gotten a lot better at this since Spooner's time. Decentralized, anonymous-by-default systems end up close to unkillable, Monero's a great example, they can delist it from every exchange they want and it just keeps running regardless.
So my instinct is that the only route that's both safe and actually persuasive across every class of people is building something unbreakable and broad enough to survive that kind of pressure, which is a much slower and less exciting answer, but maybe the only one that doesn't just paint a target on you early.