Nat La Pirate: There Is No Straight Line. Adapt or Die.
Updated: 5 days ago
The strange thing about a life story is that it becomes much tidier once you tell it backward.
You can connect the moments.
The people.
The mistakes.
The pivots.
The things that looked completely unrelated while they were happening.
Suddenly, there is a thread. But while you're living it? Not so much.
Ask Nat La Pirate.
Listen to the episode:
There is no obvious straight line connecting a tomboy growing up between cultures in Quebec, a teenage organizer, a martial artist, a theatre student, a factory worker, an elite banker, an Anonymous activist, a political campaigner, an entrepreneur, a digital strategist and a founding member of The Red Tent Collective.
And yet every one of those women is the same woman.
In this episode of Red Tent Storytellers, Nat finally lets Peeja and Hazel Moon Audio turn the microphone around.
The woman who normally solves everyone else's problems has to tell her own story.
A Mutt Named Nat
Nat calls herself a proud mutt.
Her family story crosses Italy, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and Canada.
Growing up on Montreal's South Shore meant living between identities. She wasn't quite French enough for the French kids, Arab enough for the Arabs or Italian enough for the Italians.
She was also a tomboy.
So, as she puts it, she wasn't always "girl enough" for the girls either.
Nat tells more of that family history herself in A Mutt Named Nat.
Being between groups taught her something she would use repeatedly later in life: how to become a chameleon without completely disappearing.
She learned to talk to different people.
To spot the person standing outside the group.
To recognize patterns.
And to become the glue.
But it didn't come without damage.
The Sentence That Changed Everything
Nat speaks candidly about bullying, isolation and self-harm during adolescence.
Then one day she noticed words from Eleanor Roosevelt that had been sitting at the top of her school's stairs all along:
No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.
She had walked past them before.
This time, they landed.
Nat describes that moment as a dividing line. Something shifted in the way she understood the people hurting her and the power she was giving them.
But when asked who she truly admired growing up, she doesn't begin with Eleanor Roosevelt.
She begins with the women she knew.
Her mother.
Her great-aunt.
Her mother's closest friend.
Women who fought when something needed fighting.
Women who protected family.
Women who showed up.
Before activism ever became part of Nat's vocabulary, she had already watched it happen at home.
Jiu-Jitsu, Judo and Learning Not to Be Helpless
Her mother also enrolled her in martial arts.
Nat trained in jiu-jitsu and later judo, reaching her green belt while still young. It would become another small piece of a much larger philosophy.
Learn the tools.
Understand what you're capable of.
Don't voluntarily make yourself helpless.
That same principle now appears when Nat talks about technology.
The tool has changed.
The underlying instinct hasn't.
Her First Campaign Had Nothing to Do With the Internet
Nat was an athlete in high school and had ambitions connected to badminton when a teachers' labour dispute eliminated extracurricular activities.
"It's 1999. Our time to shine. Who's da boss?"
A sentence from Nat's yearbook entry.
She was furious.
So she organized.
A walkout followed, involving roughly two thousand students by Nat's recollection.
No political consultant beyond her own mom.
No sophisticated software.
No carefully engineered personal brand.
Just a teenager who believed something was wrong and decided complaining about it privately wasn't enough.
It's a pattern that will reappear throughout this story.
From Banking to the Streets
Nat's early professional life was hardly the résumé you would predict for someone who would eventually build technology stacks and digital strategies.
There was factory work.
There was theatre.
There was banking.
After leaving an abusive relationship in her twenties, Nat walked into a Royal Bank of Canada branch with her résumé and essentially told the manager she wanted a job.
She got one.
Eventually, she became an elite banker working with small and medium-sized businesses.
That experience left her with a lasting fascination with entrepreneurship and the role smaller businesses play in an economy.
Then, around 29, the conventional path ended.
Nat left banking.
The stable career, benefits and retirement plan went with it.
What came next was chaos.
Productive chaos, eventually.
But chaos nonetheless.
Enter Anonymous
Nat had become fascinated by the early Anonymous movement and internet activism. Before they even had the name.
This was the era before the mechanisms behind social virality became dinner-table conversation. The internet was rapidly becoming a political battleground, but most people still understood social platforms as places to post things rather than engineered systems capable of directing enormous amounts of human attention.
Then Nat met someone who changed her understanding of those systems.
The full story is considerably stranger than a paragraph can capture.
She tells it in That Time I Harbored a Fugitive.
The short version?
A fugitive associated with the early Anonymous movement ended up staying with Nat and 2 other friends in a huge 5 1/2 in Hochelaga Maisonneuve, Montreal, Qc, Canada. If you know anything about 'hochelag' (for english readers: the ch is pronounced "sh" in French). That meant they were living as a commune and heating with the oven because of frozen pipes. Nat was stealing Tuna - and honing in on new skills.
What followed was an education in digital campaigns, distributed networks, and algorithms.
It also contributed to the creation of the original Anonymous Quebec.
And yes, Nat's old Anonymous-era Vimeo archive still exists.
Most of those videos were made or edited by Nat herself. The editing skill had started much more innocently. She had originally learned the basics while fixing and assembling vacation footage after her mother travelled to Cuba.
Because, again:
There is no straight line.
Learning How Virality Actually Works
This period changed the direction of Nat's life. She began learning that online virality wasn't merely the magical moment when everybody suddenly liked something.
Systems were watching.
Algorithms were measuring.
Volume mattered.
Timing mattered.
Concentration mattered.
Language mattered.
Hashtags mattered.
And coordinated human behaviour could create a signal strong enough for machines, journalists and eventually the broader public to notice.
Nat and the people around her began putting those ideas into practice.
Campaigns escaped the internet and entered traditional media.
That was the revelation.
Headline from the NY Times: Canada: Montreal to Dump Sewage Into River During Repair Work Snapshot from Reuters: Montreal begins controversial sewage dump into St. Lawrence Rivr Snap some from MACLEAN'S, Canadian Forbes: Newsmakers 2015: The Year in #hashtags Snapshot from Global News Canada: 9 of Quebec's biggest political stories of 2015
Digital communication could produce real-world pressure.
Her activism extended into national movements, including #ShutdownCanada, which brought her into contact with Vice News.
The archived material from that period includes Nat's Vice News work and interview connected to Occupy Viger Square.
The issues, political alliances and movements would change over time.
The strategic lesson did not.
If you understand how information spreads, a small group can become much louder than its size suggests.
Bill C-51
Nat also became deeply involved in opposition to Canada's Bill C-51, controversial national security legislation introduced under Stephen Harper's government.
Her campaign work from that period is preserved in System Change, Not Climate Change, her Bill C-51 media archive.
She describes participating in a peaceful action intended to send a message to Canada's Senate and later encountering the much rougher side of protest policing.
Those experiences changed her.
So did watching activist movements themselves change.
When Movements Lose the Plot
Nat's political history doesn't fit comfortably inside today's tribal categories. She marched alongside people who would later become associated with Antifa. Back then, she describes the fights as being about things like the Five Eyes surveillance alliance, banking, economic power and civil liberties.
Over time, something changed.
Activist organizations became territorial.
Egos grew.
Groups supposedly pursuing similar goals fought over ownership, visibility and control.
Nat gives the example of homeless outreach organizations competing over locations rather than coordinating coverage so vulnerable people could receive help throughout the week.
To her, it represented the moment the mission became secondary to the organization.
That was anathema.
And when the movement moved somewhere she didn't want to follow, she left. The departure came with consequences.
Nat describes harassment campaigns, fake orders sent to her home, a prostitute being falsely dispatched to her address, and police eventually appearing outside. She preserves another deeply disturbing encounter involving police and a stalker in this audio archive.
The experience reinforced something she would carry into future organizing:
Large movements become extremely difficult to control.
People matter more than brands.
And no mission is immune to ego.
That Time Her Former Teacher Became Prime Minister
Nat's political story contains one especially surreal subplot.
Justin Trudeau had been one of her teachers during his internship at Centennial Regional High School.
Yes.
That Justin Trudeau.
Nat remembers Trudeau leading a riddle club and even performing an unusual gymnastics move on a desk, an anecdote that became considerably stranger years later when an animated Trudeau performed the extact same stunt on The Simpsons.
Nat tells the full story in Did The Simpsons Get Trudeau Right?.
Years after high school, Trudeau was Prime Minister of Canada.
Then his convoy happened to stop near Nat's home.
She went outside.
There was a brief nostalgic exchange.
Then she asked her former teacher the question she actually wanted answered:
What is a woman?
The confrontation was subsequently shared through The Red Tent and became part of Nat's growing archive of women's-rights campaigning.
You can also see Nat's earlier mainstream media work in her CTV interview archive.
The Medical Experience That Changed the Fight
Nat's involvement in women's rights did not begin with The Red Tent Collective.
One of the major catalysts was intensely personal.
Nat experienced serious gynecological problems beginning young, eventually undergoing multiple procedures and losing one fallopian tube.
She also underwent a course of depot leuprolide, commonly known by the brand Lupron, as part of an attempt to address fertility-related problems.
She describes six months of profound physical and psychological side effects. Years later, she discovered the same medication being discussed and prescribed in the context of suppressing puberty in children.
Her reaction was immediate.
They're giving what to kids?
For Nat, this was not an abstract policy debate.
She knew what the drug had done to her adult body.
Her account of the experience is preserved in Why My Dr. Refused to Operate on My Tits. The discovery became one of the events that moved her from watching the sex and gender debate to becoming actively involved in it.
The Red Tent Comes Out of the Gate
Eventually, Nat found a group of women online who were talking about these issues.
Then a small group splintered away.
The first instinct was not:
Let's build another organization.
It was:
There are women in there with valuable skills. When they realize what we've realized, where will they go?
The earliest working idea was something of a refuge.
A place women could land.
Then the name arrived:
The Red Tent Collective.
And almost immediately, the fledgling group did something that would define its attitude toward organizing.
It went federal.
One of The Red Tent Collective's earliest major actions was Canadian federal petition E-4518, adapted from a successful UK petition and sponsored in Parliament by MP Dr. Leslyn Lewis.
No years of committee meetings.
No waiting until everything looked perfect.
The group came out of the gate with a federal petition.
In many ways, The Red Tent was born that day.
The Postcard That Defined the Mission
The petition showed the women they could organize.
A postcard showed them why Red Tent needed to exist.
Peeja and Carol Bamford were discussing a postcard campaign during an X Space.
Nat loved the idea.
Then she saw the file.
It was a large JPEG.
For a designer, that isn't necessarily a problem.
For a woman who just wants to participate in a campaign and print some postcards?
It can become the reason she gives up.
Nat converted the artwork into a print-ready PDF, optimized the layout, added instructions and made it downloadable from the Red Tent's shop.
The campaign generated more than 2,300 downloads.
That was the light bulb.
Women were not necessarily lacking motivation.
They were encountering technical friction.
Fix the friction and more women can act.
That concept would become one of the Red Tent's defining functions.
Don't Reinvent the Wheel. Connect It.
There were already organizations doing essential work.
There were campaigners. Researchers. Authors. Social workers. Broadcasters. Grassroots groups.
They didn't need another organization arriving to announce that it would now do everyone's job.
They needed infrastructure.
Amplification.
Connections.
Technology.
Nat describes The Red Tent as glue.
That distinction matters.
The Collective can help a woman turn a campaign into something printable. Help an organization establish an independent website. Turn a recorded conversation into searchable content. Help activists understand amplification. Give women a place to continue communicating if a social platform disappears. Archive stories so they cannot simply vanish with a suspended account.
It isn't about replacing the pieces.
It's about making the pieces stronger together.
Nothing Online Is Truly Organic
Nat's years inside digital activism left her with a phrase she repeats throughout the conversation:
In the world of algorithms, nothing is organic.
Our social feeds may feel spontaneous.
They are not.
Ranking systems determine what appears. Recommendation engines identify what keeps us engaged. Advertising systems build profiles. Professional marketing organizations create networks of accounts and content designed to dominate particular conversations. Search engines decide what receives authority.
Now generative AI systems are becoming another gateway to information.
That asymmetry concerns Nat.
A multimillion-dollar organization can hire specialists to build a network of optimized websites, media accounts, content and backlinks.
A grassroots group may have more compelling evidence and still be virtually invisible. The answer isn't to pretend technology doesn't matter.
It is to learn how to use it.
Adapt or Die
That brings us to perhaps the most important forward-looking idea in the episode.
Adapt or die.
It is the current title of the Keynote talk Nat recently delivered to women at the Women's Wealth & Wellness Summit about the future of wealth in the age of artificial intelligence.
The language is intentionally uncomfortable.
Her point is not that every woman should learn programming.
It is that women cannot voluntarily sit out a technological revolution and then be surprised when we have little influence over the structures created during it.
AI is already affecting:
search
marketing
customer service
procurement
research
administration
writing
education
sales
analytics
software development
creative work
entrepreneurship
The question is no longer whether AI will affect women's work.
It already is. The question is whether women will be users, builders and decision-makers, or merely consumers of systems other people designed.
You Do Not Need to Become a Wizard
This is where Nat pushes back against one of the most damaging assumptions around technology.
Competence does not require mastery.
You do not have to know how to build an AI model.
You should probably understand what one can do.
You don't need to become a programmer.
You should understand how the technology supporting your business works.
You don't need to become a search-engine specialist.
You should know whether people can find you.
You don't need to become an advertising expert.
You should understand what happens to your data when you pay for traffic.
Technology is a tool.
Not learning every detail of a tool is reasonable.
Voluntarily refusing to learn how to use it at all is something else.
From Activist to Entrepreneur
Ironically, Nat's professional business was born directly from activism.
Someone involved in one of her campaigns eventually said what now seems obvious:
...people would pay you to do this.
Light bulb.
Nat assembled years of campaign work into a portfolio and began professionally studying the platforms she had previously learned through activism.
She pursued Meta's Blueprint training certification.
She learned paid advertising.
Website architecture.
Tracking.
Pixels.
Search.
Digital footprints.
And agency systems.
Then another problem appeared. Companies were selling fragmented services. One business controlled the website. Another controlled Facebook. Another handled Google. Someone else did advertising.
Nobody talked to one another.
Yet every one of those systems represented the same business to the outside world.
Nat thought that was ridiculous.
So she built something different.
TL;DR: We Do the Reading So You Don't Have To
TL;DR Consultation grew from that frustration.
Too long; didn't read.
We do the reading so you don't have to.
Rather than beginning with "Do you need a website?" or "Do you need twelve social posts?", TL;DR approaches a business as an interconnected system.
Where are you trying to go?
What technology do you actually need?
What digital assets already exist?
What are people finding when they search for you?
What are you paying for that serves no purpose?
What are you failing to capture?
How does all of it connect?
Nat's early clients included Quebec entrepreneurs appearing on Dans l'oeil du dragon, the province's equivalent of Dragon's Den.
Her first service package was fittingly called 911.
Because if you're about to appear on national television, you should probably know whether your digital infrastructure can survive what comes next.
The Projects Keep Multiplying
TL;DR did not become the end of the story. Of course it didn't. Nat is also a co-founder of Impact League, an incubator and accelerator focused on helping entrepreneurs develop and scale their businesses.
Her wider project work has included organizations such as I Am Heshima and technology designed to help smaller businesses navigate opportunities that traditionally favour companies with large administrative teams.
The common thread is unmistakable.
Take something complicated.
Understand it.
Make it usable.
Give someone else the tool.
There Is No Straight Line
At one point during the interview, Peeja asks Nat what she wanted to become when she was little.
Her Grade Six yearbook apparently contained three possibilities:
A criminal psychologist.
An epidemiologist.
An investigative journalist.
She eventually studied professional theatre.
Then worked in factories.
Then banking.
Then activism.
Then technology.
Then entrepreneurship.
Now she talks about perhaps retiring one day with a food truck called Cookies Gone Nats.
Which is about as Nat La Pirate as an ending could possibly be. Because there isn't one predetermined thing you were supposed to become. One decision at 18 doesn't need to govern the next 70 years.
The knowledge isn't wasted because the career changed.
The chapter still happened.
The skill still belongs to you.
As Nat says during the conversation:
There is no straight line. Every chapter matters.
The Future of The Red Tent Collective
The Red Tent's future, if Nat gets her way, is considerably larger than social media.
One dream is an actual radio station.
Not merely another livestream.
Broadcast radio.
A network where programs and voices from different countries could be transmitted beyond any single social platform.
Another dream?
An island.
Yes.
Red Tent Island.
A retreat where women could gather for self-defence, learning, gardening, conversation, skills exchanges and community.
Is she joking?
Partially.
Probably.
Maybe.
One learns not to rule things out.
Every Woman Has a Story
Red Tent Storytellers was created to turn the microphone toward women.
Authors.
Campaigners.
Artists.
Entrepreneurs.
Women with famous names.
Women whose names you've never heard.
Women who changed countries.
Women who changed themselves.
This time, the microphone turned inward.
Not to crown a single "woman behind The Red Tent."
There isn't one.
The Red Tent is a collective precisely because many women built it, shaped it, challenged it and continue carrying it forward.
Nat's story is one of those stories.
The technology is part of it. The activism is part of it. The troublemaking is definitely part of it.
But perhaps the most important part is the idea underneath everything else:
When you know something useful, teach another woman.
When someone has a good idea, help her build it.
When a woman thinks she can't, don't patronize her.
Give her the fucking tool.
And see what she does with it.
Have an Idea You Don't Know How to Build?
You do not need to know the technical language before you ask for help.
You don't need to know what stack you need.
You don't need to know whether the answer is AI, a website, automation, SEO, a new platform or none of the above.
Sometimes the correct starting point really is:
"I have an idea. How the hell do I build it?"
That is precisely the kind of problem Nat enjoys.
Bring the business.
Bring the problem.
Bring the half-formed idea written on a napkin.
We'll figure out the technology afterward.
The Red Tent Collective belongs to the women who make it a collective.
Women bring the expertise. Women bring the stories. Women bring campaigns, businesses, books, research, art, skills and lived experience. Our Discord server is where the magic happens. In fact, this article is being written during a live group session. Really.
The Red Tent helps connect the pieces.
Through The Scarlet Frequency, our resource library, amplification campaigns, digital support and growing network of women and women's organizations, we are building infrastructure designed to survive beyond any one algorithm or social platform.
Whether you're already doing the work or just discovering your voice, come find your sisters.
And if you have a story?
We want to hear it.
Every woman has a story. We're here to tell it.
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