SESSION CLIPS: We are working on getting our 101 sessions broken into clips that are more easily digestible & referenceable. Accompanied by Chris Blankenhorn & @thegreengarret.
I have a proposal for a Europe-wide* experiment, that aims to bring together the movements around solidarity and ecology in order to build up the material infrastructure.
I'm looking for collaborators, please DM me!
Here it is briefly:
We try to raise 50 000 000€ over about 5-10 years and give that money as 1000 gifts of 50k€ each to new collectives for setting up housing cooperatives and land communes. The main vehicle for the fundraiser would be crowdfunding with focus on a high volume of small, recurring donations.
For example, this could be achieved with 200 000 donors, donating 5€/month on average for 50 months, or 4,17 years. That's 250€/person over four years.
Each recipient collective would make a legal pact with us or a trusted third party to ensure that the property will not be sold back to the market for financial gain. Additionally collectives would go through screening to ensure alignment with a shared vision.
*Even though internationalism on a global scale is important, I believe it makes sense to focus this effort geographically, to be able to have location-connected synergies between collectives.
In the end we would have boosted the 'ecosystem' with a network of maybe 10-30k members and created 1000 foci for social and ecological organizing. Additionally, we would have built up a network of Commons, that can help us gain a better understanding of this new, old, paradigm.
The leftist space is full of ideas and people with motivation to work and organize together, to try new forms of living and care, to grow food and to steward the land. I want to see this potential realized, but I'm afraid most of it will not happen unless we cooperate on a broader, international scale to push things forward.
For those interested in the prefiguration of dual power, there is a perfect opportunity right under our noses - the fediverse. Moreover, such praxis may not be so much of a choice, as a necessity. The forces of authoritarian and capitalist recuperation are coming for this network.
So far, it remains largely out of the control radius of corporations, government security services and the fascists poisoning every other online environment. But there are well-resourced elements both without and within working to change that.
Consider the contrast with major capitalist services. This recent story explains how the "U.S." government has attempted to extort a price from TikTok in exchange for allowing it continued operation in the country - its conversion into a domestic mass surveillance tool under the control of state security and military agencies.
The threat of absorption into the Zuckerberg surveillance entity is a menace, but also an opportunity. However, the prospect itself needs to be reviewed. Opinions are being voiced that Meta will not, in fact, federate at all.
Some of these claims are good-faith efforts to critically regard the well-established propensity of the corporation to lie through its teeth at every opportunity. While true, there are clear and ongoing indications that Meta has both the intention and the motive to proceed.
First, Meta has planted an engineer in the W3C ActivityPub working group. This may be a precursor to custom additions to the spec which could facilitate advertising and behavioral surveillance protocols.
An additional confirmation of intent is the fraudulent "CSAM-scare" influence operation fronted by Facebook's ex-"Chief Security Officer" and another "Security and Safety" bigwig previously at Facebook. Resources are being expended to mold the network into a semi-centralized, surveilled and shovel-ready data mine suitable for ingestion into the Zuckerverse.
But fedi-folk are smart, and the July disinformation attack was met with a critical eye. It would be tempting to assume that the community's general dismissal would have been the end of it. That is not the case.
At this link, you can read the transcript, or listen to an audio recording, of an early August meeting attended by the Stanford operatives, a co-author of the ActivityPub standard, and a prominent fediverse developer, as they discuss their plans to impose centralized algorithmic surveillance onto the network.
Now to the question of motives. This has also been called into question. Why, after an early July Threads launch with over 100 million "signups" (all of which carried over from existing Instagram accounts), would Meta care about our puny little nothing of a network?
According to one analytics firm, that usage number had dwindled to 576,000 by early August.
Suddenly the fedi, with an estimated DAU of 1.8 million, doesn't seem so puny. But beyond any question of numbers, there is a crystal clear benefit to federation, one which would fit a well-worn pattern for the Zuckerberg entity - openwashing.
A recent paper by @Mer__edith , @davidthewid and Sarah Myers West discusses the openwashing ploy utilized by Meta and other tech giants, in which "AI" and other exploitative technologies are obfuscated by a thin veneer of democratization.
Meta currently has a big problem with regulators - particularly in the EU - demanding more interoperability from their social media operations. ActivityPub federation with their throwaway Threads side-project buys them a low-cost, low-risk figleaf. Perhaps we can term this particular variant "interop-washing"?
Meta will federate for the same reason that Google pays Mozilla tens of millions a year to keep Firefox alive. But that comparison only takes us so far, because in this case, it's more like Google dishing out the money only on the condition that Firefox disables ad-blocking and sends telemetry to Google.
So, we have multiple, recent and ongoing indicators. We have motives and strategies which fit a type. Every signal beams in the same direction, and there are none which contradict it. Meta is coming.
And the ActivityPub protocol and major fediverse development projects are firmly under the control of facilitators who are smoothing the way. This is a blog post by one of the primary Mastodon developers, with a proposal to add in backend hooks for the algorithmic surveillance and telemetry collection demanded by the Facebook Mafia.
It would be a mistake to interpret the current lull in interest, and the odd nature of the Threads launch, as reasons to relax. On the contrary, this is the perfect moment to act on the protective impulses that engendered the FediPact.
Moreover, the push towards centralization, surveillance and algorithmic harvesting by Facebook-linked authoritarians, which is meeting no resistance from those at the top of the development and administrative hierarchy, makes urgent action nothing less than a necessity for everyone of a marginalized or targeted identity, all true believers in FLOSS, and radicals of every stripe.
This is the time to convene, prefigure, and build a Free Fediverse.
How could the communalization of the fediverse manifest tangibly? One idea that pops up over and over from different corners is the organization of instances into alliances. Here is a thread proposing the formation of the fedifam construct.
In brief: Instances allied into fedifams could share resources and mutually support each other in many ways, such as:
🐸 A common charter of moderation principles
🐸 Hosting infrastructure and setup support
🐸 A crowdfunding mechanism
🐸 An open-source administration platform
🐸 A commonwealth of blocklists or allow-lists
🐸 A framework for new instance initiatives from within the fedifam to spin up