How to Master the Disaster? (tdf2026)

The world breaks apart, but good news are: Anarchists & activists are better prepared for doomsday than we might think. We are familiar with the absence of command-lines and a lack of resources. In countless campaigns, mobilisations & mass actions, we´ve learned to abandon micromanagement & to trust our fellow activists. We´ve learned to organize and to get everyone a task that fits their capabilities. We will talk about strategies to navigate the chaos and what official disaster response structures can learn from social movements - and furthermore: Why software developers and other nerds might be a catalyst to scale up these strategies. Both, Berlin and New York were hit by disasters this winter. New York by a blizzard, Berlin by a blackout. the Mayors of both cities were immediately hands on. Kai Wegner, Mayor of Berlin took a tennis racket and developed excuses, when bottlenecks within the pyramidal organised disaster response led to embarrassing failure; Zohran Mamdani, mayor of New York, took a snow shovel himself and invited everyone to join and clear necessary infrastructure from snow, in a grassroots styled and decentralised response. Everyone could get a shovel and everyone would be payed. This and other examples show, how strategies, activists are using to organise social movements, could also work out to master the disaster of any kind. This is not only good for doomsday, but we can deviate strategies how to prevent it. Its not a coincidence that the fire brigade and socialism both are associated with red colour. Let´s not leave the blue lights to the cops, lets grab the chance and the shovels and become disaster responders. Licensed to the public under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ about this event: https://cfp.cttue.de/tdf5/talk/AKYVCK/