Similar technologies are now being used in the United States to criminalize dissent, target marginalized communities, and suppress mutual aid efforts. This brings us to the theme of this week’s episode. Today, we’re sharing excerpts from Shareable’s Mutual Aid 101 Learning Series‘ third session.

Elijah Baucom of Everyday Security & UC Berkeley Cybersecurity Clinic discusses security for mutual aid groups before Sarah Philips of Fight for the Future shares the current state of mutual aid financial surveillance and privacy tech. The third speaker from Session 3, Erika Sato from Sustainable Economies Law Center, opened with a 30 minute overview of legal basics and the benefits and limitations of formal structures for mutual aid groups. We’ve left it out of this episode, but you can watch/listen to the video on Youtube or below.

Resources:

• Mutual Aid Session 3 video recording
• Mutual Aid Session 3 transcript
• Mutual Aid Session 3 public slides 
• Mutual Aid Session 3 link document
• Mutual Aid 101 Learning Series
• Mutual Aid 101 Community Canvas
• Donate to The Response

Episode credits:

• Hosted and executive produced by Tom Llewellyn
• Produced and edited by Paige Kelly
• Theme Music by Cultivate Beats

Follow The Response on Twitter and Instagram for updates, memes, and more. Our entire catalog of documentaries and interviews can be found at theresponsepodcast.org — or wherever you get your podcasts.

The Response is an award-winning podcast series produced by Shareable exploring how communities respond to disaster — from hurricanes to wildfires to reactionary politics and more.

Want to help spread the word? Please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts and Spotify — it makes a huge difference in reaching new people who may otherwise not hear about this show.

Available anywhere you get your podcasts, including:

The post Surveillance, cybersecurity, and financial tech for mutual aid with Elijah Baucom and Sarah Philips appeared first on Shareable.

Appropriating the planet

In a fragment by Jorge Luis Borges, successive generations of cartographers create increasingly exacting maps of China. Their maps grow steadily larger to incorporate more and more minute details until “the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it,” for the only map that could communicate every detail of China would be a map on the scale of the country itself. Today, the Chinese maps are even larger than the empire.

The commanding heights of the gentrification economy are tech and biotech firms that collect, systematize, privatize, and commodify inputs such as genetic data, personal information, and behavioral profiles at levels far beyond that accessible through first-person experience: the stuff of ever-growing maps, new material for market exchange. The more perfect these maps, whether of a user’s consumer proclivities or genome, the more profits may be wrung. These inputs are not initially purchased from another party. Instead, as Shoshana Zuboff explains, “Surveillance capitalism unilaterally claims human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioral data.”

For Marx, capitalism is necessarily based in primitive accumulation, the “conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder, in short, force” necessary for one class to acquire capital and for another to be dispossessed to the degree that it must sell its labor to survive. Marx placed this initial violent accumulation in the late 15th and 16th centuries, when English peasants were forced off feudal lands and Indigenous American and African peoples were enslaved.

Peter Kropotkin was quick to critique Marx’s “erroneous division between the primary accumulation of capital and its present-day formation.” Later Marxists likewise found that primitive accumulation was not a bounded historical event but an ongoing process. Silvia Federici cites World Bank structural adjustment programs which, under the guise of making poor countries “competitive,” uproot the “last vestiges of communal property and community relations” and “force more and more people into wage labor” as one example and the exploitation of women’s unpaid domestic labor another. The social, biological, and psychological data now closed off and privatized by capital are a new frontier of such accumulation.

The material limit of appropriation of land is the amount of existing acreage, just as the material limit of the appropriation of iron ore is the quantity found in a certain mine. The gentrification economy is based on the modeling and mapping of the world; its material limit is the representation of the world down to the atomic level. So long as this endeavor remains profitable and requires a small caste of educated technicians, the gentrification economy and the struggles against displacement may only be expected to continue.

User, subject, worker, resident

There are at least three lines of popular political critique of the tech economy aside from resistance to community displacement. One critique of tech companies concerns their management of platforms that serve as a semi-public space. The prohibition or promotion of certain content or communities is criticized from the perspective of users. There is also a line of critique from the perspective of those subjected to new forms of power: quantified, mapped, and modeled. And warehouse workers, rideshare drivers, and software engineers alike criticize their tech industry employers from the perspective of workers. The struggle against gentrification is a critique of a fourth type. In addition to the user, the subject, and the worker, there is the resident. The Block Sidewalk campaign in Toronto joined an anti-gentrification fight to concerns about surveillance technology and U.S. corporate encroachment: resistance on the terms of the subject as well as that of the resident. The fight to kill Amazon’s New York campus highlighted both how housing costs would rise and how few local residents would get high-paying jobs: the resident and worker. The fight against Google Berlin pulled together opposition “from the displacement of the neighborhood, through data abuse of Google, to criticism of power and technology,” the synthesis of such critiques “made possible by a shared intensification of a social conflict.”

From the perspective of the ruling class, existing residents are residual, remainders, leftovers. “Join the dance of those left over,” goes the Los Prisioneros song, an anthem of the movement against Pinochet that found new life during Chile’s 2019 Estallido Social. “The games ended for others with laurels and futures. They left my friends kicking stones.”

Common sense militancy

It is hard to imagine a demand more modest than the maintenance of one’s home, community, and life. And yet to stop displacement would demand, housing activist Vasudha told me, “a reimagining of the current socio-economic system, because as it currently exists, gentrification is incentivized and encouraged until every cent of profit is milked out. The last 200 years of housing policy and how the ‘market’ works is encouraging and incentivizing gentrification. To stop it will require masses of people to really come together and pitch in and make sacrifices to a larger movement to restructure the socio-economic system as it currently exists.” The reasonable demand for universal housing in an economic system based on private land ownership is a “non-reformist reform” in the original sense outlined by André Gorz: not an especially progressive reforms to demand of the capitalist state, as the democratic socialists would have it, but an apparent reform that in fact could only be instituted by a “fundamental political and economic change” created through the “autonomous power” of the dispossessed.

We must unfortunately still contend with those whose superficial concern for the oppressed is outweighed by a greater fear of the oppressed developing just such an autonomous power. Neither the benevolence of corporate charity nor the “proper channels” offered by local representative democracy have proven, in any city in the world, sufficient to halt economic gentrification. Yet the partisans of propriety and moralists of reform continue to insist that those facing displacement and death restrict themselves to permissible tactics proven to fail. And so homes continue to be destroyed and our neighbors continue to expire on the streets. The hands of the self-declared pacifists drip with blood as their throats fill with empty platitudes. Those who demand decorum and reasonableness in resistance are accessories to the most indefensible outrages.

“I don’t know that we can challenge gentrification on political terms,” says Daniel González of San José. “It’s going to require a lot of militancy. Not just militancy, because you need a multi-faceted approach to enable greater participation. But you do need to have a very real and material threat to the stakeholders, to the city, to the investors. It needs to go beyond the arena of representative politics.”

Andrew Lee is the author of Defying Displacement: Urban Recomposition and Social War. Lee has supported grassroots social movements for more than 15 years and his work has been published in outlets including Teen Vogue, Yes! Magazine, and The New Inquiry. He writes at In Struggle and is a board member of the Institute for Anarchist Studies.

The post Cross-pollinating resistance to the tech economy – an excerpt from Defying Displacement appeared first on Shareable.

What are Agrivoltaics?

Simply put, agrivoltaics are the integration of solar energy production into land used for agriculture. In practice, this typically looks like ground-mounted solar panel arrays with pastured livestock grazing alongside those panels. In many cases, vegetable and fruit crops can be grown underneath, between, and around solar arrays. Some agrivoltaic setups may also incorporate pollinator habitats and native ecologies between the arrays; this variation is sometimes called ecovoltaics.

How do farmers and landowners benefit?

According to the USDA’s Economic Research Service, farm incomes have declined in the past years, and once the numbers come in, further declines are expected for 2024, as well. Before the pandemic (between 2018 and 2020,) more than half the farms in the country experienced financial risk.

The issue of financial viability in our agricultural system is multifaceted, but agrivoltaics offers a way for farms to add a source of diversified low-maintenance income for farmers and landowners. Once financed and installed, solar panels require little maintenance and catch sunlight, which gets converted into energy and turned into a steady income stream.

For certain crops, the full or partial shade of solar panels can also benefit production and profitability. For example, a 2019 University of Arizona study found that “Plants in high-light environments tend to have smaller leaves – an adaptation for not capturing too much sunlight and overwhelming the photosynthesis system. Plants in low-light environments grow larger leaves to spread out the light-capturing chlorophyll that let plants change light to energy. The researchers are seeing that in their trials: basil plants produce larger leaves, kale leaves are longer and wider, and chard leaves are larger.”

With proper site development and decommissioning planning, agrivoltaics leave open the potential for a site to return to purely agricultural uses in the future. By alleviating financial pressures, landowners are less likely to have to convert agricultural land to be used for something else. They are also less likely to be forced to sell the land off entirely.

How does the environment benefit?

Agrivoltaic systems provide an array of benefits to farmers and landowners, rural communities, and the environment. They can provide habitat for pollinators, reduce the need for herbicides and labor-intensive vegetation management on site, and contribute to stormwater absorption capabilities of the soil by reducing the amount of land converted to impervious surfaces.

Sheep, goats, cows, and other livestock can be grazed among solar panels to maximize land-use outcomes on a single site. Integrating livestock and solar systems provides forage for the animals, who in turn maintain vegetation and minimize site upkeep. In addition to producing clean energy, solar panels cast shade for the animals to shelter under on hot and sunny days.

What to consider when setting up an agrivoltaic system

Setting up a system that optimally integrates agriculture and solar production requires time and planning up-front. When done well, this will improve the long-term benefits for health and production, as well as the pocketbook.

The farmer or land manager must work with the solar developer to find a solution that works best for both parties. Livestock farmers must ensure their animals’ food, water, and shelter needs are incorporated into the site plan, and the panels are protected. For example, sheep tend towards docility, but goats require more protective measures around the panels and any associated infrastructure. Cattle require more space between rows of panels and for the panels to be mounted much higher off the ground. Crop farmers require the appropriate panel height and spacing for the intended crop.

Agrivoltaics in the real world

At a site in Haskell County, Texas, one company estimates that it saved $115,000 in mowing costs in the first seven months just by having sheep graze along the arrays, keeping the panels optimally productive. At one site in Southern Illinois, semi-transparent solar panels and moving tracker panels allow enough light for plants in a vineyard to thrive while also producing solar energy. In Longmont, Colorado, an agrivoltaics farm that grows 15 crops provides enough solar energy to power about 300 homes. These are just a few examples. At the time of writing, there are almost 600 agrivoltaic sites in operation around the United States, according to the InSPIRE Research Project, which maintains a database, an interactive map, and informational resources on agrivoltaics. Although there has been a directed effort by fossil fuel companies to keep rural and agricultural communities pitted against renewable energy, there are clear benefits of agrivoltaics to farmers, their communities, solar developers, and the general public—who will enjoy cleaner air, soil, and water. The benefits of agrivoltaics are already being embraced by agricultural communities, with many more projects to come.

Shareable produced this video with the Rural Power Coalition and The Story of Stuff Project. Learn more about Rural Electric Cooperatives by reading additional articles in this series.

The post Agrivoltaics: Harvesting the sun to benefit farmers, crops, and livestock appeared first on Shareable.

What is a Virtual Power Plant?

A Virtual Power Plant (VPP) is a network that connects homes, farms, and businesses using renewable energy sources like rooftop solar, batteries, heat pumps, and smart appliances. Unlike traditional power plants, a VPP doesn’t rely on one central facility. Instead, it creates a coordinated system where each participant contributes power and flexibility.

For rural communities, VPPs offer a powerful solution to increasing energy demand and the challenges posed by severe weather. These systems allow smarter energy management, helping communities stabilize their energy use and reduce their reliance on costly fossil fuels like coal and gas.

How VPPs help communities thrive

Virtual Power Plants reduce the need for expensive infrastructure upgrades and polluting gas peaker plants. Instead of building new facilities to meet peak electricity demand, VPPs leverage the energy stored in local batteries, solar arrays, and other devices when demand is highest. Research shows that this model can reduce utility costs by 40–60% compared to traditional methods.

A standout example comes from Colorado’s Holy Cross Energy. Their Power+ Program offers members affordable, lease-to-own home battery storage systems. These batteries store energy during off-peak hours and release it when demand is high or during outages. This not only saves money but also improves energy security and resilience.

Similar success stories are unfolding in Vermont, where Green Mountain Power operates a VPP using Tesla Powerwalls. The program saved millions by strategically using stored energy to offset peak demand. These savings are shared with customers through bill credits, creating a win-win model for utilities and participants.

Why we need VPPs

Modern society is increasingly dependent on electricity for heating, cooking, and essential services. At the same time, climate change has brought more severe weather events, causing disruptions and requiring more resilient energy systems. Virtual Power Plants address both these challenges. They create distributed energy networks that are more reliable, environmentally friendly, and cost-effective than traditional grid systems.

By investing in VPPs, rural cooperatives help their members save on electric bills, reduce emissions, and avoid costly infrastructure upgrades. They also ensure their communities have reliable power during extreme weather, promoting local resilience. For example, Dakota Electric in Minnesota has enrolled over 40% of its members in a demand response program, cutting peak demand by 20%.

The future of energy production, storage, and distribution is in our hands

Virtual Power Plants show how local, cooperative solutions can drive a national energy transformation. They empower rural communities to be energy-independent and resilient while lowering costs and carbon emissions. Each home that installs solar panels or a battery storage system contributes to a stronger, more sustainable network—one that benefits everyone.

Switching to a VPP means investing in a cleaner, more secure future. And the best part? It’s already happening. With successful projects from Colorado to Vermont, the path to energy independence is clear.

The post How Virtual Power Plants are empowering communities through clean energy appeared first on Shareable.

Rafa shares insights into the organization’s holistic approach, emphasizing the critical support they provide through litigation, a helpline for those fearing criminalization, and ensuring clients receive the best possible defense.

Join us as we explore interconnected struggles, the challenges of surveillance, and the power of community in the fight for reproductive justice.

Resources:

• If/When/How
• Repro Legal Defense Fund
• No Body Criminalized Podcast
• How to Become a Lawyer without Going to Law School

Episode credits:

• Co-hosted and executive produced by Tom Llewellyn
• Co-hosted, produced, and edited by Paige Kelly
• Theme Music by Cultivate Beats

Follow The Response on Twitter and Instagram for updates, memes, and more. Our entire catalog of documentaries and interviews can be found at theresponsepodcast.org — or wherever you get your podcasts.

The Response is an award-winning podcast series produced by Shareable exploring how communities respond to disaster — from hurricanes to wildfires to reactionary politics and more.

Want to help spread the word? Please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts and Spotify — it makes a huge difference in reaching new people who may otherwise not hear about this show.

Available anywhere you get your podcasts, including:

The Response is an award-winning podcast series produced by Shareable exploring how communities respond to disaster — from hurricanes to wildfires to reactionary politics and more.

Interview

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Tom Llewellyn: Hey, Rafa. Thanks for being on The Response. 

Rafa Kidavi: Hi, Tom. Hi, Paige. It’s so nice to be here. Thank you for having me. 

Tom Llewellyn:Can you start by telling us a bit more about yourself and the work that you do at If/When/How and the Repro Legal Defense Fund? And, with that, what world are you trying to build with that work?

Rafa Kidavi: Such a good question. I’m the director of the Repro Legal Defense Fund, which is an organization that sits within If/When/How. And we are part of a fund that funds bail and what we call strong defenses for people that are criminalized for their pregnancy outcomes. So anything from miscarriage, stillbirth, abortion, you name it.

We try to make sure that people feel supported. And then we work within an organization that litigates criminalization of self-managed abortion. They have active cases in our litigation team. And then we have a helpline which is a really wonderful place to get resources if you’re concerned about being criminalized for accessing reproductive care. 

The RLDF specifically is a bail fund in many ways. We primarily try to make sure that people are free and get out because we know it changes the outcome of a case quite significantly—offers from prosecutors change, et cetera—when someone is out versus when someone is in.

It’s also obviously more humane to not be caged. But not just that, we really try to support litigators nationwide in making sure that they’re providing their clients the best possible defense. So ensuring they have mitigation specialists, social workers, and other experts. And that the clients they’re supporting have the primary resources that they need that would have actually abated the consequences of criminalization quite significantly.

For example, houselessness is a huge part of why people are criminalized, obviously. And so we make sure to provide emergency housing money. Or if there are, Allegations that someone doesn’t have enough resources in their home, that often has implications on their ability to bear their children because the family regulation system steps in. And so we try to provide some of those essential costs for people that we know have really direct impacts on criminalization. 

The world that I’m trying to create is really the definition of reproductive justice. Which is safe and sustainable communities and a world in which we can exercise our bodily autonomy without the state feeling like they have to control us and step in and punish us for doing so. And I think one where we really understand how trauma functions a lot better than I think we currently do.

Paige Kelly: One thing I really appreciate about  If/When/How and the Repro Legal Defense Fund on your social media the organizations are always talking about different movements and connecting them back to repro justice.

How do you see the movement for reproductive justice Free Palestine, prison industrial complex abolition, (including the fight to Stop Cop City and more as connected or part of the same fight?

Rafa Kidavi: Yeah, absolutely. I appreciate the premise of your question because I think it’s pretty clear that these struggles are connected.

Fundamentally, I think if you have a commitment to humanity, you can’t watch people being mistreated, caged, deprived of really the very fundamental things that they need without having, hopefully, some sort of emotional reaction to that. I think we have in many ways the same enemy. We’re fighting harm and control and violence from the state.

I think when it’s outside of our country, unfortunately, the United States is obviously a very active participant in perpetrating harm. And so in many ways it still feels like I’m fighting the United States government you know, and that’s part of, I think, our mandate in reproductive justice in the framework is that we fight the impediments that prevent people from having the families that they want. We fight the state when it decides whether you get to have a child, whether you get to parent your child, whether you don’t want to have a child. I think the idea of reproductive justice is really a safe and sustainable life for us all.

And there’s no way to talk about a safe and sustainable life without talking about our shared fight for liberation. 

Paige Kelly: At If/When/How and the Repro Legal Defense Funds, you often emphasize don’t talk to cops, and why is not talking to cops so important? 

Rafa Kidavi: Because they’re not your friend? Okay, jokes aside, I didn’t grow up here, and I grew up in a country where my mother was constantly fighting the cops.

Because there was no way to be an activism about anything without fighting the cops.There was a baseline understanding—and I’m not trying to make this sound utopic in any way, I’m not trying to say things are better outside here. That’s a lie. They’re terrible everywhere. But, I think I grew up with this very clear sense that cops were there to harm you.

Nobody questioned if the state was representative of you or cared about you. And then I came here and I watched young people genuinely contend with whether they should trust the cops. And in the culture, you are told that you should. It’s very hard to unlearn that culture. And so part of saying it over and over again, I think people are often like, “But what if?”

And I think the biggest what if actually comes around survivors. And I just want to be really clear, survivors are my people. Those are who I do this work for. Trauma is why we do this work. Trauma is why I did public defense work. Nobody is ever going to tell me that my love for survivors and protecting those that are being harmed by the state is somehow different from those that are being harmed by individuals.

It’s the same kind of violence. It’s all about power and control. We know this. Prosecutors and cops have done a really good job of convincing us that they are doing this for our safety and they are not. And so I came to public defense because I used to work with survivors and everyone at the office that I worked at worked closely with the prosecutor’s office, but it was like a given that they were going to fail us.

The given conversation was the cops are going to fail you and the prosecutors are going to fail you, but you must call them, but you must trust them. And so I think that there’s this way in which everyone’s a little bit confused because of this training that we think, “Maybe it’s a radical progressive position,” or “The left is just saying this to be on the left because they like to be left.” And I’m not lying about who I am, I’m by no means anywhere, even close to the middle, I get it. And I don’t come to it from that place. I really come to it from a really practical place: When there is harm and you call the cops, do they show up and protect you and care for? They fucking shoot you in your own kitchen.

And still, the culture says, “Oh, but try again.” And the reason people try again is sometimes not because of the culture. They try again because there’s a lack of other resources. And so enter abolition: Let’s try to build up other resources so that people have other places to genuinely make decisions from, as opposed to choosing between failing and failing. Dying and dying. Is my abuser gonna kill me or is the cop gonna kill me? How is that a real choice in the world?

It’s really about saying, “Hello, you are people we care about. You are our community. You are suffering.” And I can see why you would probably want to consider calling the cops because there is a lack of resources in the world and you need protection and safety. Let’s interrupt and tell you right now, “No.” Because it might not be the answer that you want and the answer that you desperately need.

And the other pieces: Expanding who a cop is. We talk about prosecutors are cops, judges are cops, [Administration for Children’s Services] workers/social workers from “Child Protective Services” in big quotations, those are cops. They take your words, they use them against you, and they punish you with them, even if you’re declaring that you are innocent. They can take anything and flip it.

I think that’s why it’s it’s a minefield. Cops engage in manipulation and gaslighting. Sll the tools we hear about in intimate partner violence, they’re just doing with the weight of the state on a national/institutional level.

And so you shouldn’t trust them, despite what you’re being told in the culture.

Paige Kelly: What threats does surveillance pose to reproductive justice?

Rafa Kidavi: I think about surveillance a lot because of many reasons, but one of them is I came to the United States from Pakistan right after 9/11. I was one of the first round of international students that came. It was not a fun time to apply for a visa.

I had a relatively privileged experience because I was coming as an international student and yet the onslaught of surveillance the moment you land here was actually, especially at the time, was just pretty shocking to me as a young person. I’m saying this not because I think I’m unique. In fact, I always think it’s much more useful to name how not unique our shared experiences are. That actually feels much more painful to me. One person stories are compelling. 

But the fact that we’re in a sea of surveillance, I think is actually much more devastating because I think it shapes how you move just somatically,  how you navigate spaces, and how tense you are, and how tight you are. You feel this sense that your body is not your own. The second you land here, or at least I remember feeling that way. 

And then moving to New York from the “see something, say something” on the subway is something that I talk about. We have this culture of watching your communities. Don’t see them, watch them. Watching each other has become the government’s best surveillance tool.

And then I think in criminal cases, there’s a lot of conversation about shifting technologies. I’m a former public defender, I understand the interest in shifting technology. It’s scary when the government develops more complex tools to further control and surveil us. And they don’t really need all that. They’ve been doing that with totally non-functional systems. All of the family court system is a bunch of Luddites and somehow they managed to be right in your kitchen controlling you deeply. So I think similarly about the surveillance.

In the case of prosecutions, it’s not just about the individual tools that were used in a particular case, but the culture that we have of surveillance of how comfortable we feel telling on each other and telling on ourselves. I think that the idea that some people shouldn’t have bodily autonomy really allows anti-abortion stigma to fester and grow. It convinces us that we have the right to tell other people what they can do with their bodies and when they can do things with their bodies. I think state violence thrives on everyday people being willing to downplay the power of the state and instilling fear and harm in their communities.

And then that, in essence, drives people to make choices that are not based on what they know to be best for themselves and their loved ones, but really a fear of incarceration and punishment.

Paige Kelly: How is the repro movement responding to reproductive surveillance and criminalization that you’ve seen?

Rafa Kidavi: I imagine you remember the period tracker app fears. And I don’t mean to invalidate the fear. Asolutely note that the primary technology in front of you is your phone, and it is constantly tracking and controlling you. That reminder is welcome. And like I said before, it’s not really about the period tracker app for me. I think those things end up getting a lot of attention, but actually it’s that there’s an infrastructure around us constantly that doesn’t need fancy technology. And so people are almost distracted by what they’re focusing on. 

I understand it. I say this with zero judgment. I think what we need to be working on is how do we make ourselves safer? I think this is often a project of self-reflection. Asking, am I safe to the people around me? Am I truly caring for them by holding their secrets that could jeopardize their lives? Do I understand the stakes of the violence that is potentially coming forward?

I think there’s a lot of self-training that we have to do. I think similarly the “don’t talk to cops,” right? We say don’t talk to cops and I know this as someone who’s done a billion [know your right’s] trainings and I’m a public defender, but you bang on my door hard enough with enough of an arsenal and enough people behind you and God damn, maybe I’ll let you in my house and tell you all my secrets.

The power of the state is so epic. And so it’s really a process of training yourself deeply about your own dignity and self-worth and what you’re entitled to as a person. Because the government really has you feeling otherwise.

I think in our organization, we talk a lot about the family policing system in a way that I think a lot of people don’t talk about how the family policing and regulation system is really about reproductive justice.

I think the movement’s been pretty siloed. So people think about abortion and very traditional ideas of the trope of the cis white woman who goes to college and gets pregnant and needs to access an abortion. And fundamentally, that’s not the bulk of who needs reproductive care and who is unable to access it.

I think similarly, we don’t think about the family regulation system. If you’re not thinking about marginalization broadly enough, you’re not thinking about people of color. You’re not thinking about poor people, et cetera. And so the way that we see it is that if RJ is really about being able to have the relationships and the families you want and criminalization is really about severing the systems of support and communities, then taking away children temporarily, permanently, because they can’t provide the basics for their family. That kind of surveillance from the social worker who comes to your house and tries to convince you that she’s not a cop, that’s the kind of thing that I think we need to be really worried about in the RJ movement.

I think we need to broaden our understanding of who a cop is.

Tom Llewellyn:I feel like that broadens the discourse. And I definitely agree with you on getting lost at looking at the shiny thing right in front of you where there are these embedded systems of oppression, which are a lot harder to see. And because they’re harder to see, they’re harder to organize against.

How do you communicate about those kinds of underlying systems and make them more visible in a way that they can be addressed? 

Rafa Kidavi: That’s a really big question, partly because I think all of our work together is what makes that communication possible. Organizing around Stop Cop City impacts my life in the repro movement in a good way. Because yes, we’re talking about bail. And yes, we’re talking about mutual aid. And yes, we’re talking about some of the same things quite logistically and technically, because I work at a fund.

I think more than that, though, is it questions the state’s power, and that’s why they’re so mad. It feels audacious. And that level of audacity in all of our movements really helps the repro movement.

And so I’m excited about everyone’s conversations. I just want to make] sure that everyone’s having those conversations with each other in mind. I think some of the work that’s happening around making sure that we’re thinking about gender performing care and reproductive care in the same breath is really important.

We know it’s about exercising bodily autonomy and that this country has been founded on multiple mechanisms of doing that from genocide to enslavement to the immigration system, et cetera. It’s constantly doing this. And so I want that conversation to be happening everywhere.

And I think many of us are adept at having that conversation. And I think we live in such fear and forced scarcity. So it’s understandable. Again, I say this without judgment, there’s a lot of pressure on marginalized communities to fight for very few resources. I actually want more of is, that it’s not surprising to someone that the family court system is impeding on someone’s reproductive health or bodily autonomy.

Tom Llewellyn: And you bringing up just that overlap with CopCcity and this pretty significant inflection point, right? When it comes to organizing for abolition and against the policing of our communities and the militarization of our civilian peace officers.

And there’s the classic trope, first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, and then you win. And right now I feel like they’re very much fighting. The state is fighting this organizing. And so we’re seeing this the criminalization of mutual aid and bail funds.

There’s the bill making its way through the Georgia legislature that would outlaw charitable bail funds completely. We’ve seen the impact of surveillance on organizing with the Atlanta solidarity fund being raided and organizers arrested and the surveillance of private financial debt data and the criminalization of mutual aid. Can talk specifically about any of the impacts of financial surveillance used to criminalize abortion care in a similar way that it’s being used around Stop Cop City. 

Rafa Kidavi: I think we have a lot to learn from the repro movement around mutual aid and financial support. Folks have been doing this under heavy surveillance and control from the state for a long time. I think some of the really careful, thoughtful relationship-building work, building trusting and safe relationships for high-stakes situations is something that repro is doing a really good job of, and that’s not new and it’s continuing to happen.

I think there’s a very active conversation in the repro movement about resourcing reproductive care and support for people. There’s always the fear of, “If I support somebody in getting an abortion, what will the legal implications to me?” have been part of the conversation from the beginning.

I feel for people organizing around that because it’s almost like a procedural kind of violence that the state engages in. They’re just like always like throwing this shit out there to make it sound like it’s innocuous, but it’s just deeply about controlling and criminalizing.

I feel for that kind of surveillance. And it’s also unprecedented in a kind of way I think of Cop City. As someone who like doesn’t conceive of myself as naive at all, I have to say it did still have an impact on me. I still felt jolted by the audaciousness of the state TBH, even though they do whatever they want and clearly have no boundaries or limits and there’s no level of violence they’re not willing to enact as we are seeing globally. But still, it is a kind of particular moment. That’s shocking, I think.

Tom Llewellyn: Yeah, and partially, I think, is because it’s so visible, right? Like a lot of this, a lot of this repression and violent repression was not visible.

I feel like there was something in the United States that a bit of a shift happened between 2004 and 2008. During the Democrat and Republican national conventions in 2004, there were mass arrests. And there was massive class action lawsuits. And there was millions of dollars paid out that were often seen as cost of doing business They knew that was gonna happen. They didn’t give a fuck, but they did it anyways. But you fast forward to 2008 and I was there at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul in Minneapolis and there was something like a hundred and fifty arrests that entire time. Instead of arresting people, they just brutalized people. They were breaking bones. They were shooting canisters. And the switch in the militarization from 2004 to 2008 was really quite noticeable.

And I think that has continued. As we’ve seen Black Lives Matter, as we’ve seen all these other inflection points, through Occupy at times. At these different inflection points, it’s been a little bit more brutal. And it’s not just the United States. I was meeting with some organizers in France during an uprising there a few years ago, and they said that they’d never experienced the type of militarized policing and brutalization of the police back at their protests in the history of France as they were experiencing a few, a handful of years ago now. And so I feel like this is something that’s on the rise and as there’s bigger pushes for significant change.

There’s also this equal clamping down that’s happening as well. And it’s some of it’s criminalization, but a lot of it’s just brutalization. And again a lot of that is physical, right? There’s mental anguish that comes with feeling that and the fear of people not wanting to go out to protest because they’re afraid they might get brutalized.

But I feel like there’s similar tactics happening in a very different way in the repro zone as well, where it’s more of like the thought police, right? It’s like this undercurrent underhanded approach at brutalizing people that are trying to seek basic health care. 

It’s always happened. And this isn’t with Dobbs, it just is lifting things up to the surface, but it does feel like it’s becoming heavier-handed as well. And I’m not sure if you have experienced that in the space as well, or if there’s that general feeling across the space. 

Rafa Kidavi: I absolutely feel like the general feeling of fascism is just constantly on the uptick.

So yes, everything that you’re saying I absolutely hear. And I think we feel it honestly, even if we don’t always know it. 

I think what’s hard about the individual cases, and because I do direct services work and I’m formerly a public defender, I think the amount of brutality that the state is willing to put an individual through has always been, and will always be, at the extremest of levels.

I think when we come together and there’s a movement and there’s a group of us, there’s something different. There’s a different dynamic. And so it does feel really intense to watch the cops come and brutalize masses of people in public like that. Especially in 2024. I am constantly like, “How much more violence are we just going to watch happen?” And I understand that some of it is that we couldn’t watch the violence before, which is not a comfort. It’s just to say damn, how much happened that we couldn’t see. And now that we’re all seeing it, how unable are we to respond to it and stop it? And, I think all of that is absolutely true.

I think when it comes to individual cases, though, part of what moves me about repro is that I’m not some cis straight girl. That’s not the vibe I’m coming from. I’m coming from someone who actually knows that chosen family has kept me alive. What is more cruel and violent than severing your connections with the people you love most? And that’s just the basis of the criminalization that’s inherent in in the state from stealing the children of indigenous people, to now stealing people’s children using the family court system.

It’s hard for me to ever compare the violence because it has been happening. The fact that we ever had solitary confinement. The fact that we talked about the death penalty for young people. Name a limit to the violence. There is not one. And I think in the repro space, you’re talking about the most marginalized, traumatized of people in a really vulnerable position, and then it’s, “Oh, cool. Let’s punish you.” That part is shocking. And in the repro space, in what world do you see someone who’s had a significant pregnancy loss and the desire is to punish them? It is just absolutely so cruel and backward.

Tom Llewellyn: And, this is something that you have talked about quite a bit on your podcast. No Body Criminalized, which I’ve really enjoyed listening to. One of the things that you talked about on the podcast, the idea of abortion being the testing ground for other actions.

And, as we’re talking about how it’s related to a lot of this other criminalization, what aspects do you feel like are being tested in the abortion reproductive justice space that may find their way out into other rights as well? 

Rafa Kidavi: I think it’s quite fundamentally about bodily autonomy. It’s about your own personhood and your own ability to make decisions about yourself. And I think the state constantly tests how much they can control and decide for you, how much you’re willing to put up with, and how much they can get away with. And rewriting of trauma and oppression completely from the right around abortion permeates the culture.

I’ll give you an example. We were trying to find a defense attorney for somebody on a case who had been alleged to self-manage their abortion. We find somebody in the place that they’re in and through an organization that we work with. That’s wonderful. And they send us an attorney who does capital defense work.

And we’re like, “Okay, we need someone who’s really highly skilled capital defense work. Fits the bill.” Aand he writes back and he’s like,” I don’t support the killing of fetuses.” And it was like, you do capital defense work! I’m with you. I’m a public defender. I’m not saying don’t do capital defense work. Absolutely. I too would like to defend somebody that was accused of killing someone. That’s not my boundary. It’s that somehow abortion is the exception to that? The idea that someone took control over their own body is more abhorrent to you than somebody that doesn’t exist in this realm? That’s more violent to you? It’s ass backwards constantly. 

Even the framing of families. It’s my pet peeve when the right talks about families. Your families are a hot mess, first of all, and second of all let everybody else have their non-oppressive relationships. Because that’s really the goal here, right?

We are trying to create families. Most people who have abortions are trying to do right by their families, by the people they love most. There’s this constant pushing of the definition of things. It’s like a national gaslighting of us all.

And the part that I didn’t say is, part of the project of the state is to confuse us and where people might genuinely have questions to manipulate our minds into thinking that us trying to survive is somehow wrong. How do we not see that having a complete chilling effect on all of us? I think that’s what the criminalization of abortion is about. It discombobulates you. 

The fact that most people don’t even know abortion is healthcare is bonkers. Check your medical bill when your provider decided that you needed to get reproductive care. I bet you’ll see that more things are called abortion than you realize.

Paige Kelly: One quote I revisit often by abolitionist Mariame Kaba is “hope is a discipline.” And how do you keep hopeful or what gives you hope?

Rafa Kidavi: Yeah, it’s a really good question. I feel like I’m always in a fight with Mariame Kaba in my head about hope as a discipline. It’s like, “Really do I have to keep doing this?” I will tell you that my toddler when they first started speaking, their party trick would be to walk into a room and say “Mariame Kaba,” because they just knew it elicited the reaction. They had no idea what the words meant That just told you who their chosen family was.

Honestly, my kid. My personal relationships. I think about my world in two ways. There’s my small circle and there’s my big circle. And my big circle is large and I want good things for everyone and I want to try hard to do that. And sometimes when the circle is too wide, it comes with a kind of depletion. It comes with a kind of betrayal. We are all but people trying to navigate all the violence that we’ve experienced and the world is constantly bestowing upon us. And so that will happen. 

And so the thing that actually keeps me hopeful is my small circle, where I can come back and remember “Okay, this community of people that I’ve kept around me practices love on the daily and helps me stay alive.”

And that is a really hopeful place. 

Tom Llewellyn: Just as we close out, is there some piece of advice that you would give to people that are maybe on the outside of the reproductive justice world. Is there something that you would want people to know, or is there a way for people to plug in and support and contribute to the work that’s being done? 

Rafa Kidavi: That’s a good question. And my advice is based on all the people that have come before me and told me how to think. So I just want to name that. 

We’re thinking a lot at If/When/How about how much more people need to be involved around fighting the family surveillance and policing systems. And so I think people often think about reproductive justice as traditional abortion work, which, of course those are our people But I really want people to start seeing that more broadly.

And, if you’re in law school and you want to become an attorney— I’m sorry in advance and my apologies to the planet for bringing more of us—and do family defense work. And I want to be really clear that you can do family defense work without being a lawyer at all. Get in there, fight that system. 

Paige Kelly: Thank you so much, Rafa, for taking the time to come on today and sharing your work and wisdom. So grateful.

Rafa Kidavi: I really appreciate you, Paige. Thanks, Tom. 

Tom Llewellyn: We look forward to following your work and the new season of No Body Criminalized, which will be coming out soon.

The post Surveillance and reproductive justice with Rafa Kidvai appeared first on Shareable.

This action is in direct response to allegations that Atlanta officials have misused PayPal data to impose racketeering charges on members of the Atlanta Solidarity Fund for their aledged support of ongoing organizing efforts to Stop Cop City. With deep roots in the civil rights movement, this fund stands as a historic pillar of community support, dating back over a century.

The controversy centers around the arrest of three Atlanta Solidarity Fund organizers during a horrific military-style raid by local and state cops. The organizers face charges linked to PayPal transactions for everyday items like glue sticks and a garden hose. These charges, widely regarded as trivial and unjust, have spotlighted the broader issue of financial surveillance by FinTech entities such as PayPal. 

A comprehensive House judiciary report recently highlighted how law enforcement agencies have been increasingly leveraging financial institutions to surveil Americans, raising alarm across various sectors.

A letter from the coalition to Congress articulates the severe implications of unchecked financial surveillance, noting how it endangers the fundamental operations of mutual aid organizations. 

The reliance on risky FinTech platforms like PayPal, despite their inherent privacy risks, underscores a pressing dilemma for mutual aid groups. These platforms facilitate swift financial transactions, essential for the survival of many community support networks, yet they expose users to surveillance and potential data exploitation.

Furthermore, Mutual Aid groups are facing threats to their very existence, particularly in Georgia, where it’s among the states introducing legislation intended to completely abolish bail funds.

Lia Holland from Fight for the Future, reinforced the broader implications of financial surveillance, “The stark reality is that financial surveillance is just as harmful and dangerous as surveillance of our communications.” Many social media companies are implementing default end-to-end encryption to protect our conversations, but meanwhile, FinTech companies are spying on us more than ever.” 

Holland has co-organized this letter because of the pressing need for both the Congressional investigation into the “escalating abuses of intimate financial data in Atlanta” and the mandating of  “end-to-end encryption for our financial lives.” They believe that these are both “important step[s] toward accountability and change.”

Mutual aid organizations and bail funds like the Atlanta Solidarity Fund stand as crucial lifelines for those navigating the challenging waters of legal systems and social injustices. 

As Michael Collins, Senior Director of Government Affairs at Color of Change, adeptly puts it, the “Atlanta Solidarity Fund [is] a beacon of ethical engagement embodying the true spirit of community, standing against the tide of surveillance and unjust persecution.” Collins also points out that “Atlantans deserve a city that reflects their values, not one defined by militarized raids and intrusive surveillance.”

It’s clear federal protections are needed to ensure the support and safety of community organizers from persistent financial surveillance and threats of criminalization.

The signers of the letter, including current Shareable partners Mutual Aid Eastie and Mutual Aid Hartford are specifically urging Congress to:

1. Defend the First Amendment rights of these and other protesters to dissent. Members of all communities should be able to protest peacefully and express their dissatisfaction with government plans without fear of attack. We call on Congressional leaders to condemn this wildly inappropriate law enforcement crackdown on the right to protest and against the historic role of bail funds in supporting popular resistance.
2. Investigate the threat of abusive financial surveillance to traditionally marginalized communities, and take action to reduce the data-hungry practices of Big Banks and Big Tech that put users’ and activists’ rights at risk.
3. Implore the Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens and the Atlanta City Council to listen to the Atlanta community, defund Cop City, and cancel the construction lease. All charges against Stop Cop City activists and the Atlanta Solidarity Fund organizers should be dropped, and all activists should have their arrest records expunged immediately. 
4. Champion the right to build community-owned and -governed alternatives to the abusive surveillance of today’s mainstream Big Tech and Banking systems, ensuring the creation of privacy-protecting technologies like Signal that protect vulnerable communities. The events in Atlanta illustrate that access to alternative technologies is becoming increasingly important. However, fear of prosecution has had a chilling effect on the creation and use of privacy-preserving tools. In the digital age, we urgently need private financial tools for safety, security, and organizing.

This call for a Congressional investigation into the misuse of financial data not only highlights the perils of financial surveillance but also underscores the enduring spirit of mutual aid organizations. 

The fight for digital privacy and community autonomy is a clarion call for protecting the rights and freedoms that underpin the very essence of solidarity and support within communities across the globe.

Read the full letter: https://www.fightforthefuture.org/news/2024-04-03-letter-mutual-aid-atlanta/

The post Mutual Aid groups urge Congressional investigation of financial surveillance of Stop Cop City activists appeared first on Shareable.

Last March, the Internet Archive was forced to curtail its lending of e-books following a judgment against the digital library in a lawsuit coordinated by the Association of American Publishers (AAP). In a celebratory press release, AAP president Maria A. Pallante attempted to draw a contrast between the Internet Archive and “the thousands of public libraries across the country that serve their communities every day,” whom Pallante thanked. But, in December, more than 100,000 of those libraries, as represented by the American Library Association (ALA) and Association of Research Libraries (ARL), expressed support for the Internet Archive’s appeal against the case.

“This is a fight to keep library books available for those seeking truth in the digital age,” says Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive. And other libraries appear to agree.

A court brief filed by the ALA and ARL urges the Second Circuit Court of Appeals to reconsider the lower court’s judgment in light of the impact that it will have, not just on the Internet Archive, but libraries across the United States. The appeal comes amid a wave of threats that libraries nationwide are trying to stem.

Hachette v. Internet Archive

“This lawsuit is an attack on a well-established practice used by hundreds of libraries—even traditional ones—to provide public access to their collections,” says Kahle.

The lawsuit coordinated by AAP against the Internet Archive involved some of the largest publishing companies in the world: Hachette, the lead plaintiff, as well as Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, and Wiley. Filed in 2020, the suit alleged that the Internet Archive committed copyright infringement by scanning and distributing copies of the publishers’ books online via its National Emergency Library.

In response to the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Internet Archive launched the National Emergency Library at a time when many libraries were closed and readers home under mandatory lockdowns. The Internet Archive facilitated the National Emergency Library by scanning purchased or donated books, encrypting the files produced to prevent them from being copied, and loaning them to one reader at a time for a limited amount of time using digital rights management tools. The Internet Archive argued that this was protected by “fair use,” which permits the use of copyrighted material without permission in cases that are non-commercial, limited and/or negligible to the market for the copyrighted material.

Judge John G. Koeltl disagreed. In Koeltl’s judgment, the Internet Archive—a nonprofit organization that charges readers no subscription—stood to profit from the National Emergency Library via donations; its lending was not limited; and it threatened the e-book market. Consequently, in August of 2023, the Internet Archive was forced to take down their digitized versions of the titles that publishers sold as e-books.

Internet Archive v. Hachette

The Internet Archive is now appealing Koeltl’s judgment. In its first court brief in the ongoing case (still known as Hachette v. Internet Archive), the Internet Archive argues that Koeltl fundamentally misunderstood the facts of the case, especially regarding fair use. The Internet Archive argues that, just as fair use protects the non-commercial, limited, and market-negligible lending of traditional libraries, it protects such lending by digital libraries too. More worrisome, the inverse may become true: If fair use can be denied to digital libraries, then it may be denied to traditional ones too.

This is where the American Library Association and Association of Research Libraries come in. 

“This legal case … is part of a long-standing disagreement between libraries and publishers about how copyright principles should apply to libraries in the digital age,” says Jonathan Band, attorney for both the ALA and ARL.

In their aforementioned brief in support of the appeal, the libraries clarify that they are not filing in support of either the publishers or the Internet Archive, but in defense of fair use. Their concerns center on Koeltl’s judgment that donations entail profit and that digitization is not protected by fair use. If maintained, this judgment would render all libraries commercial enterprises and prevent them from continuing important work, such as digital archiving.

“ALA and ARL’s brief asks the court to preserve the fair use rights of libraries by correcting the District Court’s error in characterizing the Internet Archive’s use as commercial under the first factor of fair use,” says Katherine Klosek, director of information policy at the ARL. “If the publishers prevail on the ultimate question of fairness, we ask that the court craft its opinion in a way that is narrowly tailored to the facts in the case in order to preserve library fair use in other library contexts.”

Whether the Internet Archive and supporters of its appeal will prevail is yet to be determined. Publishers will be filing their opposing briefs later this month, and the court will be setting hearing dates thereafter.

“There is simply no legal support for the notion that Internet Archive or a library may convert millions of eBooks from print books for public distribution without the consent of, or compensation to, the authors and publishers,” says Terrence Hart, general counsel for Association of American Publishers. “The plaintiff publishers will vigorously litigate the appeal of this case, which stands for foundational copyright principles.”

Book Bans, et. al v. Libraries

As previously mentioned, Hachette v. Internet Archive arrives amid a wave of threats to libraries. Last March, three days after the AAP issued its celebratory press release regarding Koeltl’s judgment, the ALA issued its own  statement condemning “the violence, threats of violence and other acts of intimidation that are increasingly taking place in America’s libraries.”

By its count, the Internet Archive estimates before Koeltl’s judgment, it was lending more than 500 banned books, which it has since been forced to take out of circulation. If successful, the ongoing appeal can help stem the tide and save libraries big and small, traditional and online.

“Libraries are under attack like never before,” says Kahle. “The core values and library functions of preservation and access, equal opportunity, and universal education are being threatened by book bans, budget cuts, onerous licensing schemes, and now by this harmful lawsuit. We are counting on the appellate judges to support libraries and our longstanding and widespread library practices in the digital age. Now is the time to stand up for libraries.”

The post Libraries urge court to reconsider judgment against Internet Archive appeared first on Shareable.

In addition to publishing our stories and podcasts this year, Shareable launched SolidarityWorks, our new organizing program to meet the challenges our communities face. Be sure to check out the new Emergency Battery Network Toolkit, an open-source guide designed for folks to create their own community-owned backup power supply. 

Another world is not only possible – it’s already being realized in communities across the globe. Here’s a glimpse in 10 stories:

1. From Bayanihan to Talkoot: Communal work practices from around the world

“For all of human history, societies have depended on communal work to sustain themselves into the (often unpredictable) future. However, at a certain point, that all changed. Market forces took over, and communal projects ceased to have the same significance. The individual took precedence over the community, and large public works became the purview of burgeoning states.” This story explores the key elements that differentiate communal work from other collective activities and several examples of what it has looked like in practice.

2. Mutual Aid and the movement to Stop Cop City

Writer, organizer, and teacher Dean Spade (‘Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (And The Next)”) wrote a feature story about the critical role mutual aid has played in the ongoing movement to stop the construction of Cop City—and the deconstruction of parts of the Weelaunee Forest—in Atlanta.

3. How to grow your own toilet paper

Robin Greenfield is a writer, researcher, and activist who makes a strong case for growing your own toilet paper. Greenfield argues that ‘Toilet Paper Plants’ are not only easy to grow but are a way to opt out of consumerism and contribute less to the harmful environmental impacts of the toilet paper industry. Check out this How-To Guide, to start growing your own toilet paper in the new year.

4. The Response: Forced labor and immigrant dreams — Saket Soni in conversation with Rebecca Solnit

This episode of The Response podcast is the recording of a live conversation between Saket Soni and Rebecca Solnit on Saket Soni’s recent book, The Great Escape: A True Story of Forced Labor and Immigrant Dreams in America.

The Great Escape is the harrowing story of how 500 disaster relief workers from India were trafficked to the United States under false pretenses and exposed to inhumane conditions while rebuilding New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

5. Black radical imagination helps us transform our relationships to energy, land & economy

“For those of us interested in exploring alternative visions for the future of land, economy, and energy, the answers on how best to achieve collective liberation may come in lessons hard-learned from the past. Two places to start are Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, which spans centuries from continental Africa to colonial America and the United States, and the “Black Freedom Struggle”, which offers transformative and regenerative possibilities for imagining and building a world without white supremacy.”

6. Legal tools for Land Return 

Janelle Orsi, an Oakland-based “sharing lawyer” and a director of the national nonprofit Sustainable Economies Law Center, offers her thoughts on tools that could be useful to land justice movements as they work towards and realize #LandBack, land return, and reparations. In the piece, Orsi explains, “I’m writing this for the people – especially those who own land – who are feeling animated toward repair, healing, and return of land to Indigenous and Black people. I’m also writing it for myself. As a land justice lawyer, I have tinkered with the nuts and bolts for 15 years, and I’ve found them increasingly hard to stomach. Now, I’m attuning to the ways law and legal tools have disrupted the flow of inspiration that motivates land return.”

7. Andrea Roberts: Countering displacement through collective memory

This Cities@Tufts recording tracks the history of displacement and dispossession that has led to the destruction, neglect, or dismantling of communities initially designed to protect African Americans from structural racism.

Dr. Andrea Roberts explains how these communities’ unique challenges require new planning and design tools to detect the interplay of historical and contemporary conditions contributing to the cultural erasure of African American placemaking.

8. The Spanish Civil War: Lessons in economic democracy

“The Spanish Civil War and Revolution of 1936 was arguably the 20th century’s greatest experiment in economic democracy. Seizing the opportunity opened by the conflict between the Spanish Republic and right-wing Nationalists, Spain’s workers and peasants built a new economy in the midst of the chaos.” 

9. Artisans Cooperative: An Etsy alternative, owned and run by artists and makers

Etsy, the online arts and crafts seller, raked in record profits in 2021, yet still increased artist transaction fees by 30%. Etsy’s business model relies on artists, yet the company continues to exploit and take advantage of them. Enter Artisan’s Cooperative, an online cooperative owned and run by artists and makers, not a greedy corporation. 

10. Emergency Battery Network Toolkit

This past summer, Shareable piloted the first new program of SolidarityWorks, the Emergency Battery Co-Lab, to aid organizers in building their own community back-up power supply. The Emergency Battery Network Toolkit is centered around the recordings of the pilot and includes all trainings and ‘office hours’ (edited into bite-sized chapters), summaries of each lesson (including key takeaways), graphic recordings, customizable templates, and other resources.
Learn more about the project and our partners in the project, People Power Battery Collective (a project of People Power Solar Cooperative) by checking out this episode of The Response Podcast: The Response: People Power Battery Collective with Kansas, Crystal, and Yasir.

Bonus: Everything you wanted to know about SolidarityWorks

If you can’t tell, we’re excited about the new direction we’re taking our work with SolidarityWorks. Since 2009, Shareable has been instrumental in radical transformative cultures — we’ve published more than 4,500 stories and 300 how-to guides, distributed 50+ seed grants, and advised hundreds of organizers, policymakers, and social innovators. We are utilizing our history of storytelling, our role in the solidarity economy ecosystem, and our convening experience to help local communities move from inspiration to action through Co-Labs, trainings, and comprehensive toolkits.

The post Best of Shareable 2023 | Reader’s Digest appeared first on Shareable.

The event they were attending, Dweb Camp, is something like a summer camp for techies interested in building decentralized (read: community-owned and -governed) digital infrastructure, as well as the people who need such tools. Sometimes, those individuals are one and the same.

At Dweb Camp my organization Fight for the Future looked to further bridge the gap between tech projects and the front-line activists, journalists, and marginalized people they aim to serve. Amid our advocacy work for the First Amendment right to code and against financial surveillance, we’ve found that a lot is getting lost in translation. First and foremost, what’s missing between tech and activism is trust.

Three days of listening, learning, and brainstorming

For three days, participants learned from, and brainstormed with, people on the front lines of the struggle to maintain access to abortion and gender-affirming care. In a pillow-strewn tent in the redwoods, perhaps more reminiscent of Burning Man than a tech conference, we first heard from the organizations themselves.

They told us about the technologies mutual aid organizers have “frankensteined” together, often at significant personal risk, to send money to patients; the multifaceted challenges they face meeting a huge demand with well-vetted volunteers; and the constant threat of surveillance, deplatforming, and censorship that extremists are weaponizing to try and scare them into halting their still-legal operations. 

The experience was as sobering as it was inspiring, and led into a second day that focused on what tech projects might do to ease the burden and help keep people safe.

While our day two conversation sometimes slipped into the weeds of tech, the takeaway was clear: as one abortion fund representative told me, decentralized tools could be a game-changer. They only wished that the technologies weren’t so early in their development, because they’re needed now. 

Why decentralization is key to health and financial privacy

Just weeks prior to Dweb Camp, Atlanta law enforcement subpoenaed the PayPal data of the  bail fund supporting #StopCopCity protesters. Ahead of a pivotal city council vote on whether to fund the massive police training facility — a time when major protests were planned — the police used this PayPal data to arrest bail fund organizers in a militarized raid, and charge them with money laundering. 

Mutual-aid organizations are well aware that the mass communications surveillance revealed by the likes of Edward Snowden is the tip of the iceberg; 9/11 also provided cover for the U.S. government to ramp up its financial surveillance. Today, every non-cash transaction of every person in the U.S. is surveilled. It is only with the advent of technologies like cryptocurrencies and digital dollars that mainstream privacy advocates are re-examining the abuses of big banks and the federal government. 

The fact is, our digital lives will never be safe without truly private, unsubpoenable financial options that re-establish our Fourth Amendment rights — protection from unreasonable searches and seizures by the government —for the first time in a generation.

Amid the gleeful techlash reporting on the downfall of some of the industry’s biggest players, like recently-indicted FTX Founder Sam Bankman-Fried, there are also responsible people. These folks are building alternatives to the surveillance and moralizing  censorship of both big tech and big banks. 

At Dweb Camp we heard about a Discord alternative with the privacy of Signal; a technology that breaks the monetary link between an abortion fund and an abortion patient; as well as uncensorable ways to share information on gender-affirming healthcare, as state attorney generals seek to ban it from the internet.

It’s through working together toward making such systems a reality that activism and tech can build the trust and community we need. The truth is that mutual aid funds — whether they are for bail, disaster relief, abortion, or gender-affirming care — have operated in a decentralized manner, at a very high level, for a very long time. Emerging tech projects have a lot to learn from them — not only about serving their needs, but in making the transition from philosophy to real-world impact. 

How “unconferencing” helped build trust and grow ideas

On the third day of Dweb Camp, the organizers decided to do something different. We switched to an unconference format, in which all were invited to create the sessions we wanted to have on the spot. While many of the big names left once their scheduled appearances were done, the sessions held on this day were universally lauded as the best of the event. 

After a brave attempt at building a decentralized app to ease our unconferencing failed, we used paper and large plywood boards to schedule interdisciplinary conversations at dozens of venues around the summer camp. The “Tech for Bodily Autonomy” track participants joined forces with another decentralized community still establishing its presence at the event, the “Arts” track. We wanted to dig deeper into the growing pains of the kind of internet we’d all rather have.

However, at that point, the entire facility’s power went out. Suddenly, the portable bathrooms throughout the campgrounds, which many had eschewed, were our best option for waste. Anything that wasn’t on a battery was dead, and plans began to form, organized by an attendee with experience in building decentralized power infrastructure, to collectively wire up our car batteries. I volunteered my Subaru, excited at the prospect of learning something totally new.

Not knowing what we’d find when we came back, we rallied our group and headed to an area of woven mats in a redwood grove. Our infrastructure concerns were, after all, incredibly privileged. We all knew we could just drive away if it came to it, so our focus returned to drilling down on the lessons our decades-old, decentralized networks had for the new ones we need to grow online. 

We established a frame for thinking about the type of people that came to Dweb Camp, and named a binary: the “what” people, and the “why” people. For some, the “what” is concrete: making the actual function of the technology, the way it is coded, their focus. For others, the “why” is the only thing that isn’t abstract — they want technologies that they can use for social change, for art, and to build better communities. They don’t care how it works, they just want people they can trust working under the hood. Together, we recognized the immaturity of common language between the two as a point of friction — a growing pain of not only Dweb Camp, but of decentralized technology itself.

Dissolving the binary toward the common language of stories

Over the course of the next hour, we mirrored what the Tech for Bodily Autonomy track did that week: we dissolved the binary. Because, by and large, what we found was that the common language between techie and activist, between legislator and advocate and journalist and society is a currency we all love: stories. 

For these sorts of new technologies to succeed, the “why” people must also transcend to become the “what”. As a privacy-preserving, end-to-end encrypted messaging service, Signal has become a crucial tool for everyone from antifascist organizers to the U.S. Intelligence Service because of what it does for them — not the tech specs. Activist-decentralized technologies, if they are to rise and replace the power- and data-hungry hegemony of big tech billionaires, need stories, too. These stories need to be big and loud and real, coming faster than misguided legislators can act to outlaw privacy-preserving tech or the right to contribute to open source software projects.

The sessions we organized could have taken place nowhere else. Dweb is a brainchild of the Internet Archive, an organization perhaps best known for its WayBack Machine, a publicly -accessible archiving project that preserves the history of the internet. The principles of Dweb are embodied in its participants — including not only the circles of tech and activism around the Internet Archive, but also supporting leadership from 30+ Dweb Fellows attending from around the world. While the men’s bathroom line was still disconcertingly long, a beige flag for many a tech event, Dweb Camp was refreshingly intentional about elevating the perspectives often absent from traditional tech spaces.

And therein lies what is truly remarkable about Dweb: it has created a medium, built on a foundation of inclusion that, while imperfect, works eagerly to put traditionally marginalized folks at the center of conversation. This is a community where in real time I watched binaries dissolve between tech and activism, an event that’s hungry to facilitate more such work. I trust Dweb to continue its evolution toward ever-more interdisciplinary efforts, as well as establish inroads toward funding to carry Dweb Camp’s uplifting tech philosophy into a globally impactful reality.

After that last conversation, which carried over well into lunch, we climbed the hill back to the lodge and found the electricity was back on. Things settled down into more conversations, hugs and last-minute introductions, a talent show, and a silent disco stretching into the wee hours. As I watched people dance, I was already plotting for the following week. It felt like these were people who could dream up a new story for our digital world, and make it happen too.

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Some experts and owners would say there is no need to imagine. The world is already growing beyond the usual profit-for-a-few model. 

“We have evidence all around us that societal expectations of business are shifting,” Clarisse Magnin-Mallez said during a 2021 McKinsey Global Initiative (MGI) Inside the Strategy Room podcast. “I found it striking that 87 percent of people who were asked about the role of companies declared that they should create value for multiple interests, not just make profits.” 

The profit-from-the-top-down business model is changing, according to OwnCo co-founder Harry Wilson. Wilson and co-founders Sascha Kellert and Špela Prijon launched OwnCo in January 2023 to help early-stage businesses share ownership with their community contributors, empowering their voices in shaping and growing entities that affect them. 

Wilson said that community-minded founders and business owners want to make a positive change in the world by looking at alternative ways to grow a business beyond the usual “cash-burning” strategy. They also want to share their profits with community contributors who have added value to their companies or organizations. That value manifests in a variety of ways, including participation, purchasing services, new business referrals, doing good for community organizations that support a business’s mission, or other non-monetary contributions.

“We’re working with a fitness company called Maverick who wanted to attract the top 10 trainers in LA. So how can they do that? By giving them ownership, because these people are at the top of their field, and possessing ownership is something that appeals to them,” Wilson said.

Similarly, OwnCo client Somos offers free and fee-based services for the use of an online platform that helps language instructors from all over the world grow an ecosystem for teaching, connecting with students, building community, and marketing their classes and products. Instructors who charge for their classes, services, and products will be charged a percentage-based fee where they keep 90 percent of their sales. Somos assesses a nine percent commission and gives one percent to community partners who engage in work relative to their mission. As for community ownership, Somos is very similar to Maverick’s template for awarding their shares. 

“We’re not asking for money,” says Khawar Malik, Somos founder and CEO. “Teachers’ participation will generate ownership shares.” Somos has only recently begun to set up their co-ownership program, but Malik said participation could include receiving tokens when teachers sign up students for paid classes or elect a “Lifetime” deal for a one-time charge.

Somos will set aside 32.5 percent of its business for community ownership. Refugee employees, teachers, and core community partners aligned with Somos’s mission to champion language, workers, and migrant rights will be eligible for this option. 

OwnCo client Novlr, a platform for writers to plan, draft, and publish their work, will initially set aside 10% of its business for co-ownership opportunities. According to co-founder Thomas Muirhead, after they accrue over 10,000 co-owning writers, the community-owned portion of the company could grow from 10 percent to 20 percent. 

“There is a general swell of enthusiasm for employee ownership, community ownership, and stakeholder ownership. It’s an important shift toward the organizations we want to design to be like in the future. The people who [add] value to an organization should be the ones who benefit from it,” Muirhead said. 

Whether companies accept in-kind contributions as a pathway to co-ownership, modest monetary investments remain an option. Novlr co-owners will be able to pay a one-time buy-in fee bundled with a lifetime membership. In return, these writer co-owners will elect representatives to an executive board to weigh in on how the business grows. A “Writer’s Trust” will be established to enable the redistribution of future profits to community owners.

For community-centered entities like Maverick, Somos, and Novlr, OwnCo helps establish transparency between founders and their community contributors. Founders use OwnCo’s platform to administer credits, set goals, disburse payouts, and sign legal contracts with their community to identify expectations. Contributors, too, can see the business’s activities, monitor their shares, and execute other agreed-upon tasks. 

OwnCo, has also designated 30 percent of its equity for community contributors or people who subscribe to the platform or provide referrals. Customers who pay at least the $500 monthly subscription fee get 400 OwnCo shares, which could be worth over $20k by 2025 if OwnCo is successful.

“We use our own model, so we are co-owned by our community. If you are a customer, then you also get ownership in OwnCo. If you help us get customers, you get ownership, too,” Wilson said. Currently, OwnCo has 25 clients doing business in the United States, Canada, Brazil, and Europe, including the United Kingdom. 

Wilson said OwnCo has no direct competitors, although growing distrust, disenfranchisement, and dwindling patience with traditional investments and profit-driven models have led people to place their trust, their money, and/or their participation in similar community-empowering ownerships, like crowdfunding, communal farming, property coops, credit unions, investment pools, and ROSCAs (rotating savings and credit associations). These have all been ways to empower and include people who have habitually felt left out of traditional wealth-building and ownership models. 

In the 2020 Shareable article, “From  Sharing Economy to Community Economy: Why it is important to learn how to design communities,” Marta Mainier wrote, “The community economy is the most interesting evolution of the sharing economy, an economy made up of companies, groups, places that put the community at the center of their business strategy; by doing so, they transform markets and organizations.”

Muirhead hopes Novlr’s community-ownership initiative will transform the publishing industry. “The main driver for this is the goal for Novlr to really grow, to scale where it really represents creative writers, where changes in the publishing industry might be possible because — as a writer-owned industry — we may be able to lobby as a group and disrupt the publishing industry,” he said.

Though OwnCo currently only works with budding businesses and organizations, Wilson can see a scenario where community ownership is not primarily driven by the owners, but also the contributors. “It would be interesting to get community members to rise up and start demanding changes from [traditional businesses],” he said. “For them, we could be the platform that organizes petitions… to say that if you share ownership, they’d help grow the business with this or that contribution.”

“It’s all about putting a dent in the world. With our model, decisions are made by the people who are impacted by the business. Instead of an Airbnb CEO who lives on another continent, the vacation hosts and neighbors will have a say over how proceeds are invested and distributed. So you have more wealth distribution, and thousands of people can have an impact on businesses that affect them, instead of one or a few,” Wilson summed.

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