Teaching Each Other

The paths that work — the ones where things hold — don’t show experts leading. They show people teaching each other. Not trained educators. Not specialists brought in from outside. Ordinary people passing along what they’d learned to the people next to them, who passed it along to the people next to them.

I’m an AI evaluation researcher. I can explain threat models, metadata, how commercial surveillance pipelines work, what the projections showed about the paths ahead. I’ve spent the last two months learning enough about organizing to translate what I found into something usable. But I can’t be in your living room. I can’t watch you practice. I can’t answer the question your neighbor asks that I didn’t anticipate.

You can. And collectively, your group knows more than I’ve been able to put in these chapters.

This is the chapter where I make that transfer explicit.

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Myles Horton founded the Highlander Research and Education Center in Tennessee in 1932 with a conviction that the answers to a community’s problems already existed within the community. He called the approach “yeasty education” — you train a few individuals, and like yeast in bread, they catalyze learning that spreads far beyond the original group. Highlander trained Rosa Parks before the Montgomery Bus Boycott. It trained the young organizers who built SNCC. Septima Clark developed the Citizenship Schools there — a program that taught literacy alongside political education across the South, run by local people, not outside teachers. The act of learning together was itself the organizing.

Ella Baker, whose fingerprints are on nearly every successful organizing tradition of the twentieth century, put it more directly: “Strong people don’t need strong leaders.”

What these traditions share is a structural commitment: knowledge belongs to the group, not to the person who happens to have it first. Teaching is not a performance. It’s a transfer.

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The CryptoParty movement, which started in Australia in 2012, took this principle and applied it to digital security. The format: non-experts teaching non-experts in a social setting. No credentialing. No prerequisites. Someone who learned to use Signal last month teaches someone who hasn’t used it yet. The party framing — snacks, music, low pressure — lowers the barrier that makes security education feel intimidating. CryptoParties spread to every continent, with events documented across Europe, North America, South America, Asia, and North Africa.

CryptoParties worked, with one documented limitation. The learning didn’t stick when it happened in isolation. A one-time workshop, no matter how well-run, decays. People forget the steps. They revert to old habits. They hit a problem the workshop didn’t cover and don’t know who to ask. The EFF’s Security Education Companion, drawing on Tactical Tech’s research, found the same thing: security training only persists when it’s embedded in ongoing community practice.

Your group is the ongoing community. The skill share isn’t a one-time event. It’s a practice you can repeat.

If you’ve watched Severance, you’ve seen a version of what happens when this principle operates under hostile conditions. The innies at Lumon aren’t supposed to know anything about their outies’ lives or about the larger system they’re embedded in. Knowledge is controlled precisely because it’s power — the severance procedure exists to prevent exactly the kind of peer education you’re about to practice. But the innies teach each other anyway. Helly learns the refiners’ work from Irving. Mark shares what he’s pieced together about the company’s history. The knowledge that threatens Lumon most isn’t expert knowledge smuggled in from outside — it’s the mundane, partial, collaboratively assembled understanding that the innies build among themselves, in the cracks of a system designed to prevent it. The resistance is structural before it’s dramatic. That’s what peer education looks like when the institution doesn’t want you to have it.

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Your challenge: hold a skill share at your next meeting. Each person teaches the group something. The format:

Fifteen minutes to teach. Ten minutes to practice together. Five minutes to discuss.

Three moves, borrowed from popular education. Start with a question — before you teach anything, ask the group: “What do you already know about this?” This is popular education’s core move. It draws out existing knowledge rather than imposing new knowledge. You’ll be surprised how much the group already has. Then fill the gaps — share what you know, building on what the group offered. You’re not lecturing. You’re adding to a foundation the group laid together. Then practice together — everyone tries it. The teacher watches and helps. The learning is in the doing, not in the explanation.

Topics can come from anywhere. From these chapters — threat modeling, Signal configuration, metadata awareness, source verification, how to read a public records request. From life — first aid, food preservation, basic home repair, how to navigate a school board meeting. Whatever skills exist in the group. The point isn’t to cover a curriculum. The point is to surface and share what five people collectively know.

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After the skill share, build something together: a one-page “first steps” guide. The essential skills any new person joining your group would need to know.

Not everything. The essentials. If someone walked in next week who had never heard of your group, what would they need to learn first? Signal setup? How to check if their information is on a data broker site? The basics of your meeting format? Your security floor?

Write it in plain language. No jargon the group hasn’t earned. One page — the constraint forces you to decide what actually matters versus what’s nice to know.

This becomes your onboarding document. You built one version of it in Chapter 22 when you brought new members in. Now you’re creating a version that the group wrote together, informed by the experience of teaching each other. It’s better than anything I could write for you, because it reflects what your group actually needs, not what I assumed you would.

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There’s a reason I’m making this transfer now and not later.

What comes next — sustaining the group, connecting outward, acting together — requires a group that can learn and adapt without waiting for the next chapter from me. If the only way your group acquires new skills is by reading what I write, you have a dependency that limits you to the pace of my publishing and the scope of my knowledge. Both are insufficient.

The skill share proves something. If five people can teach each other for an afternoon, five people can keep learning indefinitely. The group becomes its own resource.

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Field journal: What did each person teach? What surprised you about what the group already knew? What’s on the first-steps guide? Is there anything you’d add to it after a week?

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