This letter was collaboratively written with dozens of aligned groups. As the weeks of action called by Extinction Rebellion were coming to an end, our groups came together to reflect on the narrative, strategies, tactics and demands of a reinvigorated climate movement in the UK. In this letter we articulate a foundational set of principles and demands that are rooted in justice and which we feel are crucial for the whole movement to consider as we continue constructing a response to the ‘climate emergency’.

Dear Extinction Rebellion,

The emergence of a mass movement like Extinction Rebellion (XR) is an encouraging sign that we have reached a moment of opportunity in which there is both a collective consciousness of the immense danger ahead of us and a collective will to fight it. A critical mass agrees with the open letter launching XR when it states “If we continue on our current path, the future for our species is bleak.”

At the same time, in order to construct a different future, or even to imagine it, we have to understand what this “path” is, and how we arrived at the world as we know it now. “The Truth” of the ecological crisis is that we did not get here by a sequence of small missteps, but were thrust here by powerful forces that drove the distribution of resources of the entire planet and the structure of our societies. The economic structures that dominate us were brought about by colonial projects whose sole purpose is the pursuit of domination and profit. For centuries, racism, sexism and classism have been necessary for this system to be upheld, and have shaped the conditions we find ourselves in.

Another truth is that for many, the bleakness is not something of “the future”. For those of us who are indigenous, working class, black, brown, queer, trans or disabled, the experience of structural violence became part of our birthright. Greta Thunberg calls world leaders to act by reminding them that “Our house is on fire”. For many of us, the house has been on fire for a long time: whenever the tide of ecological violence rises, our communities, especially in the Global South are always first hit. We are the first to face poor air quality, hunger, public health crises, drought, floods and displacement.

XR says that “The science is clear: It is understood we are facing an unprecedented global emergency. We are in a life or death situation of our own making. We must act now.”  You may not realize that when you focus on the science you often look past the fire and us – you look past our histories of struggle, dignity, victory and resilience. And you look past the vast intergenerational knowledge of unity with nature that our peoples have. Indigenous communities remind us that we are not separate from nature, and that protecting the environment is also protecting ourselves. In order to survive, communities in the Global South continue to lead the visioning and building of new worlds free of the violence of capitalism. We must both centre those experiences and recognise those knowledges here.

Our communities have been on fire for a long time and these flames are fanned by our exclusion and silencing. Without incorporating our experiences, any response to this disaster will fail to change the complex ways in which social, economic and political systems shape our lives – offering some an easy pass in life and making others pay the cost. In order to envision a future in which we will all be liberated from the root causes of the climate crisis – capitalism, extractivism, racism, sexism, classism, ableism and other systems of oppression –  the climate movement must reflect the complex realities of everyone’s lives in their narrative.

And this complexity needs to be reflected in the strategies too. Many of us live with the risk of arrest and criminalization. We have to carefully weigh the costs that can be inflicted on us and our communities by a state that is driven to target those who are racialised ahead of those who are white. The strategy of XR, with the primary tactic of being arrested, is a valid one – but it needs to be underlined by an ongoing analysis of privilege as well as the reality of police and state violence. XR participants should be able to use their privilege to risk arrest, whilst at the same time highlighting the racialised nature of policing. Though some of this analysis has started to happen, until it becomes central to XR’s organising it is not sufficient. To address climate change and its roots in inequity and domination, a diversity and plurality of tactics and communities will be needed to co-create the transformative change necessary.

We commend the energy and enthusiasm XR has brought to the environmental movement, and it brings us hope to see so many people willing to take action. But as we have outlined here, we feel there are key aspects of their approach that need to evolve. This letter calls on XR to do more in the spirit of their principles which say they “are working to build a movement that is participatory, decentralised, and inclusive”. We know that XR has already organised various listening exercises, and acknowledged some of the shortcomings in their approach, so we trust XR and its members will welcome our contribution.

As XR draws this period of actions to a close, we hope our letter presents some useful reflections for what can come next. The list of demands that we present below are not meant to be exhaustive, but to offer a starting point that supports the conversations that are urgently needed.

Wretched of the Earth, together with many other groups, hold the following demands as crucial for a climate justice rebellion:

• Implement a transition, with justice at its core, to reduce UK carbon emissions to zero by 2030 as part of its fair share to keep warming below 1.5°C; this includes halting all fracking projects, free transport solutions and decent housing, regulating and democratising corporations, and restoring ecosystems.
• Pass a Global Green New Deal to ensure finance and technology for the Global South through international cooperation. Climate justice must include reparations and redistribution; a greener economy in Britain will achieve very little if the government continues to hinder vulnerable countries from doing the same through crippling debt, unfair trade deals, and the export of its own deathly extractive industries. This Green New Deal would also include an end to the arms trade. Wars have been created to serve the interests of corporations – the largest arms deals have delivered oil; whilst the world’s largest militaries are the biggest users of petrol.
• Hold transnational corporations accountable by creating a system that regulates them and stops them from practicing global destruction. This would include getting rid of many existing trade and investment agreements that enshrine the will of these transnational corporations.
• Take the planet off the stock market by restructuring the financial sector to make it transparent, democratised, and sustainable while discentivising investment in extractive industries and subsidising renewable energy programmes, ecological justice and regeneration programmes.
• End the hostile environment of walls and fences, detention centers and prisons that are used against racialised, migrant, and refugee communities. Instead, the UK should acknowledge it’s historic and current responsibilities for driving the displacement of peoples and communities and honour its obligation to them.
• Guarantee flourishing communities both in the global north and the global south in which everyone has the right to free education, an adequate income whether in or out of work, universal healthcare including support for mental wellbeing, affordable transportation, affordable healthy food, dignified employment and housing, meaningful political participation, a transformative justice system, gender and sexuality freedoms, and, for disabled and older people, to live independently in the community.

The fight for climate justice is the fight of our lives, and we need to do it right. We share this reflection from a place of love and solidarity, by groups and networks working with frontline communities, united in the spirit of building a climate justice movement that does not make the poorest in the rich countries pay the price for tackling the climate crisis, and refuses to sacrifice the people of the global South to protect the citizens of the global North. It is crucial that we remain accountable to our communities, and all those who don’t have access to the centres of power. Without this accountability, the call for climate justice is empty.

The Wretched of the Earth

• Argentina Solidarity Campaign
• Black Lives Matter UK
• BP or not BP
• Bolivian Platform on Climate Change
• Bristol Rising Tide
• Campaign Against the Arms Trade CAAT
• Coal Action Network
• Concrete Action
• Decolonising Environmentalism
• Decolonising our minds
• Disabled People Against the Cuts
• Earth in Brackets
• Edge Fund
• End Deportations
• Ende Gelände
• GAIA – Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives
• Global Forest Coalition
• Green Anticapitalist Front
• Gentle Radical
• Grow Heathrow/transition Heathrow
• Hambach Forest occupation
• Healing Justice London
• Labour Against Racism and Fascism
• Lesbians and Gays Support the Migrants
• London campaign against police and state violence
• London Feminist Antifa
• London Latinxs
• Marikana Solidarity Campaign
• Mental Health Resistance Network
• Migrants Connections festival
• Migrants Rights Network
• Movimiento Jaguar Despierto
• Ni Una Menos UK
• Ota Benga Alliance for Peace
• Our Future Now
• People’s Climate Network
• Peoples’ Advocacy Foundation for Justice and
• Race on the Agenda (ROTA)
• Redress, South Africa
• Reclaim the Power
• Science for the People
• Platform
• The Democracy Centre
• The Leap
• Third World Network
• Tripod: Training for Creative Social Action
• War on Want

Wretched of The Earth is a grassroots collective for Indigenous, black, brown and diaspora groups and individuals demanding climate justice and acting in solidarity with our communities, both here in the UK and in Global South. Join our mailing list by completing this registration form.

Image of Wretched of the Earth bloc with “Still fighting CO2lonialism Your climate profits kill” banner.

Originally published on the Red Pepper website, 3rd May 2019: https://www.redpepper.org.uk/an-open-letter-to-extinction-rebellion/

The post An open letter to Extinction Rebellion appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Republished from The Guardian

The office planner on the wall features two reminders: “Technosocialism” and “Indienet institute”. A huge husky named Oskar lies near the door, while the two people who live and work here – a plain apartment block on the west side of Malmö, Sweden – go about their daily business.

Aral Balkan and Laura Kalbag moved here from Brighton in 2015. Balkan has Turkish and French citizenship, and says their decision was sparked by two things: increasing concerns about the possibility of Britain leaving the EU, and the Conservative government’s Investigatory Powers Act, otherwise known as the snoopers’ charter, some of which was declared unlawful this week by the court of appeal. The legislation cut straight to the heart of what now defines the couple’s public lives: the mesh of corporate and government surveillance surrounding the internet, and how to do something about it.

Kalbag, 31, is from Surrey, has a web design background and says she’s “always been a very socially minded, troublemaking kind of person”. Balkan, 41, traces what he does now to his experiences as a small child, designing his own games for a personal computer. It was “the last time when we actually owned and controlled our computers – there wasn’t some corporation somewhere watching everything we were doing, storing it and monetising it.”

Now, they style themselves as “a two-person-and-one-husky social enterprise striving for social justice in the digital age”.

Aral Balkan and Laura Kalbag with their husky, Oskar. Photograph: Lars Dareberg/Getty for the Guardian

Balkan and Kalbag form one small part of a fragmented rebellion whose prime movers tend to be located a long way from Silicon Valley. These people often talk in withering terms about Big Tech titans such as Mark Zuckerberg, and pay glowing tribute to Edward Snowden. Their politics vary, but they all have a deep dislike of large concentrations of power and a belief in the kind of egalitarian, pluralistic ideas they say the internet initially embodied.

What they are doing could be seen as the online world’s equivalent of punk rock: a scattered revolt against an industry that many now think has grown greedy, intrusive and arrogant – as well as governments whose surveillance programmes have fuelled the same anxieties. As concerns grow about an online realm dominated by a few huge corporations, everyone involved shares one common goal: a comprehensively decentralised internet.

Balkan energetically travels the world, delivering TED-esque talks with such titles as “Free is a Lie” and “Avoiding Digital Feudalism”. His appearances have proliferated on YouTube, although he himself uses an online video player that doesn’t harvest personal data. (“If there’s a free and open, decentralised and usable alternative, we try to use it,” he says – he favours, for example, the privacy-respecting search engine DuckDuckGo over Google.) At the same time, he and Kalbag are on a painstaking journey that involves ideas and prototypes aimed at creating a new kind of digital life.

Back in 2014, they came up with a plan for the Indiephone, “a beautiful new mobile platform and a phone that empowers regular people to own their own data”. “One of my mistakes was, I told people about it,” says Balkan. “And then we realised there was no way we could finance it.” Assisted by around £100,000 in crowdfunding, they started work on a new kind of social network, called Heartbeat, whose users would hold on to their data, and communicate privately. Since then, they have launched an app for iPhone and Macs called Better Blocker, purchased by about 14,000 people, and with a simple function: in a much more thorough way than most adblocking software, it disables the endless tracking devices that now follow people as they move around the web.

In the last few months, they have started working with people in the Belgian city of Ghent – or, in Flemish, Gent – where the authorities own their own internet domain, complete with .gent web addresses. Using the blueprint of Heartbeat, they want to create a new kind of internet they call the indienet – in which people control their data, are not tracked and each own an equal space online. This would be a radical alternative to what we have now: giant “supernodes” that have made a few men in northern California unimaginable amounts of money thanks to the ocean of lucrative personal information billions of people hand over in exchange for their services.

“I got into the web because I liked the democracy of it,” says Kalbag, who has just published a book titled Accessibility for Everyone, about innovating in a way that includes those who technology too often ignores – not least people with disabilities. “I want to be able to be in a society where I have control over my information, and other people do as well. Being a woman in technology, you can see how hideously unequal things are and how people building these systems don’t care about anyone other than themselves. I think we have to have technology that serves everybody – not just rich, straight, white guys.”

In the Scottish coastal town of Ayr, where a company called MaidSafe works out of a silver-grey office on an industrial estate tucked behind a branch of Topps Tiles, another version of this dream seems more advanced. MaidSafe’s first HQ, in nearby Troon, was an ocean-going boat. The company moved to an office above a bridal shop, and then to an unheated boatshed, where the staff sometimes spent the working day wearing woolly hats. It has been in its new home for three months: 10 people work here, with three in a newly opened office in Chennai, India, and others working remotely in Australia, Slovakia, Spain and China.

Muneeb Ali (left) and Ryan Shea of Blockstack. Photograph: David Chuchuca

MaidSafe was founded 12 years ago by the 52-year-old computing engineer and former lifeboat captain David Irvine. He has the air of someone with so many ideas he can barely get them all out. Despite spurning money from venture capitalists, his company has come from humble beginnings to the verge of its proper launch.

In a pristine meeting room, Irvine explains a mistake carried over from old-fashioned corporate computer networks to the modern internet. “There’s a big server, and people connect to it. That used to be the way companies work; now, they’ve done the same thing to the internet. Which is remarkably stupid, because they are central points of failure. They’re points of attack. There are passwords on them: stuff gets stolen.” He goes on: “And as the internet was starting, it was clear to me straight away that it would centralise around several large companies and they would basically control the world.”

His alternative is what he calls the Safe network: the acronym stands for “Safe Access for Everyone”. In this model, rather than being stored on distant servers, people’s data – files, documents, social-media interactions – will be broken into fragments, encrypted and scattered around other people’s computers and smartphones, meaning that hacking and data theft will become impossible. Thanks to a system of self-authentication in which a Safe user’s encrypted information would only be put back together and unlocked on their own devices, there will be no centrally held passwords.

No one will leave data trails, so there will be nothing for big online companies to harvest. The financial lubricant, Irvine says, will be a cryptocurrency called Safecoin: users will pay to store data on the network, and also be rewarded for storing other people’s (encrypted) information on their devices. Software developers, meanwhile, will be rewarded with Safecoin according to the popularity of their apps. There is a community of around 7,000 interested people already working on services that will work on the Safe network, including alternatives to platforms such as Facebook and YouTube.

One big question hangs over Irvine’s concept of a decentralised internet: given what we know about what some people use technology for, the encrypted information stored on people’s devices will include fragments of nasty, illegal stuff, won’t it?

“It will. It will. It definitely will. It’s all society’s data. All information,” says Irvine

I read him a quote from the company’s blog: “Even MaidSafe staff don’t know who is on the network, where they are based, what has been stored and where the data is located.”

“No. We don’t know. That’s fine, though.”

Is it? Even if it includes child abuse images, or so-called revenge porn or beheading videos?

“Yeah. I think it’s fine. Because to me, the whole thing here is like … You’re building a road, and you think: ‘How can I be absolutely certain that a paedophile doesn’t drive on that bit of tarmac?’ You can’t. That’s the thing with the internet. When you’ve got these controlled things like Facebook, of course they could clamp down on some of that stuff. But also, it means they can manipulate the whole of society. And we can’t be in that position.”

Irvine adds that MaidSafe’s encryption is no more developed than the kind already used by the net’s criminal elements. “We’re not enabling them. We’re enabling everybody else,” he says. He says he would encourage the police to go on to the network and use the same detection and entrapment methods they already use on the so-called dark web, where users can stay anonymous.

Once MaidSafe is up and running, there will be very little any government or authority can do about it: “We can’t stop the network if we start it. If anyone turned round and said: ‘You need to stop that,’ we couldn’t. We’d have to go round to people’s houses and switch off their computers. That’s part of the whole thing. The network is like a cyber-brain; almost a lifeform in itself. And once you start it, that’s it.”

Before my trip to Scotland, I tell him, I spent whole futile days signing up to some of the decentralised social networks that already exist – Steemit, Diaspora, Mastadon – and trying to approximate the kind of experience I can easily get on, say, Twitter or Facebook. They were largely so underpopulated that there’s been no incentive to go back. Won’t the same thing happen to MaidSafe?

“It might,” he says.

But is he optimistic or pessimistic? “Oh, this won’t fail. It won’t. If you ask me: ‘Will this be the future?’ … absolutely. Not necessarily my version, but a version of a completely decentralised network based on privacy, security, freedom – that will exist.”

One big focus of the conversation about a different internet are cryptocurrencies and so-called blockchain technology, whose most spectacular story so far has been the rise of Bitcoin. All users of a cryptocurrency have their own “private key”, which unlocks the opportunity to buy and sell it. Instead of financial transactions having to be hosted by a bank – or, for that matter, an online service such as PayPal – a payment in a cryptocurrency is validated by a network of computers using a shared algorithim. A record of the transaction is added to an online ledger – the blockchain – in a way that is unalterable. And herein lie two potential breakthroughs.

One, according to some cryptocurrency enthusiasts, is a means of securing and protecting people’s identities that doesn’t rely on remotely stored passwords. The other is a hope that we can leave behind intermediaries such as Uber and eBay, and allow buyers and sellers to deal directly with each other.

Blockstack, a startup based in New York, aims to bring blockchain technology to the masses. Like MaidSafe, its creators aim to build a new internet, and a 13,000-strong crowd of developers are already working on apps that either run on the platform Blockstack has created, or use its features. OpenBazaar is an eBay-esque service, up and running since November last year, which promises “the world’s most private, secure, and liberating online marketplace”. Casa aims to be an decentralised alternative to Airbnb; Guild is a would-be blogging service that bigs up its libertarian ethos and boasts that its founders will have “no power to remove blogs they don’t approve of or agree with”.

Muneeb Ali, 36, is originally from Islamabad in Pakistan and is one of Blockstack’s two founders. He is an admirer of Snowden, who, in March, will be the star attraction at a Blockstack event in Berlin.

An initial version of Blockstack is already up and running. Even if data is stored on conventional drives, servers and clouds, thanks to its blockchain-based “private key” system each Blockstack user controls the kind of personal information we currently blithely hand over to Big Tech, and has the unique power to unlock it. “That’s something that’s extremely powerful – and not just because you know your data is more secure because you’re not giving it to a company,” he says. “A hacker would have to hack a million people if they wanted access to their data.”

David Irvine of Maidsafe. Photograph: Maidsafe

It’s significant that Blockstack isn’t based in northern California: Ali says: “The culture in Silicon Valley isn’t the right fit for us.” Even though the startup has attracted millions of dollars from its backers – who include venture capitalists – Ali insists they are in for the long haul.

Back in Malmö, Balkan recalls that Zuckerberg put out a new year statement in which he tried to sound a note of sympathy with people who have grown sick of an online world controlled by a few big players. “In the 1990s and 2000s, most people believed technology would be a decentralising force,” Zuckerberg wrote. “But today, many people have lost faith in that promise. With the rise of a small number of big tech companies – and governments using technology to watch their citizens – many people now believe technology only centralises power rather than decentralises it.” He mentioned encryption and cryptocurrencies, and said he was “interested to go deeper and study the positive and negative aspects of these technologies and how best to use them in our services”.

Balkan marvels. “How does that work with a huge entity like Facebook, that just sucks power up?” he asks. “It’s absolute spin.”

He and Kalbag have much more modest ambitions, and that, he says, is the whole point: if we want a more diverse, open, decentralised internet, developers are going to have to wave goodbye to the idea of huge platforms that will supposedly make them rich.

“We’ve kind of been brainwashed into this Silicon Valley idea of success,” he says. “You know: ‘Unless you’ve made a billion dollars and you’re on the cover of Forbes magazine as the next king, you’re not successful.’ With our projects, no one’s going to make a billion dollars if we’re successful – not me, not Laura, not anyone.”

He drains the last of his coffee and checks his phone. “And if we do, you’ll know something’s gone wrong. We’ll have screwed up.”

Lead image: Punk rock internet illustration. Illustration: Andy Martin/Heart

The post The punk rock internet – how DIY ​​rebels ​are working to ​replace the tech giants appeared first on P2P Foundation.

People gather during last year’s Occupy Hong Kong protests. Photo via Flickr user johnlsl

During the fall of 2011, when Occupy Wall Street inhabited a chunk of New York’s Financial District, many of us reporters found ourselves especially fascinated with the media center on the northeast end, a huddle of laptops and generators surrounded (at first) by a phalanx of bikes. I spent a lot of time there myself. After the christening of Tahrir Square as a “Facebook revolution” a few months earlier, this was the place where one would expect to find The Story, the place where the hashtags were being concocted and the viral videos uploaded. From #OccupyWallStreet to #BlackLivesMatter, it has become customary to name our movements after hashtags, and to thank our smartphones for bringing us together and into the streets.

As Occupy blew up around me, and as I tried to figure out what to write about it, I was lucky to have the guidance of Mary Elizabeth King, who worked for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee during the Civil Rights era and went on to become a scholar of movements around the world. I was editing a column of hers then, which gave us an excuse to check in regularly.

“Social media alone are not causative,” she wrote in one of her columns around that time. “Nonviolent movements have always appropriated the most advanced technologies available in order to spread their message.” This was something she told me again and again. Which is to say: Don’t be distracted by the technology—it’s not as big a deal as everyone thinks. She helped me listen better to the people themselves, to their ideas and their choices. Such meatspace-centrism also helped me understand why much of Occupy’s momentum was lost when police destroyed the physical protest camps.

We’re often told, especially by those who profit from them, that the latest gizmos change everything, that they spread democracy as a byproduct of their built-in disruptiveness. But whenever a Facebook-driven protest fills Union Square, I think of the May Day photographs from a century ago, when the same place was just as filled, or more so, by protesters in ties and matching hats—no Facebook required.

Socialists in Union Square, New York City, on May Day, 1912. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Power is still power, and a lot of the techniques for building it and challenging it from the past aren’t going away—unless we let ourselves forget them. And I worry that the gizmos many of us depend on are too good at helping us forget.

What online social media excel at is getting an idea out to a large number of people really quickly—but only for a brief period of time. They’re great at spurring bursts of adrenaline, not so much at sustaining long-term movements. This shouldn’t be so surprising, because the developers of social media networks optimize them for rapid-fire advertising. A labor organizer working with low-wage workers recently lamented to me that many of those she works with are using Instagram—which is even worse on this front than some other popular networks.

“There’s only so much you can do by sharing photos,” she said.

The problems that viral media present are not entirely new. They’re akin to what happened in 1968 in France, when students and artists filled Paris with their slogans and provoked an uprising that nearly brought down the government. And then the unions stepped in—at first, they supported the students, but then, by negotiating with the government and wielding their economic power, the unions took the gains for themselves. A similar story unfolded in the wake of Egypt’s “Facebook revolution”: The young, tech-savvy liberals may have instigated the uprising’s early days, but when the fairest election in the country’s history came around, they didn’t stand a chance against the Muslim Brotherhood, who had spent decades organizing through neighborhood mosques and social services. The Muslim Brotherhood later fell to the US-funded Egyptian military. The liberal Facebookers still have a long way to go.

If a viral, revolutionary rupture were to happen in the United States right now, who would be best poised to benefit? Walmart? The military? I doubt it would be the self-styled radicals loosely organized across the country. Whenever I’m in a meeting of anarchists talking about how they’d be stronger if they provided childcare, I think of the evangelical megachurches I’ve been to that are actually doing it, big time.

Protesters in Cairo’s Tahrir Square in 2011. Photo via Flickr user Ramy Raoof

Effective resistance movements depend on networks that are flexible, durable, and can adapt their strategies to changing conditions over time. They need to provide support to members and would-be members who want to ditch the institutions that prop up the current system. And they need to develop alternative institutions that build a new world in the shell of the old. None of these are things that Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or Snapchat do terribly well—though, in principle, they could.

DemocracyOS, built by Argentinian activists, and Loomio, built by Occupy veterans in New Zealand, are open-source tools that facilitate collective decision-making; both are already being put to use by a new generation of internet-based political parties. CoBudget, a new add-on for Loomio, helps groups allocate resources collaboratively. Another open-source project, Diaspora—a Facebook-like network that allows users to control their own data instead of entrusting it to a corporation—works well enough that the Islamic State has turned to it. CoWorker.org is a platform that helps workers connect with each other and mount campaigns to improve their conditions. Movement-friendly technologies like these, however, tend to be far less market-friendly than their competitors, and don’t attract the private investment that commercial platforms use to build a critical mass of users.

Smartphones, meanwhile, make it easier than ever before to document police abuse and blast the evidence out everywhere. Organizations like Witness are equipping activists to be even more sophisticated in putting mobile cameras to good use. But these phones also come at the cost of perpetual surveillance by increasingly sophisticated—and militarized—police forces; there are times when they are better left at home.

If you look beyond devices and apps, there are lots of reasons to be hopeful about the future of protest and activism. Never before has there been so much knowledge available about what makes protest effective, or so many opportunities for getting good training. Researchers like Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan have been sifting through data on past movements to determine what works and what doesn’t. Historians, meanwhile, are rediscovering forgotten stories of popular uprisings that shaped our world. The country’s first program in civil resistance, at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, offers hope that someday schools teaching people power may be more plentiful than war colleges.

One thing that struck me over and over during my time among the Occupy encampments was the amnesia. The young activists’ familiarity with protest movements even a decade or two before theirs was scattered and piecemeal compared to their knowledge of celebrities, wars, and empires. Perhaps this is why so many participants succumbed to despair when the movement didn’t succeed quite as wildly as they’d hoped after just a few months. Perhaps, too, this is why so many people have given up on the Arab Spring after the horrors of Egyptian military rule and the Islamic State. We forget that the French Revolution underwent similar throes in its Reign of Terror and the rise of Napoleon; paradoxically, it was through Napoleon’s autocratic conquests that democratic ideas spread. In the United States, critics of Occupy fault it for not becoming more mixed up with electoral politics, like the Tea Party, but they rarely notice how it enabled the rise of progressive politicians like Bill de Blasio and Elizabeth Warren.

That protest may be over, but the movement is not. I hope that those fighting the racist justice system today keep a longer view in mind than Occupiers generally did.

If there is one thing I have learned from covering protests, it is not to trust anyone’s predictions—including my own. Movements will always surprise us. But I think we know enough now to stop expecting some killer app to come along and change the world for us. That’s something we’ll have to do ourselves.

The post The Future of Protest appeared first on P2P Foundation.

“Maybe Diaspora was born just before its time, and maybe now, people will realize what a gift has been given to us by the Diaspora founders and the community that continues to build, create and maintain this project.”

I’m overjoyed that the Ello hype-machine is currently reviving interest in Diaspora and decentralised networks that set themselves apart from the netarchical giants. Here’s an excellent first person introduction by Diaspora contributor Birch, which was originally published on her blog.

I joined Diaspora a few years ago, in 2011. I had migrated to G+ when it came out and shortly afterwards the #nymwars started up. Many people were unhappy that Google was forcing ‘real names’ onto people. Many bloggers and people who were known primarily by nicknames had their accounts shut down.

Meanwhile, a group of young men from NYU were already working on something amazing that people had heard about but weren’t quite sure how to join.

People weren’t familiar with this ‘decentralized’ thing. And admittedly, most people who wanted to own their content and have better privacy, etc., weren’t tech-savvy enough to start their own ‘pod’ of Diaspora. All pods interconnect with one another, and many pods started up as a group effort for a few friends to run their own, but some big pods started up also — Diasp.org, Poddery.com and others. These were open to the public to join. Diaspora had their own as well, called joindiaspora.com. However, it proved to take a very long time to get an invite to, 1) because of the sheer volume of people wanting to join and 2) the team wanting full stability at their end before letting everyone in. These other pods took the load off from that.

The downside, however, was that people waiting on an invite from JoinDiaspora didn’t necessarily know about all the other pods unless they were following the Diaspora project. In reality, what the largest percentage of the population did was request an invite and then just wait (and eventually forget). As time passed, they assumed Diaspora never happened. (I still meet people that say “hm, I wonder what ever happened to Diaspora?”

Luckily, there was a vast number of people following the progress quite closely, and the ability to join other pods – rather than wait on the core pod to get all the invites out – became much more common knowledge during the #nymwars of Google+.

I came across a conversation on Google+ about Diaspora, people were talking about joining it and my first thought was:
What? It IS finished? How can I get an account? Where do I find information?

As is normally the way on social networks, info suddenly made its way round. Especially because so many people wanted to leave G+ and Facebook. That desire to avoid data mining and own content, especially while under threat of having your account shut down due to one’s name not being ‘Real Enough’, was enough to get people looking into the status of the Diaspora they had heard about.

In the beginning Diaspora was wonky.

It has ALWAYS been a community project (much more so now), and the boys from NYU were working 24/7 to get this stable for the people flocking to it.

People have a sense of ‘entitlement’, and even though something is free (TRULY free) and being offered to them out of a labour of love, there are still bound to be complaints and demands. Such was the way.

Regardless, Diaspora continued to grow.

Then, the unthinkable happened.

Ilya took his own life. One of the Diaspora founders.

I won’t get into it here. This post isn’t about that. It can be read about here. But there is no shortage of grief still to this day. Most of the community suddenly really REALIZED – these are people. These Founders (like of any project) are people. As grief hit the community, I think, too, a sense of bonding began to grow. I know that I still feel very close to all those initial friends I made there, even those whom I often disagreed with.

As time passed I spent more time in Virtual Worlds, mainly Inworldz, and only spent time on social networking sites sporadically. I also began blogging more about my own personal internal journey with various things. I still logged into Diaspora, still checked in with friends, but wasn’t as active.

Then Ello came on the scene. The hype of this seemingly ‘grassroots’ type of project, and its claim of privacy, no data mining, etc., intrigued me. I joined to see how it compared with Diaspora. Whereas the news had been calling the Diaspora founders ‘Geeky, Nerds’ etc., and almost mocking their attempts, Ello was the ultimate Hipster’s dream. Pretty, retro, minimalist. Actually, the clean interface reminded me a lot of Diaspora. However Ello, at the time of my last use of it (yesterday Sept. 26th), is dysfunctional. You’d think with a Venture Capital investment it would at least have a proper search function, or reshare. Or notifications? nope.

Of course, no one realized right away about the VC investment. Full story on what Ello really is:
https://aralbalkan.com/notes/ello-goodbye/

That’s all the time I’ll waste talking about Ello, except to mention that what got me on my Diaspora rant was coming across the same ignorance as before “Hm, I wonder if Ello is going to go the way of Diaspora?” “Will Ello succeed? Or fail, like Diaspora?” I corrected a few of those misconceptions and although my comments had 50-75+ views, no one responded.

So.

On Diaspora the past few days, I have seen many new people, possibly due to the fact that people remember Diaspora now. Possibly due to the fact that they realize there is an actual TRULY free (and decentralized) option to Facebook, Google+ and, of course Ello.
So I decided to add some screenshots with some getting started tips.

1. When you join, make a NewHere post. The registration process is very simple and directs you into a good ‘Getting Started’, but I don’t think people realize how important that first post is. We follow tags at Diaspora. When anyone posts a public post with tags that I follow in it, that post gets into my Stream. Likewise, I also check JUST my tags to see what’s going on there. If you don’t have friends, and are posting privately, or without tags… no one is going to see your post

As you can see above, this new member made a public post, used the NewHere tag as well as others to show interests. Because I follow NewHere, it arrived in my feed.

You can search topics in the Search bar, add a ‘#’ directly in front of the word you are searching.

Along the side you can see others who share that interest/follow the tag, and of course you see the most recent posts about that topic.

There is the option on the page to Follow that tag (see above the space to enter text) and/or post directly onto that tag page about the topic.
Once you have your followed tags, you can click them from your sidebar and just see what’s going on in the topics of your choice.

To search for a person instead of a tag/topic, simply put the person’s name into the search window with no ‘#’

And there, I found Leanna <3

Now along your sidebar, you can choose to look at individual tags, and you can also choose which aspects you want to see. I can choose just Friends and see just their content, and likewise the text/posting box on that page will by default ONLY go to friends.
If you Select All of your aspects then that will be the default destination of your posts. Be sure to choose ‘public’ below your text box however if you are new and wanting to meet people via your tagged post.

Now, this hasn’t been an extensive ‘how to’, but more of an overview.

If you’d like to join Diaspora, there is a list of pods that indicates if they are open or closed at http://podupti.me, run by diasp.org’s David Morley. When choosing a pod, you can see what version it’s running, if it’s open or closed, amount of time running, and what services it offers (many of them offer cross-posting to WordPress, Tumblr, Twitter and Facebook).

I personally use diasp.org and feel free to look me up!
[email protected]

I think that the sheer number of people flocking to Ello, even with its less than stellar origins and lack of function, indicate that people are really ready to move on from the data mining sites such as Facebook and Google+.

This might be Diaspora’s time to shine.

Maybe Diaspora was born just before its time, and maybe now, people will realize what a gift has been given to us by the Diaspora founders and the community that continues to build, create and maintain this project.

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