The Machinery of Empire
Lately, I’ve been grappling with how to shift the discourse around me from lamenting the shifting tides of regime change among elite factions within Empire’s hegemonic nation to the deeper transformations of Empire itself.
The truth is this: Empire compels us to labor in service of sustaining its machinery of survival, even as it destabilizes that very machinery. These opening weeks of the Trump administration strike me as yet another intensification of that dynamic—one in which we are compelled to put even more work into sustaining that machinery at the expense of experimenting with alternatives.
To orient myself to this dynamic, I returned to some notes that never made it into previous AGAPE summaries—notes that speak directly to this tension.
Discussions of Empire too often fixate on who’s at the controls—who holds office, signs orders, or pulls triggers. But, again, the deeper danger lies in the machines themselves, in systems engineered to operate regardless of who is in charge. These are machines that manage populations, extract resources, sort risk, predict behavior, and normalize domination. They are adaptable, modular, and scalable—producing devastating effects without requiring malicious intent. Crucially, they do not require constant tending; only non-interruption and the occasional reinforcement.
Our task, then, is not simply to ask who governs these systems, but how to fault their operations—how to defend ourselves from their functioning, no matter whose hands are on the controls; how to resist their routines, repurpose their residues, and compose life within the ruins left in Empire’s wake.
As the Maroons understood, the issue was never who would wield the whip, take the overseer’s place, or inherit the master’s house. The task was to take flight from the plantation and sabotage its machinery of (re-)capture and captivity—not to manage its personnel or administer its operations. Likewise, our attention must shift from who rules Empire to how Empire’s rule is reproduced—and how it can be broken.
Let us be clear: Empire is not a monolithic institution, but an evolving assemblage of abstract and concrete machines—some co-opted from pre-colonial formations, others forged in imperial and colonial contexts, and still others born of decolonial and counter-colonial resistance, only to be captured and repurposed to serve neo-colonial ends. Its continuity depends on the constant recomposition of these machines, reconfigured to absorb crises, neutralize threats, and maintain the two fractures that anchor its power—wounds engineered into the world itself:
The division of humanity into racialized populations — constructed not only through demographic determinability (the sorting of populations by phenotype, ethnicity, nationality, religion, credit score, educational attainment, income bracket, and economic mobility), but also through geographic separability (the partitioning of territories and regions: drawing and enforcing borders between neighborhoods; between nations; between the First, Second, and Third Worlds; between the Global South and Global North), historiographic sequentiality (the staging of development: primitive, ancient, modern; developed, developing, underdeveloped), and sexual orientability (the binarization of identities and relations: masculine/feminine, gay/straight, cis/trans, monogamous/polyamorous).
The severance of humans from their earthly kin—from soil, stone, wind, and water.
Dismantling Empire requires sabotaging and short-circuiting the connections that sustain its machinery, disrupting its operations until the system collapses under its own disarticulation. Yet dismantling alone is insufficient, for too many of us remain entangled in its infrastructures of survival. Alongside disassembly, we must construct alternative life-support systems—assemblages of sustenance, relation, and regeneration—that enable us to endure and thrive amid the ruination of Empire.
This demands not only the reclamation and repair of pre-colonial, decolonial, and counter-colonial machines—those wrested from Empire’s grasp, salvaged from the wreckage it leaves in its wake, or hidden in fugitive refuges beyond its reach—but also the strategic co-optation of imperial and colonial machines, repurposing them to subvert Empire’s genocidal, ethnocidal, and ecocidal logics. At the same time, it requires the invention of new decolonial and counter-colonial machines that connect and coordinate all of the above, forming insurgent, maroon infrastructures capable of sustaining diverse struggles for liberation.
To do so, we must interrogate the vulnerabilities within our own pre-colonial, decolonial, and counter-colonial machines—what weaknesses allowed Empire to co-opt, displace, or destroy them? What faults made them susceptible to capture? At the same time, we must analyze Empire’s machinery: how its ruling powers consolidate authority, how its disciplinary powers regulate bodies, how its normalizing powers manufacture consent, and how its optimizing powers extract and exploit at scale. Our aim is to turn the tables on Empire—to co-opt, displace, and dismantle its apparatuses just as it has done to ours.
This requires tracing how Empire’s machines determine who counts, who belongs, and who must be erased—sorting populations, redrawing borders, freezing peoples and places in staged timelines of development, and weaponizing sexual orientation and intimacy: not merely to police desire, but to distort it, extract it, and force it to conform to colonial pornotropes. It means recognizing the layered forms of violence—physical, cultural, institutional, carceral, and behavioral—that sustain these operations and mapping their interrelations so we may skillfully counteract them.
Empire operates scalarly. It doesn’t simply act; it synchronizes its operations across multiple registers. And resistance is the work of sabotaging its operations at every scale.
At the sub-molecular scale, Empire targets the flesh—weaponizing our own organs against us, conditioning our senses and brain chemistry to shape perception, desire, and reaction. Empire wants your twitch before it’s even yours. It stalks the blush, the shudder, the near-thought. It doesn’t wait for you to move—it predicts your impulse and logs your vibe.
Rootwork sabotages the sensor/censor. It vibrates at the threshold, making the Imperial apparatus shudder—like bass so deep it plays the soundsystem like a rattle instead of a speaker. In so doing, it deprograms sensation and recalibrates biochemistry—below the threshold of detection, under the radar of capture—shifting the vibe, intensifying our desire for resistance, sharpening our sense of when and where to move before Empire anticipates, and fortifying our courage to seize the moment.
At the molecular scale, Empire exploits social bonds—scripting connection through platforms that capitalize on relation. Friendships are flattened into follower counts. Intimacies are formatted for input. Dating apps translate desire into swipes, scores, and predictive analytics. Professional networking converts co-worker solidarities into personal branding strategies.
What's more, relations come to resemble asset portfolios. Separated parents with joint custody manage their children like shared property—timeslots divided like timeshares. Monogamous lovers relate as proprietors of each other’s time, or as co-founders of a joint venture. Polyamorous partners curate their connections as if diversifying their investments. The person seeking love imagines themselves “on the market.” A breakup becomes a corporate liquidation.
Footwork sabotages the profile and the portfolio. It builds crews through coincidence without coordination—relations sustained by insubordination and improvisation, not scripting. These are fugitive pack formations, held together by polyrhythms so funky you need multiple meters, multiple incommensurate metrics, just to attempt to notate or locate them. The beat never lands where expected, and the dancers don't sync on the assigned cue.
At the molar scale, Empire diagrams the crowd—mapping mood like terrain, forecasting and scheduling mass production, mass consumption, mass migration, and mass death like weather. It analyzes heat signatures. It generates risk scores. It models threat probabilities. Entire populations are classified, ranked, and optimized—so that force can be administered at scale: discretely, efficiently, and with statistical justification.
Wake work subverts the forecast. It generates noise so Empire can’t extract the signals it needs to determine risk—disrupting its ability to predict which times, places, and bodies to target. It leverages butterfly effects—imperceptible perturbations that ripple into systemic breakdown. A single unregistered variation upsets the entire predictive model. Wake work weaponizes chaos—not as disorder, but as radical sensitivity to initial conditions.
At each scale, we must counter Empire’s machinic assemblages not only by dismantling them, but by composing alternatives in their wake. Rootwork, footwork, and wake work are not metaphors. They are insurgent modes of maintenance and disruption, of resistance that cannot be mapped, mimicked, or monetized. They are how we survive the machine and slip its grip. At each scale, with each work, we must also construct alternative life-support systems that sustain and strengthen us against Empire’s violence.
At the sub-molecular scale, this means nourishing and protecting our bodies—learning to care for them and defend them against harsh and hostile elements.
At the molecular scale, it means fostering tonic rather than toxic relations—forming bonds sustained by care rather than coercion or conformity.
At the molar scale, it requires reconfiguring how we distribute resources and responsibilities—spreading vulnerabilities across our networks so that no single individual or group can be easily singled out as a weak link or vital node for Empire to capture and exploit.
And survival is not enough. We must learn to thrive in ways that Empire cannot capture—sustaining ourselves and one another in festive wayswhile rendering Empire increasingly incapable of sustaining itself.
Thriving in the midst of, and in apposition to, Empire requires more than resistance—it requires the careful composition of alternative infrastructures: systems that can hold life, distribute care, sustain refusal, and enable collective and festive modes of endurance. Not static blueprints or abstract utopias, but vital adaptations and mutations—built under pressure, in motion, often in secret, and always in relation. Forged not just in opposition to Empire, but in commitment to each other.
