💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › cayden-mak-building-online-power.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 08:39:42. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
➡️ Next capture (2024-07-09)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Title: Building Online Power Author: Cayden Mak Date: April 19, 2022 Language: en Topics: organizing, internet, power Source: Retrieved on 2022-05-16 from https://anarchiststudies.org/onlinepower/ Notes: This essay appears in the current “Power” issue of Perspectives on Anarchist Theory (N.32) and is available from the Institute for Anarchist Studies here! AK Press here! and Powell’s Books here!
Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, likes to claim that his company’s
goal is to bring all the world’s people closer together through
networking. That’s a truly astounding fiction, as Facebook – and
effectively all of the firms dominating the internet today – are
motivated to capture all of human experience as “behavior” from which
they can extract value in order to sell more advertising.
But what if the internet wasn’t just a medium for extracting the raw
materials of this new means of production? What if we treated the
internet seriously as a place – a location where people spend their work
and leisure time, not just in transit, but in community? There is more
than one way to do politics and build a community on the internet, and
in spite of the current dominance of surveillance capitalism as the
model for governing the web, it is not the logical conclusion of the
technology itself. Rather, it’s the consequence of social, political,
economic, and legal processes, as Shoshana Zuboff argues in The Age of
Surveillance Capitalism.1
The internet as we experience it is a designed system that is itself the
result of systems of power that are much older, and perhaps less
visible, than it is. Therefore, it is possible – and necessary – to
contest for power online. However, our existing models for online
organizing are heavily focused on mass mobilization, utilizing the web
as a communications medium connecting interested individuals to
organizations and one another.
At 18 Million Rising, we’ve been at the forefront of trying to figure
out how to move away from the mass mobilization/communications model of
online organizing and toward models that foreground humans and,
hopefully, help foster a different kind of internet. Founded as an
organization specializing in mass mobilization through email and
petitions, we’ve evolved to include a variety of other tactics while
keeping those tools in our toolbox for strategic moments. We primarily
organize young Asian Americans, a group of people more heavily online
than any other race/age demographic, and for whom belonging may be
particularly elusive. Our generation, often stuck between the home
cultures of our parents and their homelands and the popular and
political culture of the United States, frequently struggles to find
belonging offline.
To make matters more complex, the term “Asian American,” in the popular
imagination, spans a universe of stereotypes that young Asian Americans
often feel at war with. The origins of the term, of course, are in the
Third World Liberation Front, when Asian American organizers were on the
hunt for a descriptor that felt new, fresh, and relevant to the
political work they were undertaking. Since the 70s, the term has been
defanged and turned into an almost meaninglessly general census
category. Also since the 70s, who might count as Asian Americans has
been shaped by U.S. imperialism, immigration policy, and globalization,
making potential members more diverse, and dividable, than ever before.
18MR’s work is particularly urgent because of the ways the social and
economic pressures placed on our generation are separating them from
other communities. We’re more likely to have moved to cities away from
our families of origin for work. We’re often burdened with heavy debt,
while at the same time serving as the young professional or creative
vanguard of gentrification in cities across the continent. We’ve watched
our civil liberties be eroded by the expanding national security
apparatus after 9/11. While young Asian Americans trend leftward, it’s
by no means a given that we will be full-throated participants in social
movements. And there is an expanding counterweight: the rise of
right-wing movements both in our nations of origin and in the United
States point to the growing possibility many of our people will be
recruited away.
We found, starting very early on, that the people we were most trying to
reach were tech savvy and highly skeptical. They were critical and
thoughtful, often seeing through the somewhat manipulative clickbait
tactics popular at the time, and which still reign in certain digital
programs. They were asking earnest questions about what it means to be
Asian American – and demonstrated time and time again that they wanted a
political home that could host difficult conversations about our role in
movements for racial, economic, gender, and environmental justice. We
upped our game because we saw those early indicators, and it means our
work continues to be robust, relevant, and incisive nearly eight years
on.
These five questions – which I return to on a weekly basis to inform our
strategy and tactics – are necessary but not sufficient for the task of
treating the internet as a true place. I hope you’ll find them useful in
your organizing.
Developing a set of shared principles may seem straightforward, but it’s
critical. There are some tensions that are worth articulating here that
we’ve encountered in developing our own operating principles. While they
certainly aren’t unique to the internet, the way that people use the
internet often amplifies these tensions in our day-to-day work.
In particular, there is a tension between rigidity and flexibility. One
of the greatest challenges of building a comprehensive organizing
strategy for the internet is the sheer speed and volume of information
and interaction. Being clear about what your principles are, while
articulating them with the flexibility to respond to a swiftly changing
landscape, is vital to being able to make decisions in alignment with
your principles in the first place. On the other hand, principles that
aren’t rooted, that you cannot articulate in alignment with a broader
radical tradition, don’t serve as bulwarks against the pull of trends or
fads.
A strong set of principles can guide your political formation through
tricky questions of what tools to use and why; how to respond to
punctuated moments of collective grief, rage, or joy; and keep the
collective on track when defining who “your people” are. 18 Million
Rising’s operating principles articulate a clear politics of collective
action in the service of our anti-racist, anti-capitalist, and
anti-imperialist analysis that also complicates our relationship with
technology itself. While the internet is critical for howwe do our work,
the people remain why – fetishizing the tools takes us further from our
why. Getting clear, and staying clear, even when the waters you’re
navigating are murky, builds trust and allows you to engage in
principled struggle within your team and more publicly with others.
transdisciplinary strategy?
We intentionally don’t run 18 Million Rising like a conventional
nonprofit. Every day, I’m trying to figure out how to distribute
leadership among my small team – composed of individuals with a wide
range of relevant skills who are experts in their discipline – in ways
that allow us to move forward with deep alignment and help us learn from
one another to improve all our efforts.
While you might not be organizing within a formalized structure like we
do, these questions are still relevant to developing your team. Division
of labor is a necessary consequence of engaging in struggle online: you
may need people who think about product and user experience, people who
write code, people who produce still and moving images to complement
your work, people with the facilitation skills to manage community,
people who think about operational security online and addressing
threats to the group, or people with any number of a broad host of other
skills. There won’t be any one person who has all of them – it’s simply
impossible to grapple with the complexity on your own.
To engage in transdisciplinary strategy is to engage in principled
struggle across expertise. Being able to consider form and content at
the same time – and understand how they are constantly shaping each
other – is critical to being effective on the internet. At our best, our
team operates from a deep trust of one another and our people, and at a
speed where we are constantly sharing and challenging one another to
expand our understanding of everything from movement dynamics to tech
tools.
While we can’t all master one another’s skills, we can share a political
analysis of the tools of our respective trades. That analysis can inform
both how we show up for each other and what we ask of each other in our
day-to-day work. It helps us see the intersections of our expertise and
develop an interdependent way of looking at the work that makes every
move intentional and considered. Our members respect us for this
discipline.
principles inform the politics of those feelings?
Some theorists of the economy of the internet have argued that the web
is an economy of attention – with such a dizzying profusion of content,
the thing that comes at a premium is attention. This turns the logic of
the era of broadcast media on its head in a way that has broad
implications for issues of censorship and speech online. In such an
information-saturated environment, how do people make decisions about
what they pay attention to?
I like to tell my team that people choose what to pay attention to based
on how content makes them feel – what’s the overall affect, or emotional
content, of your offering? Affect is deeply political: the way we
understand ourselves and our groups informs how we respond emotionally
to news, analysis, and calls to action. It is also mutually
constitutive. How we feel about the world around us impacts how we
understand our identity in relationship with others.
Understanding that affect can be manipulated, and manipulative, is key
to differentiating your work as organizing. Organizing helps people
understand the things they’re already feeling. At 18MR, we already know
many of the folks who trust us for insight and analysis are used to
feeling a particular way about the world. Helping them locate themselves
and feel what it feels like to be in right relationship with the world
around them is the work of creating belonging.
We approach all of the content that we put out, regardless of platform,
as a body of work. It’s not just about putting together a communications
plan for a campaign or project, but rather projecting a sense of place
through a combination of aesthetics, analysis, and effective action.
It’s not about the content itself so much as it’s about an approach to
the content – we create opportunities for our members to see themselves
reflected in our work: their aspirations, values, and visions for the
world as it should be, not just as it is.
Placemaking offline originates in city design philosophy that is
oriented towards humans instead of catering to motor vehicle traffic or
commerce. Principled placemaking is rooted in the ways that local
communities already use the spaces in which they live and is informed by
input from broad swaths of that community. It also isn’t a one-time
process, but rather iterative in response to evolving needs.
Therefore, placemaking online needs to be similarly oriented toward
human beings. The results of successful placemaking on the internet are
reflected in our members’ willingness to give us candid feedback, the
kinds of rich conversations that happen on our social media posts, and
the sense of belonging we foster among our members. Additionally,
because the content we create can, and does, get ported across platforms
and reposted by other accounts, it’s important that people can
immediately identify it as coming from us, no matter where it shows up.
Online placemaking is about a critical combination of writing style and
design elements with principles, strategy, and affect.
All of these things combined together don’t necessarily mean you’re
building power. The fifth and final question is exactly about power:
when we think about what we do with all the work we put into the first
four questions, the fifth asks, to what end?
Strategies that focus only on the community itself fail to contend for
power in any meaningful way. While the relationships that are built and
the analysis that is developed is critical to success, it is collective
action that will keep people coming back for more.
I should also warn that rigorously answering the first four questions
should protect you from drifting toward prioritizing the technology
itself over the goals of your organizing. Insulating your thinking
against the fetishization of particular tools is critical to building a
sense of collective efficacy. And an engaged, disciplined membership
will also mean you’ll get pushback against campaigns where the form and
the analysis don’t align.
What I usually call the “given form” of online organizing will be
familiar to most people: the petition and email, often with a thoughtful
social media or content strategy thrown in on top. This approach is
primarily focused on mass mobilization – deft writers might be able to
politicize new folks around an issue this way, but it’s more likely that
you’re turning out support from people who have already been activated
around the issue in the past. The form is useful when you’re trying to
convince a target with power to act in ways that benefit your community
or prevent harm. However, the form doesn’t necessarily lead to building
power.
At 18MR, we think of our collective efficacy in more than one way.
First, we do acknowledge the way mass mobilization tactics serve many of
our goals. We keep these tools in our toolbox for this reason, and
they’re clearly legible to members. However, we also know that there is
work to do that doesn’t involve asking a legislative body to pass or
repeal a law or a judge to grant a stay on a deportation order, for
instance. Especially through principled collaboration with other
movement organizations that specialize in other forms of organizing,
we’re able to model action that is expansive and generative.
Exploring – and sometimes developing – new tools for our people to see
and experience collective efficacy online pushes us toward new forms.
I’m particularly interested in finding forms that emphasize depth over
breadth and create space for personal as well as social transformation.
I’m interested in a much more nuanced field of practice that is also
about how we build the future world in our everyday relationships, as
well.
You may have noticed that these five questions are deeply intertwined. I
don’t think that they’re questions you answer once and then proceed to
develop campaigns. They’re meant to be a guide to an iterative process
of asking difficult questions about what you’re doing online, how, why,
and for whom. Engaging uncritically with technology means having our
work dictated by the constraints of that technology.
In order to contend for power online, we are intentionally and
rigorously interfacing with some of the most insidious parts of
surveillance capitalism. As we do so, we’re trying to adjust the
expectation for what organizing can look like online. A movement
organization is more than a brand: brands are produced for consumption,
but a movement is space for participation and power.
To abandon the internet as a site of struggle is not just to give into
corporate power, as they work to enclose the online commons. It’s also
to concede a vast and undefined territory to the far right – cults of
conspiracy, white supremacy, and violent nationalisms that run rampant
even in seemingly mainstream online spaces.
We live in a time of tremendous opportunity for online action. Beyond
the work that we have already done at 18MR, there’s a constantly
expanding horizon for what we could do. For instance, the possibilities
for new kinds of international solidarities in a time of increasing
authoritarianism and state repression are underexplored. The global
pandemic also means more people are seeking belonging online, which is
an opportunity and a threat.
The internet itself will not yield transformation and greater freedom
unless we act on it strategically and in alignment with our values. It’s
my hope that this offering can be of use as we contend for power on the
internet, using the internet.
---
Cayden Mak is Executive Director at 18 Million Rising, a national
organizing formation for young Asian Americans online. He is a movement
technologist whose work focuses on making technology work for the
people, while fighting coercive, extractive, and carceral technologies.
He is the 2019 recipient of the Everett C. Parker Award for his work on
media justice and internet freedom. He lives in Oakland, California.