A field manual for showing up in the conversation... whether the person in front of you is curious, defensive, theory-trapped, credentialing at you, working inside the system you want to dismantle, sharpening with you as a peer, performing bad faith, or already chewed up by the same machine you're naming. Built from the substrate of years of streams, field notes, anonymized arguments and conversations. This is NOT A SCRIPT. It is a vocabulary of named moves and the principles that govern which one to reach for.
A toolkit for talking to people. Mostly online, but the moves work in real life too. It’s designed for people who want to engage with others but don’t have decades of theater, debate, organizing, streaming, and practice to draw on.
Its not a script. Not a flowchart you follow until you “win.” Not a guarantee that any given move will work on any given person. Not a tool for “destroying” anyone, and not a license to feel superior for having read it. The first encounter is not the full conversion…it’s an on-ramp, a pattern interrupt, a seed planted, not the finished journey. People change minds over time, not in single conversations. Plan accordingly.
There is no Windows operating system for human beings. Every person you engage with is running custom firmware… shaped by their specific history, labor, region, faith background, family, body, trauma, and the algorithms they consume. People don’t tend to accept the same argument the same way. The same move that opens one person closes another. The catalog of 60-plus moves below is not a set of weapons to deploy at-will; it’s a vocabulary you reach into after reading the firmware in front of you. If you internalize nothing else from this toolkit, internalize this. The catalog is useless without it.
Read the Custom Firmware Principle in the handbook for the full treatment.
Seventeen principles underneath every move in the catalog. Read them once before you reach for any technique. Most have full treatment in the handbook; the meta-principle (Custom Firmware) gets its own essay.
Built from real conversations I’ve had: a defensive Christian nationalist, a young troll algorithmically radicalized into casual reactionary content, a credentialed conservative who claimed eight years of psychology study and produced calibration files instead of evidence, three young people in different states of seeking (an academic with a homework prompt, a young evangelical, a sympathetic newcomer), two peer anarchists in tactical discussion, a moderate Democrat aspiring politician in a five-hour exchange, a neo-nazi, a former soldier who arrived at anti-system analysis through being chewed up by the system itself and so many more have contributed to the making of this. All anonymized as scenario descriptors … no real names appear here.
Plus field notes in total about 187,000 words worth across multiple years. Synthesized into the principles, scenarios, families, and moves you see here.
The pathological-bad-faith scenario (Scenario 8, dark-tetrad territory) is not represented with transcripts because I don’t carry those conversations to air. They stay in chat. The leg-sweep family (Family J) in this toolkit draws on notes, brainstorming, and memory rather than on a worked example. If you ever see me pattern-name a real dark-tetrad actor on stream, that’s what it’s about and for.
The full longform. Foundation principles, the Custom Firmware essay, the nine scenarios with their dialogue-tree patterns, every move family with summaries, the leg-sweep section with its callout, the vocabulary table. Read this end to end before deploying anything.
Triage in real time. Three to five questions about who you're engaging with, output is the matching scenario, the dialogue-tree pattern for it, and the relevant move cards.
The full catalog of 60 named rhetorical moves I use across 11 families. Each card carries the description, when to deploy, when NOT to deploy, and one or two worked examples lifted verbatim from real conversations. Filterable by family, scenario, and vocabulary. The reference layer.
Forty-plus phrases that appear throughout the toolkit as named techniques. Make a sandwich, no project of projects, tentpoles, sweep the leg, lost in the sauce, hive mind, custom firmware, willing to know the worst. Reference table at the bottom of the handbook.
Start with the handbook. The picker is for the moment you're already in a conversation and need a quick triage. The moves page is the reference layer you'll come back to. None of this replaces practice. Talk to people. Get it wrong sometimes. Update.
