What RORBT Is
A protocol for organizing without permission—cheap to run, expensive to surveil, structurally impossible to co-opt. Not an app. Not a union. A set of rules.
RORBT is a way for ordinary people to organize against the people who own everything—without asking permission, without a boss, and without handing the guest list to a platform that will sell you out the first time the cops ask nicely. It is not an app you log into. It’s a protocol: a small set of rules for how groups of people who trust each other govern themselves, coordinate, and keep power from calcifying.
The software is just a convenient delivery mechanism. The rules can run on a phone, on a piece of paper, or on a mesh network when they shut the internet off.
Why it exists
Productivity has climbed for forty years. Your paycheck didn’t. The gap between what working people produce and what they’re paid didn’t evaporate—it got vacuumed upstairs into buybacks, yachts, and campaign checks.
The tools we’re handed to fight back are owned by the same people we’re fighting. Organize on Facebook, in an employer’s Slack, or in a Google Sheet, and you’ve invited the opposition into the room. The metadata alone is a map of who trusts whom—ready to be subpoenaed, leaked, or sold. You cannot build a counterweight out of the boss’s surveillance equipment.
The three promises
- Cheap to organize. No dues skimmed by a bureaucracy, no SaaS subscription, no consultant class. The protocol costs almost nothing to run.
- Expensive to surveil. No real names, no telemetry, no central list. The server is deaf—it routes messages between hashes and can’t read who you are or what you said.
- Impossible to co-opt. Roles rotate, decisions are logged, money needs two signatures, and anyone can be recalled. There’s no permanent throne to capture and no owner to buy out.
Who this is for
Both halves of the same fight:
- Organizers—the person in the break room who finally says “are you getting screwed too?” Start in Organizing.
- Builders—the person who wants to read the threat model, run their own relay, and verify the claims. Start in Build & Self-Host.
You don’t have to pick a side of that line. Use the audience filter at the top of the sidebar to show only your path—or read across the bridge. New here? How these docs work.
We’re not asking for a seat at their table. We’re building a new one, in a room they can’t find, with people we actually trust.