Bypassing the State: Parallel Polis and Parallel Pols

Part 3 in the series - following on from Bypassing the State: DIY and Bypassing the State - Energy, Water, Data & Transport

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The previous posts set out a series of ordinary, practical responses to infrastructure pricing that has drifted away from value delivery. Across energy, water, data and transport the same pattern appeared. Costs rose not because marginal supply became expensive but because historic failure, deferred maintenance and regulatory accretion had to be funded. Monopoly structures blocked competitive exit. Individuals responded not with protest but with calculation. Systems were used where they still made sense and bypassed where they did not.

At this point it becomes necessary to ask what sort of behaviour this actually is. Are these merely disconnected workarounds, or do they represent a more general response to how modern states now price participation in essential systems? There is already a concept that appears, at first glance, to describe something similar. It is worth examining precisely because the resemblance is incomplete.

The Original: Parallel Polis

The idea of the Parallel Polis was developed by Václav Benda in late communist Czechoslovakia in 1978. It described the deliberate construction of parallel cultural, social and economic structures that allowed citizens to live truthfully outside an illegitimate state. These parallel institutions were explicitly political. They were acts of resistance grounded in ethics, solidarity and conscious withdrawal. Participants accepted inconvenience, legal risk and higher cost because the objective was moral autonomy rather than efficiency.

That historical context matters. Parallel Polis assumed a state whose claims to legitimacy were actively rejected. Participation in official systems was itself political. Non-participation was a statement. The parallel structures that emerged were fragile, heroic and necessarily limited in scale because they required belief, sacrifice and coordination. They persisted because people were willing to pay a price for meaning.

What’s Happening Now Is Different

What is emerging now does not fit that description. The individuals installing backup generation, pricing boreholes, bypassing last-mile data monopolies or structuring journeys to minimise territorial charges are not rejecting the state’s legitimacy. They are not attempting to live outside society or to prefigure an alternative moral order. Most remain broadly compliant where systems still deliver value. Their behaviour is selective rather than oppositional.

The difference is structural. Parallel Polis required sacrifice, where they accepted higher costs and legal risk for moral autonomy. What’s happening now requires only calculation. When private electricity generation costs 22 pence per kilowatt hour and grid costs 27.69 pence, bypass doesn’t feel political. It feels like financial literacy. When a shared borehole hits payback in 3.7 years but sharing is prohibited, the decision to route around the monopoly does not require ideology. It requires only arithmetic and a willingness to read the regulations carefully.

This distinction matters because it determines how behaviour spreads. A practice that requires belief spreads slowly and remains bounded by identity. A practice that requires only maths spreads as far as spreadsheets can travel. No shared narrative is needed. No organisation has to be built. Each participant arrives independently at the same conclusion because they are responding to the same prices, the same definitions and the same regulatory thresholds.

How the State Encounters the Problem

Parallel Polis could be framed as dissidence and suppressed accordingly. What is happening here is harder to categorise. The individual is not refusing to comply, they are complying with the rules as written, often more carefully than intended. Shed-mounted solar arrays exist because permitted development guidance allows them. Vehicle-to-home batteries operate because cars are regulated differently from stationary storage. Offshore ticketing constructions work because jurisdiction is defined geometrically rather than functionally.

This behaviour does not announce itself as a movement. It has no slogans and no leaders. It rarely recognises itself as such. From the outside it looks like a series of sensible decisions made by people managing risk in systems that have demonstrated fragility. From the inside it feels like prudence rather than protest. That lack of self-consciousness is central to its ability to spread.

Parallel Pols: A Different Name for Different Behaviour

For this reason it is a mistake to stretch the Parallel Polis concept to cover what is happening now. Doing so obscures the most important feature of the phenomenon, which is that it scales precisely because it is uninterested in meaning. People are not building parallel structures to live more truthfully. They are building them to pay less, to avoid outages and to stop absorbing costs created by failures they did not cause.

This difference warrants a different name. The behaviour described here is not a parallel polis in the original sense. It arises from pricing signals rather than ideology and from arithmetic rather than ethics. I will call it Parallel Pols, partly as wordplay on my own pseudonym and partly because it captures something deliberately unromantic.

Where Parallel Polis carries connotations of heroism, sacrifice and moral witness, Parallel Pols sounds mundane, almost cynical. That is intentional. There is nothing noble about running a diesel generator to undercut the grid, nothing inspiring about exploiting planning loopholes, nothing heroic about treating infrastructure participation as a conditional commercial decision. Parallel Pols are not constructed to stand apart from the system. They are constructed because the system has stopped making numerical sense. The structures may resemble one another. The incentives do not.

The Precedent Already Exists

There is a useful comparison that makes this easier to recognise. Wealthy individuals have long responded to punitive or incoherent pricing by leaving altogether. They change tax residence, restructure assets or simply spend less time within jurisdictions whose demands no longer match what they offer. That behaviour is rarely framed as ideological. It is described as prudent. Nobody writes essays about the moral courage of Monaco residents.

The pattern is already visible closer to home. Private security patrols operate in wealthier residential areas of London while police response times stretch to hours in others. Gated developments employ their own staff. Ring doorbells and private CCTV networks supplement or replace reliance on state surveillance and response. No one frames this as dissent from the state’s monopoly on security. It is framed as sensible risk management. South Africa shows the same traits in electricity provision. Eskom’s load-shedding forced middle-class households to install solar, batteries and generators as standard. What began as emergency provision became permanent parallel infrastructure.

Parallel Pols apply the same logic domestically rather than geographically. Instead of moving bodies across borders, people move functions outside systems. Energy generation, water supply, data access, security provision and transport pricing are rerouted in place. The exit is local, incremental and largely invisible to migration statistics, yet the underlying calculation is identical. The threshold question is the same: does participation still cost less than alternatives?

What is new is accessibility. Global exit has always required capital, advisers and mobility. Functional exit now requires little more than consumer hardware, planning definitions and the willingness to read the small print. A £20,000 borehole shared among ten households is not Monaco. It is a spreadsheet that adds up differently than it did five years ago. That is why Parallel Pols spread without organisation and without overt conflict. They do not need a manifesto. They need only persistent mispricing.

The Implications Are Structural

States reliant on monopoly provision assume passive participation. They assume that usage follows from citizenship and that prices can be adjusted to recover accumulated costs without provoking exit. Parallel Pols demonstrate that this assumption no longer holds. Once alternatives fall within domestic reach, participation becomes conditional. Systems designed around captive demand find themselves competing not with other providers but with kit lists and screwdrivers.

The state could, of course, attempt to tax generators, ban boreholes, or regulate battery storage more heavily. But doing so transforms quiet exit into political opposition. Currently those who bypass do so privately and remain broadly compliant. Force them to participate in systems they have already calculated make no sense and they become organised complainants. The state’s actual choice is not between permitting bypass or preventing it. It is between tolerating private exit or creating loud, middle-class political resistance. Most choose the former.

None of this requires hostility toward shared infrastructure. It requires only repeated evidence that participation now involves absorbing risks and costs that no longer correspond to current service delivery. When South East Water leaks 104.8 million litres per day while charging customers for wastewater treatment of water that never enters the sewer, the response is not anger. It is calculation. When grid electricity includes renewable obligations, smart meter rollout costs and decades of deferred maintenance, the generator stops being extravagant and becomes sensible. When that happens people stop arguing and start adjusting.

Those adjustments do not need to be coordinated to become structural. They need only to be repeated. Each household that installs backup generation validates the decision for the next. Each successful planning workaround gets documented and shared. Each community that discovers the regulatory threshold where cooperation becomes illegal learns exactly how far they can push before attracting attention. The knowledge spreads horizontally, peer to peer, through the same channels that spread any other practical information about managing household costs.

Not Rebellion, Not Reform

The original Parallel Polis was a response to an illegitimate state that demanded conformity. Parallel Pols are a response to pricing regimes that demand subsidy. The former was political by necessity. The latter is mechanical by design. Treating them as the same obscures why the newer form spreads more easily and why it is harder to suppress.

What emerges is not rebellion and not reform but exit without drama. Infrastructure is used where it still delivers value and bypassed where it does not. The generator runs when the grid is expensive. The borehole supplements when mains water is restricted. Starlink activates when broadband fails. The offshore coordinate processes when Air Passenger Duty exceeds the bypass cost. Each decision is local, rational and requires no permission beyond following the rules as written.

The state does not confront an enemy here. It confronts the sums, and the sums do not negotiate. When a monopoly prices to recover historical debt rather than deliver current value, when regulation blocks competitive exit at exactly the scale where alternatives become affordable, when definitional gaps permit bypass through technical reclassification, people will route around the obstacle. They do not need ideology to do this. They need only functioning spreadsheets and access to publicly available planning guidance.

That is what makes Parallel Pols different. They are not heroic. They are not fragile. They do not require sacrifice or belief. They require only that the price remain wrong long enough for the calculation to spread. And once it spreads, it does not reverse.

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The next post will wrap up the series by looking at government response and the bias towards phase change outcomes.