S1E1 - Kitty Stryker on Anarchist Prepping

Episode Notes

Kitty Stryker can be found on twitter at @kittystryker and at http://kittystryker.com/

Margaret Killjoy can be found on twitter at @magpiekilljoy and at http://www.birdsbeforethestorm.net/

The following transcript was provided by a comrade who wants to help us make this show more accessible:

S01E01 Kitty Stryker on Anarchist Prepping Live Like The World Is Dying

0:00:00.0# (Introductory music)

0:00:15.1# Margaret Killjoy: Hello and welcome to Live Like The World Is Dying; a podcast that explores life when it feels like the end times. I say "when it feels like the end times", and I’m gonna get into this more throughout various episodes of the podcast, because of course, the world is always ending. It’s always changing the status quo. Always shakes and changes, collapses, rebuilds, all of these things. So sometimes people roll their eyes when you talk about the world ending. And sometimes that makes sense, the world has ended in a lot of different ways. But... It sure feels like the world is ending right now to me and to... Maybe to you and maybe it will, maybe it won't. Obviously what it means for the world to end is a subjective thing. But it's a... It's a stress factor to say the least, on a lot of people's lives right now. Thinking about climate change and thinking about the... The rise of global fascism. So this is a podcast that's gonna explore... Well, how we can live while we feel like the world is dying. For myself and for this podcast I've found that I focus on four different priorities. I focus on living like the world is going to end and that I might not survive, living like the world is going to end and I can try to survive, living like we can prevent the end of the world, and of course, living like maybe the world isn't ending after all. So basically hedonism, prepping, revolution, and not burning all your bridges because... Who knows, the status quo might linger on after all. With this podcast I'm probably going to focus on the middle two of these priorities. I'm gonna focus on prepping and revolution. And I'm going to do that because... Well, I've always sort of wanted there to be more information and more... More going on about anarchist and leftist prepping. Because most of the prepping world is of course steeped in... Not just like right-wing politics, but also right-wing values and individualistic values and of course as an anarchist I believe in the balance between the individual and the community and because of that I don't believe in individualistic survival. I don't believe that the bunker mentality, which we're going to talk a lot of shit on in this podcast over the next couple episodes, is appropriate to most... To most threat models. So I'll be your host, but for the most part I'm going to interview people who know a lot more about a lot of this stuff than me. As for me, I am a prepper I suppose on some level. I keep a small stockpile food. Dried food in 5 gallon buckets in case there's an interruption in... Well, food supplies. I make sure I know where water filtration is. I also keep a to-go bag and... At my house. And I keep another one in my car that's much smaller. Neither of these are a particularly elaborate. They're... They're fairly simple things I put together. And that's... That's more for my own mental welfare than it is like any immediate expectation of crisis. And I also... I live off grid. Which is not something that I'm gonna specifically advocate that anyone else do. I actually live off grid because it just sort of meets my needs here and now in terms of how I like to live. I live about half an hour away from a small city in a cabin I built myself in the woods because I like doing that. I like living that way. I'm an anarchist and that's going to certainly bleed over into the content of this show. I believe in a world without course of hierarchies like the state or capitalism or white supremacy or heteronormativity or... Or any of the intersecting oppressions and hierarchies that rule the world that shouldn't. And so of course, a lot of my... I tell you this because I want you to know my biases because I want you to come to your own conclusions. I have a bias against state and federal aid. I tend to find it to be wildly inefficient. I'm far more interested in creating a society based on mutual aid. And so... And I find agency to be wildly important. I find it very important for us to encourage each other to have agency and so I'm interested in disaster relief or crisis preparation or whatever, that maximizes individual agency, that maximize community agency and... Yeah, that's what's interesting to me so that's what I'm going to be focusing on more. This first episode, our guest is Kitty Stryker who I can let introduce herself. Thanks so much for listening.

0:05:01.9# (Musical transition)

0:05:06.5# Margaret: So today our guest is Kitty Stryker. Well actually, do you want to introduce yourself with your name and pronouns and kind of any political or organizational affiliation you feel like shouting out.

0:05:21.4# Kitty Stryker: Sure. I'm Kitty Stryker, I use she/her pronouns. I'm a... I identify myself as a leftist doomsday prepper. But I'm more of a like... Emergency prepper, street medic. I work with Struggle Of Circus, which is a of bunches of leftists and other sort of radical political groups and a bunch of juggalos coming together to help out at protests and usually do medic related stuff but also be kind of a meat wall around marginalized communities. I identify as an anarchist and... Yeah, I guess I just found it really interesting that when I was looking for communities of leftist to talk to about prepping, there wasn't anything there.

0:06:15.5# Margaret: Yeah that was... I think we ended up kind of finding each other through a similar... I don't actually remember how we first ended up talking about it. Maybe you do. But we've been, for anyone who's listening, Kitty and I have been talking vaguely about how we needed to do something about this... This lack of...

0:06:34.2# Kitty: Lack of information, yeah.

0:06:35.9# Margaret: Yeah. Because so much of the information that's out there about prepping is not really applicable, well, to anyone realistically. But certainly not necessarily applicable to people whose ideology isn't "fuck you, I've got mine", you know? So...

0:06:53.5# Kitty: Right and I think... And it could be actively hostile in forums and stuff. Like places that you wanna go to ask for information and ask for advice become really hostile when people are talking about how much they want to kill antifa or of like... "I can't wait til the race war". It's not really a very comfortable place to ask questions about fortifications.

0:07:19.5# Margaret: Yeah. That makes sense. So why don't we start by kind of talking about the general conception of preparedness and kind of what is leftist or anarchist prepping or preparedness. As... At least as you can conceive it.

0:07:37.7# Kitty: Sure, well, so for me I grew up with parents who are sort of like... Suburban homesteader types, with a mixture of prepping. But are also hoarders so while they have everything you would need in an apocalypse you also wouldn't necessarily be able to find it. So I kinda grew up with the hoarding tendency that they think comes with a lot of prepping. You wanna have lots of things that seemed very important. But also this desire to try to make it organized and make it easily accessible. I realized fairly quickly that while I'm more of a stay-in-place kind of prepper and sort of emergency preparedness person, I also will potentially