The technology and protocols that drive the Internet were inventions of scientists working for the U.S. government. Over time, however, it has become clear that the Internet is, actually, its 4.5 billion users, and it has developed with the engagement of journalists, social and “special interest” groups, and political organizations. The Internet was quickly recognized as a vehicle for intensified and unprecedented sharing of ideas, information, experiences and plans, but that came with its own challenges. The neoliberal machine, for instance, took heed of this potential and began integrating the Internet within their business plans to maximize profits. Similarly, governments realized that vast amounts of critical information on people and their activities were available on the Net and began exploiting it for surveillance purposes. This, then, is the most profound technological challenge of our times – whose Internet is it? For what purpose will future innovations in the Internet be used? And, most importantly, will people and communities control the evolution of the Internet or will a small elite commandeer it for their narrow interests?
In this brief essay, members of the May First Movement Technology Board share their perspectives on the historical context of this moment, the role technology is playing in the contemporary crisis and its potential to significantly contribute to building a world based on concern for the common good.
A historic teachable moment, and why?
We are living in an urgent and teachable moment. Challenges are mounting against racial, classed, gendered and sexualized oppression in both the global and domestic arena. Can technology help us devise strategies to engage in an anti-capitalist revolutionary process that consolidates these efforts and helps us confront white supremacy and hetero-normative patriarchy in the US, and globally? Can it help us build a life-generative world based on justice, liberation and love? History has shown us that technology plays a central role in upholding the structures of discrimination and exploitation within a society, and is not something separate and outside of the political, economic and social context. We, at MFMT believe that a transformation from a competitive society to a cooperative society could allow the ongoing digital revolution to produce a vast abundance of the necessities of life. Global connectivity can be activated to meet the needs of humanity and protect all living beings and the planet. It is possible to achieve community-based democracy, technology and a society built on care, justice and concern for all living beings. This is a matter of will. Whether this is something that the working and poor people will demand and fight for is the critical question of our historic moment.
Technology and the revolutionary process
Over the last quarter century or so capitalism has been challenged in its technological transition from industrial and machine-based production that is labor enhancing to digital and robotic production that is labor replacing. This is causing a major disruption in the production and distribution of the necessities of life. Production with fewer workers means that ever-larger swathes of today’s multiracial and multi-gendered working class are “disposable” to the capitalist operations. Without work and wages, they are unable to meet basic human needs. These changes are now speeding up in the midst of the COVID pandemic and many millions of jobs have already been lost. Most of these will not return, including those being digitized and automated. The deepening economic crisis that has occurred as a result of COVID sets the stage for the future and must be understood as we consider our responses to new weapons in the arsenal of the state, all enhanced by digital technology: surveillance, monitoring, intimidation, tracking and direct violence. MFMT is actively pursuing answers to these emerging challenges.
May First Movement Technology / Technology & Revolution Convergences
May First Movement Technology is a democratically run, not-for-profit cooperative of movement organizations and activists in the United States and Mexico. Founded in 2005, our 850 members (mostly organizations in the U.S. and Mexico) host over 10,000 email addresses and over 2,000 web sites on our collectively owned and secured hardware that run exclusively on encrypted disks. Our members run our organization via a race and gender diverse elected body of movement activists, organizers and technologists. We participate in networks, coalitions and campaigns organizing around many technology related issues. MFMT has distinguished itself in confronting many legal threats and standing up to subpoenas. The organization engages in building movements by advancing the strategic use and collective control of technology for local struggles, global transformation, and emancipation without borders.
In relation to this historical moment, we at May First believe that information technology can help us address the threats of climate change, economic inequality and other socio-political challenges of our times. Technology for the common good has limitless potential to meet the needs of all living beings.
The “Technology and Revolution” Campaign
In 2017 we initiated a “Technology and Revolution” campaign to talk with movement organizers about how we can harness that power. Nearly 1,000 activists participated in 18 convergences throughout the United States, and Mexico. Open discussions about what our movement should be doing about technology, identified hundreds of priorities, from which themes consistently emerged:
1. Assure a neutral internet
2. Oppose, restrain and ultimately eliminate intrusive government internet surveillance
3. Provide everyone full access to high-speed internet
4.Develop an Internet that can be democratic, open and free of corporate pressure.
5. Improve and deepen the collaboration between movement technologists and other movement activists and organizations.
These led us to reflect on the challenges of protecting a free and open Internet and about technology’s role in the future. In 2018-2019 we organized 5 congresses to further develop these themes. We offered a few readings and a Discussion Guide to help ground the conversation, and decisions on how to facilitate the conversations were left up to the organizers.
Points of unity emerged from these congresses:
1. To improve and deepen the collaboration and mutual education between movement technologists and other movement activists and organizations.
2. Provide everyone with full, FREE, high-speed, equitable, access to the Internet, with no content restrictions.
3. Build an Internet that is democratic, community-centered and governed, open, decentralized, and free of corporate pressure and monopolies.
4. Build a political technology campaign to oppose, restrain, and ultimately eliminate government surveillance.
5. Focus technology development to prioritize sustainability, build communities that thrive, repair damage to the environment and build a world of climate justice.
6. To seek out, build, and embrace the potential of digital technologies to protect and advance our movements.
7. Foster political consciousness about the centralization of technology in movement work and the urgency of revolutionary movement-based technology.
8. Expand the technology conversation beyond settler/colonial technology and thinking to be culturally relevant, intersectional and grounded in political education and historical context.
These intense conversations took hours, and the consensus was that community run and owned technology is central to our collective future. We need to heighten awareness of this fact. The challenge is that unless we deal with issues of power and the reality of capitalism, hetero-normative patriarchy and white supremacy, technology’s capacity will be limited. We therefore focus on technology rooted in building the movement for working class and poor people’s power.
Technology has immense potential for strengthening the struggle for socio-economic and environmental justice.
How technology can fortify global movements
Technology’s use in social movements provides tools to strengthen and expand ideas, projects and direct actions. As Samantha Camacho, one of the co-authors, says, “…as a Latin American mestizo woman, I visualize technological development as being co-opted by privileged groups, where the needs and voices of resistance are not being reflected. It is hard work to identify and adopt useful tools for the struggle, work that is not always possible to do beyond immediate response and reaction to very specific risks such as surveillance and monitoring.”
Currently, technology is ever present and has implications for our daily work. Two scenarios demonstrate its impact:
In the first case, movements that are “open” can reach many people in different locations, so their communication, organization and advocacy processes will be through open platforms, mostly digital. People who participate do not necessarily know each other physically, they only coincide ideologically, so their life experiences can be a factor of disagreement. Organizational spaces can be varied and exist simultaneously, in most cases without control of participation, which can result in violating personal profiles and / or anonymity. Open organizational spaces can be conducive to the rapid flow of ideas and the construction of new narratives and can lead to the emergence of new organized groups that propose concrete actions beneficial to the movement. On the other hand, collective care agreements are difficult to make and maintain in the long term because participation is constantly changing.
In “closed” movements there are groups small enough for people to know each other personally. Besides sharing ideology they are involved in organizational processes that allow them to generate bonds of trust and safe spaces. In extreme cases they will use security protocols that require encryption tools and a more meticulous care of identity, anonymity and personal data. These require generating agreements of coexistence and collective care that in the long run contributes to having a more intertwined and co-responsible movement. They are more successful in generating information, organizing it, analyzing it and distributing it. When the tools are more specialized they require a learning curve that is unsustainable when done individually. It necessarily requires a collective commitment.
Talking about how technology contributes to the development or success of social movements often fails to recognize the dynamics of the people involved and on the breadth of the movement itself. Decisions can be made according to needs and risks, yet collective agreements and periods of learning and testing are always required.
Technology” and the Internet: The People and Our Imagination
Look at your computer without assumptions and what do you see? It’s a box: an inanimate object, using electricity and some machined parts inside it with wires attached. It does nothing and means nothing because, sitting there in isolation from the rest of the world, it is nothing. The moment you turn it on and connect to the Internet, everything is transformed. This box is part of a network of 4.5 billion people, globally. We share information, ideas, activities and what’s important to us. It is the most remarkable project of communication the human race has ever engaged. That, for us, is the Internet — not the technology that drives it.
Discussion often rages about whether the Internet is a force for good or evil though that is not the most critical question. The more important question about this massive act of human communication is why it emerged now, leading to most of the people on earth talking to each other? Human history offers the answer. We opened this essay with a description of the crisis that the human race is facing. Few now doubt that the crisis is existential and consists of failing societies, collapsing economies and a battered and threatened environment. If we don’t solve this crisis, it will destroy everything. Not everyone thinks about that all the time but we can safely assume that almost everyone feels it.
Human history is littered with such crises, which have sometimes come close to wiping us out as a species. They vary in cause and intensity but have one thing in common: in our response, we have a natural tendency to band together, rely on each other and share what we each have learned. We have survived as a species because we collaborate, not just cooperate (something many species do instinctively) but actually share the tasks of the present while also thinking about the future: planning, foreseeing, and imagining about what the world could and should look like to assure that we survive. We can envision tomorrow and that vision drives our collective action today.
The process of “imagining”
How do we do this imagining? We think together with the entire human race. As you think right now, your thoughts are derived from the thinking of the entire human race. There is, in reality, no such thing as an original idea. Every idea can be traced back, further and further to the thinking of others. Our mind is the collective experience of humanity. That is why we have an Internet. It is the mass intellectual collaboration of the entirety of the human race made immediately possible through information technology. It is a kind of mega-mind and that brings into relief its fundamental importance. If the Internet is used for bad purposes that mind is going to go in bad directions. We can win the Internet if we struggle for and manage to democratize it, and we can use it for productive purposes. We can do anything we want with it.
In May First’s Technology and Revolution series described earlier in this essay, participants engaged in an exercising of imagination. They were asked to describe elements of the world they think we should have with no limits and no consideration about feasibility. Dream. Imagine. The contributions in these groups, usually made up of about 20 people, were written on a blackboard. They would fill four or five boards in a 15-minute exercise. Then we would look at them as a group and realize something remarkable. All of it, every single item, can be achieved right now. Nothing these groups of activists came up with is impossible given the technology we already have. The vision of a sustainable society, a dream for many was described in those hundreds of ideas, is a feasible option for our world.
A vision for the future
How we collectively develop that vision is the challenge. The human race has answered that challenge by developing the Internet. In an instant, we can now share knowledge, open our lives and thinking to others, understand the challenges that people face in different parts of the world, compare how we respond to those challenges in different places, understand what we have in common and plan our lives and actions world-wide based on that understanding. Of course, we’re not the only people who see the Internet. Governments and powerful corporations recognize the power of the Internet and have been quick to understand and exploit its potential. The struggle over the Internet right now is not whether or not they’re going to shut it down but how it’s going to be used. Will its use be limited to advertising, marketing and repressive surveillance or will it be used to meet human needs, share our lives, build our collective imagination and plan ways to realize a society that sustains and realizes our imaginings?
That’s why May First Movement Technology combines our two tasks: sharing technological resources like web-hosting, email provision and cloud storage and web conferencing; and participating as an organization of the movement for fundamental change in all kinds of networks, campaigns and educational work. These aren’t separate tasks for us; they are part of the same effort because, in the end, that technology is only the most efficient and effective way of sharing imagination and that sharing of imagination is what fuels those networks and campaigns.
We dedicate ourselves to Internet work because we are convinced that it is key to building a sustainable world and, in practice, is a major step in the building of a global democracy that can make that world possible.