Deep Response is about polycrisis response beginning (but not ending!) at the personal level. It’s the personal project of me, Tyler Disney.
Deep Response: An Emergency Education in Post-Consumer Praxis is my first book. It explains my own struggle to figure out what to do about it all, why my initial attempts to make a dent in the ‘problem’ fizzled, and how I turned things around. It’s heavy on the philosophy and reasoning of Deep Response, while giving an overview of the “how-to”. You can read the first chapter here.
I’m now writing a Deep Response Handbook in three volumes. I intend to go into as much depth as I can in terms of pragmatic how-to information for those interested.
- Volume I: The Crowbar Protocol is about getting immediate relief, carving out some personal autonomy, and beginning the process of getting your own oxygen mask on.
- Volume II: Ruggedization is about developing polymathic skills, learning to evaluate the relationship between activities in your life, and pareto decoupling and buffering your life from the logistics of industrial consumer capitalist society.
- Volume III: Coherence is about tying everything together into a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. It finishes the work of systems thinking begun in volume II and aligns all of the moving parts of your lifestyle with your values and goals, while maintaining a fluid dynamic equilibrium that is agile and adaptive to unfolding circumstances.
The end of volume 3 is only the beginning. Deep Response is very much not about exalting individualistic approaches. It acknowledges that the work of cultivating the successor societies that are arising out of the ruins of the current arrangement begin within each of us.
Deep Response doesn’t insist that the work should or ought to begin on an individual basis. That’s just the approach that worked to get me going because I live in an isolated and individualistic society. If I happened to live within a more group/community oriented web of deep reciprocal relationships, I would have started there.
But I don’t. And that’s part of the predicament we’re here for, isn’t it?
Deep Response doesn’t berate you for not being born into a functional community. It meets you where you are at (assuming you too live an isolated individualistic life) and suggests a way forward, one step at a time.