Oct 25, 2024 post article

After years of complaining about the hells that are social media in particular and enemy infrastructure in general, we’ve finally taken the step to removing ourselves and our reliance on it by revamping our website to be more useful to our needs.

If you want all the technical details, check the bottom of this post, but the short version is on top of hosting our zine library (which we are now also adding poster and sticker designs to! …whenever the Internet Library, recovering from its recent hack, exits Read Only mode and lets us upload things again…) it also hosts a blog, a calendar of events, and a page dedicated to the weekly Open Anarchist Study Group.

It’s currently very bare bones design wise, but we’ll get around to making it pretty.

I want to talk about the desire and intentions for making this switch, the main one being that we want to take seriously our critiques of the existent and our desire for self organization, as well as a desire to publish a wider variety of things, to be another node in the anarchist counter-info ecosystem, and for the ability to better archive our project.

As far as taking seriously our critiques and desire for self organization goes, it’s basically an eye roll inducing cliché at this point to say Social Media Bad, Phone Bad, etc. We all make the joke, do an awkward chuckle about it and don’t really think about it again until we’re complaining about it again the next day. Repeat ad infinitum. But even at the risk of making you, dear reader, roll your eyes yet again I think it’s worth going these critiques and looking critically at why we begrudgingly accept this at best and make a complete joke of it at worst.

Though before I delve into this I do want to be explicitly clear about two things.

Firstly, there is no technical solution to social problems. Meaning that social media or not, there are underlying issues to all the things I’m about to bring up that are more rooted in the ways a world built upon hierarchy, submission and generalized alienation between and from ourselves, the things we do, and the world around us. This has to be intentionally examined and attacked at all times, in all spaces, regardless of what tools we are or aren’t using.

Secondly and similarly, while moving from social media to a website on our own infrastructure doesn’t magically do away with the things I’m going to bring up, I do think every tool and technology carries within it the world that made it and a way of relating to the world it presupposes and encourages, which is why I think using different and older tools is a worthwhile project as a scaffolding to help encourage different behaviors and ways of relating.

And again, no technical solution to social problems, there are inherent issues with alienated, impersonal communication which relies upon a world of displacement and resource extraction to enable it’s invention, the laying of it’s global infrastructure, and the physical resources and energy upkeep to keep it going.

All that being said, to me part of taking self organization seriously is understanding that anarchy is a tension that we live in all parts of our lives and as such we take up the task of self organization in all parts of our lives and projects. Part of this is rejecting the capitalist ideology of efficiency and the mass media ideas of image making and consensus building. In all these realms political parties and billion dollar news corporations will always be better than whatever we can do, but we aren’t trying to emulate them and build followings, voters or viewers. We want to find and encourage rebellious individuals engaged in the infinite tension of living freedom, an entirely different goal requiring different tools.

Beyond this even, we are a people without a tradition of self organization - taught and socialized through family structures, religion, school, work and politics that our only role in life is to obey and follow orders. Every small instance where we can practice and experiment with it helps us when we break through the time and space of authority and domination and have chances to experiment with the bigger projects of self organization - whether its a squatted social center or farm or the liberation of a whole territory, whether a temporary autonomous space carved out by a riot or a months long insurrection enveloping a whole region.

And, to be real, most people have a working bullshit detector. Look at these anarchists who say they are against all forms of domination, hierarchy, authority and representation yet vote and petition those in power. Clearly their words are just words and they are politicians like any other who speak out both sides of their mouths. It’s an issue of coherency, of understanding our means are our ends because there is no end. We already have to make so many sacrifices to survive, such as paying rent while we are too weak to simply take housing as needed, but this is not an excuse to simply shrug it off and say that it is what it is.

As far as specific critiques of social media go what concerns me is that its a particular tool that encourages spectatorship, not just in the way of social media apps are designed in a way to keep our attention but also in the way of when people come out to the streets rather than participate many come simply to stand around and get videos and pictures for social media often to build a particular image of themselves or their group/project.

In this way social media is also a repressive tool as these images and videos become a way for police forces to reconstruct scenes and identify people for arrest. Beyond this, social media is basically a ready made network map of rebel communities and affinities for our enemies - who follows who, who follows what project, who interacts with who more or less.

There is a more sinister aspect of repression that comes with it which is algorithmic control, self censorship and limiting of our discourses within the limits of civil society. It’s no secret that most of what is seen is decided by a black box algorithm made and tweaked entirely by our enemies which builds personality profiles on users which is also sold to advertisers and, like all other data social media gathers from us (including DM’s), is available to the police. It’s clear that we know this on some level and understand how identifiable we make ourselves via these platforms so we engage in a practice of self disciplining in what we say which leaks out into our broader discourses and practices. For example, with regards to the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people by the israeli state how many people complain about how they’ve seemingly exhausted all options of resistance? How many of us put forward not a watered down version of direct action, but a direct action that speaks through fire and gunpowder? Part of it is we know we are identifiable which means open to door knocks by our enemies over our words, the other part is because our enemies control these platforms they have control over our presence on these platforms and under a misinformed desire to keep access to these platforms we engage in self disciplining of our words and ideas letting our enemies exert control over our dialogues.

Slightly touched on already but there is also just keeping in mind the cycle of social reproduction - that what we do creates a certain kind of world which compels us to continue to do the same activity which shapes us into particular people of that world. In this instance, the majority of radical projects being on social media requires people to have a working phone or at least some level of consistent internet access and particular social media accounts to keep up with and participate in things going on which fundamentally excludes people who don’t have those resources or don’t want to have them. People shouldn’t need a particular social media account or a phone to tap into particular information, resources or projects and at the current moment most individuals sharing of news, information and events stops at sharing a post on a particular social media site and even worse many newer people coming to anarchy don’t know a time when this wasn’t the case. It will take a lot of intentionality and cultural struggle to change that.

I could keep going deeper on the particular critiques of social media, and perhaps I will at a later date, but this is just a surface level look at what I think are some of its most pressing issues. I think there is also arguments to be made that alienated communication socializes us to not see others as actual people and as such treat others poorly, that the constant stream of catastrophe next to entertainment desensitizes us to the world around us, that the images projected to us of struggle elsewhere encourages a focus on image rather than action, content of action and experimentation. I could go on, and again these issues are not isolated to social media alone but I argue are particularly more harmful and felt through the mass use of social media.

Coming to the rest of the reasoning for making this switch one of the big ones is a desire to publish a wider array of things. Social media prioritizes images - and generally not printable ones - short video and short text. We want to provide a space to publish the longer works of friends and comrades, interviews, translations and experiment with audio and visual projects. An instagram, twitter, mastadon, etc. account just isn’t the tool for these.

Relatedly, I have a particular desire to archive our project. Social media accounts are notoriously hard to archive, they aren’t archived by default, it’s a pain if not nearly impossible to find old things, we’ve already been long since locked out of our twitter account, it’s a matter of time before instagram kicks us off there and fundamentally none of these companies and their data will be around forever. We think it’s important for radical projects to archive their works - whether its writing, videos, audio, images, whatever it is! - so we can inform and inspire the radicals, anarchists, and random pissed off individuals of the future.

Finally, the distro is fundamentally a counter-info project and at the current moment the counter info ecosystem in this particular territory primarily comprises of Puget Sound Anarchists, a hand full of distros, a hand full of instagram accounts, and an inconsistent amount of graffiti and wheat pasting. This is neither robust nor from my perspective meeting the needs of the individuals and ongoing struggles here. So in being able to better archive and create longer and different forms of media and analysis we are trying to take seriously our position as part of the counter-info ecosystem and use this as an example of what other projects could be doing and offer technical support for any projects that are interested.

May a thousand counter-info projects bloom!

May they inspire a thousand individuals to action!

Before ending this, I again want to just really hammer home the point that there are no technical solutions to social problems and that all of these issues will be tacked by individuals taking the initiative to change these behaviors themselves, and that these issues go beyond social media in particular.

-An Individual who Comprises Part of Fugitive Distro

The Technical Stuff

Currently our library is hosted by The Internet Archive which has its ups and downs. We’re looking into a few alternatives and redundancies, most of which are self hosted. One of these is putting out a yearly torrent of the entire library or parts of the library - such as All Of It, Zines, Zines by Category, Stickers, Posters, so people can take it all or pick and choose. Another option, which is what the Anarchist Stickers Archive uses, is IPFS. Either way it’s going to involve self hosting, which means finding someone or somewhere that will let us set up a server or renting server space with money we don’t have. Or maybe we can find a bunch of other nerds who will share parts of their bandwidth for IPFS, or we just need to dig up and splice into fiber optic cables somewhere to get free internet for a server.

The rest of our web infrastructure is hosted by Autistici/Inventati, an over 20 year long running anarchist collective. We use them for our email account and we use their static web hosting for our website.

We didn’t have to use a static website, we could have used Noblogs which is much easier to use and what we would suggest to people who aren’t particularly tech savvy. If you’ve ever used Wordpress, it’s a custom wordpress set up that they self host. We chose a static website because we wanted particular control over how things looked and particularly to have fine control over the display of our library which Noblogs isn’t particularly suited for.

Because we are using a static website we are using Hugo to generate it and be able to have a blog like structure. It’s kind of a pain especially since there is a lot of custom HTML that works against Hugo’s theme system, but now that the base set up is all done adding new pages or blog posts is easy and for the blogs a custom RSS feed is made for people who still use that.

Our calendar of events is the other thing besides the library that’s not on anarchist infrastructure. Currently it just uses Calendar.Online but we’re looking into possibly using the Squat Net radar or if we go the self hosting route for our library putting together an instance of Ganico.

Also it’s unused for the moment, but we have an account on Kolektiva, an anarchist Peer-Tube instance which we may be using in the future for all our audio and visual projects or we might scrap it and do self hosting for all that too. Who knows!

Again, there is no technical solutions for social problems and there were easier ways to go about all of this, but its a matter of principles and desire for self organization as well as one of us (hi) having an interest in these kinds of projects and looking for an excuse to mess around with them.