Author: Slingshot robot #1

By Sparrow

At the ad agency where I work, the owner brags to clients that we could serve ads to their intern’s mom. It’s not an exaggeration. The vast swathes of user data collected by social media platforms, websites, apps, and the smart devices that colonize our homes grant modern advertisers a staggering ability to target ads to hyper-specific audiences. 

In the past several months, tech companies have come under public scrutiny with a series of scandals—from the whistleblower leaks in October 2021, which exposed (among other things) Facebook’s inconsistent policy enforcement, to the revelation in January 2022 that Apple was skirting its own privacy policies to allow certain companies to continue to collect data from people who had opted out of tracking. Yet while these scandals have brought questions of user privacy and safety to the forefront, popular discourse proceeds from the perspective of the user or tech companies. The ad industry—the financial engine of this system and the ultimate purchaser of user data—remains an inscrutable behemoth. 

When we approach questions of user privacy without a strong understanding of how modern advertising works, how advertisers access data, and how they exploit it in the service of capital, our proposed solutions address only data collection and security, without addressing that data’s ultimate use and abuse. I hope that by using my vantage point from within the ad industry to explore these questions, I can add valuable context to the conversation around privacy and surveillance advertising. 

From Mad Men to the Metaverse

Historically, advertisers had a limited ability to target ads to specific audiences. If my agency wanted to reach the intern’s mom in 1985, we might have bought ad space in Better Homes and Gardens magazine or on a billboard near her house or on NBC during an episode of Cheers. But a whole new ad frontier emerged with the birth of the internet and digital advertising. 

Modern digital advertising functions on a system of real-time ad buying, wherein algorithms hold near-instantaneous auctions each time a user is eligible to be served an ad. While traditional advertising methods rely on buying ad space in a context where interested customers are expected but not guaranteed to see the ad, digital ad exchanges allow advertisers to buy ads on a case-by-case basis, dependent on whether the consumer is likely to be interested or receptive to the ad in the first place.

This subtle difference is critical: If a jewelry company buys an ad in a print magazine, they pay a flat fee for that ad space and everyone who reads the magazine will see the ad, regardless of whether they’re interested in jewelry. If the same company buys a targeted ad on Facebook, they pay for each time someone sees the ad, but instead of the ad being seen by everyone on Facebook, they can select targeting parameters and exploit Facebook’s user data to show the ad only to people who are interested in jewelry (or whatever other criteria they choose). 

User data forms the backbone of this system. The more an advertiser refines their ability to target receptive users, the less money they “waste” on people who don’t make purchases, and the higher the return on investment for the brand when people do make purchases.

In 2022, in addition to all the strategies my agency could have used in 1985, we could also reach the intern’s mom by targeting members of a Facebook group for parents of the intern’s university. Or we could set up a page on the client’s website showing off intern projects and then serve ads to the people who have visited the page. Or we could use social media to target first degree connections of the client’s employees. Ultimately, advertisers’ ability to create extremely specific targeting parameters is as limitless as the data they have access to.

In modern advertising, advertisers and the mega-corporations at the center of the privacy debate are locked in an incestuous relationship. Tech companies control advertisers’ access to digital ad space. Together with Amazon, Meta (née Facebook) and Alphabet (Google’s parent company) hold a triopoly on digital ads—GroupM estimates the three companies facilitate 80-90% of all digital advertising in 2021. By the same token, advertisers provide tech companies’ main source of cash flow, with advertising sales bringing in 81% of Alphabet’s 2021 annual revenue. For Meta, that number jumps to a whopping 97%.

The algorithms of all three platforms further reinforce the value of user data by favoring ads that are more relevant to users, making well-targeted ads literally cheaper to buy. Not coincidentally, all three platforms also happen to directly offer advertisers access to a dazzling hoard of user data. 

Thus, the parasites feed each other. The relentless pursuit of profit incentivizes advertisers to constantly refine their audience targeting capabilities and incentivizes the platforms to continue to collect user data and sell advertisers ever-increasingly precise mechanisms of exploiting that data.

Data Points

So, what data are we talking about exactly? At the risk of sounding alarmist, pretty much anything, since in theory any device with an internet connection can collect data on people. Broadly speaking however, there are two overarching categories: first and third party data.

First party data refers to data that a company or brand collects about their own customers, such as email addresses or phone numbers. Most loyalty programs exist to populate these lists, by getting high value customers—that is, customers likely to make valuable purchases—to share their personal information in exchange for discounts or access to special deals. Another example of first party data is when companies track website visitors, like with the site we set up earlier to find the intern’s mom. Via a piece of code installed on their website, brands can pipe a log of visitors directly into an advertising audience. 

Third party data on the other hand is collected by outside actors—including apps and smart devices, the ad platforms themselves, and a whole sub-industry of companies dedicated to compiling data specifically for advertisers. The most common categories include demographic data, like age or gender; behavioral data, such as the amount of time someone spends on a given social media site; interest data, ranging from broad categories like “beauty” or “cosmetics” down to specific parameters like “pink lipstick”; and geographic data, which encompasses not only where a person is at the moment the ad is served to them, but also the places that they have traveled within a given time period.

It’s a common misconception that companies like Meta and Google sell user data to advertisers. While companies that sell data certainly exist, Meta and Google are not technically among them (I reference Meta and Google here specifically, but this also applies to most social media and major tech companies in general). What these companies actually sell is access to user data, meaning that an advertiser can use Meta’s data, for example, to target ads bought through the Facebook ad platform, but they cannot at any point view the data directly or use it on another ad platform. But this distinction, while important for the sake of understanding the relationship between tech companies and advertisers, is ultimately semantic. Whether a company sells user data directly or “just” access to it, the end result is the same.

If my agency targets the intern’s mom by serving social media ads to the first-degree connections of the people who worked at our client’s company, we rely exclusively on data that advertisers can access via a social media sites’ ad platform, without ever owning the data ourselves. Moreover, it’s data that users voluntarily supply to the social media site when they list their job in their profile and connect with their acquaintances.

When used for something like my boss showing off to a client, it seems fairly innocuous. But just imagine how easily it could instead be used more nefariously: for example, to serve union-busting ads to the friends and family of workers trying to unionize. Regardless of whether the advertiser or tech company has access to the raw data, and regardless of people’s ostensible consent to their data’s collection, the very use of this data represents a massive and predatory privacy invasion.

To an Ad Free Future

Advertising is one of capital’s most ubiquitous instruments of control. It influences where we spend our money, the food we eat, how we pass our time, the people we vote for, even the values we hold. When we trust the ad industry with user data and the ability to target highly specific audiences, they will always use it to manipulate us and to profit off us. Granting advertisers access to any form of user data inherently invites abuse.

Unfortunately, it’s unlikely that the advertising industry will abandon targeted advertising any time soon. Although a bill introduced to the US Congress in January 2022 would ban surveillance advertising, its chances of being enacted are slim—at least in part thanks to how heavily political campaigns rely on serving targeted ads to constituents.

There are basic steps everyone should take to protect their privacy against advertisers. All social media sites have privacy settings of some sort which you should check regularly, although the level of control they actually provide the user is often quite vague. A good ad blocker will block not only ads but the tags that track you across the internet. Likewise, switching to a privacy conscious, open-source browser like Firefox grants inbuilt customizable tracking protection. A VPN adds extra security, preventing companies from accessing your location, which is sometime used to serve ads even when users have opted out of tracking. Furthermore, autonomous tech collectives offer alternatives to tech companies’ monopoly on the internet, with non-ad funded options for secure email, collaboration, and document sharing, just to name a few. 

But what makes this problem so critical is its inescapability: completely avoiding surveillance advertising in its modern iteration requires either a high level of tech literacy or an abstinence from tech altogether. Furthermore, individual solutions don’t address the root of the problem or combat surveillance advertising as a system.

On a cultural level, we should reduce our consumption habits across the board. Advertisers and tech companies are incentivized as agents of capitalism to convince us to over-consume—everything from food to clothing to “content.” Consciously reducing our consumption undermines the power that advertisers exert over us, limits their ability to steal our data and profit from its exploitation, and frees us to build and immerse ourselves in alternate systems.

Beyond this, we need to become more comfortable with inconvenience. A lot of people like personal ads because they’re incredibly convenient: companies can serve you an ad for the exact thing that you’re looking for at the exact time that you’re looking for it. Likewise, tech companies also use the data they collect to customize the content you see, save your settings, and personalize your overall experience with the brand. 

But it’s these very “benefits” that ultimately reveal themselves as self-serving scams. Companies only care about things like your convenience or “brand experience” insofar as that brand experience leads to a return on investment for the brand.

Take for example the ever-mysterious social media algorithms, supposedly designed to enhance user experience by prioritizing relevant content. The most widely publicized of the 2021 whistleblower leaks revealed that Facebook’s own data had indicated for years that Instagram’s algorithm was psychologically addictive and harmful to users’ mental health, particularly among tween and teen girls. But as recently as March 2021, Mark Zuckerberg had publicly denied the accusations that their platforms had negative impacts on mental health.

Similarly, among the slightly less well publicized leaks was the revelation that in 2018, Zuckerberg had personally rejected proposed measures to fix the Facebook algorithm’s proclivity to promote outrage. He cited concerns that the fixes might cause users to interact with the platform less.

In both cases, the apparent “bugs” were ignored or suppressed because they directly serve the explicit purpose of the algorithm: to keep people on the platform as long as possible, because the longer someone is on a given platform, the more opportunities the platform has collect their data and serve them ads.

We must reject experiences that are constantly curated to our convenience, mediated by algorithms and advertisements, and designed to extract maximum profit. We can’t divorce discussions about social media and algorithms from tech companies’ relationships with advertisers. The very real harm inflicted by Meta, Google, and their ilk, allegedly in order to bring us a maximum level of convenience, is incentivized by advertisers at every turn. We must strive, both individually and in our communities, to reclaim our attention and our privacy.

Fundamentally, the most integral part of the advertising “ecosystem” is not the platforms, as advertising leaps from medium to medium, nor the advertisers, who spend and manipulate while never producing anything tangible, but the people they call “consumers.” Advertisers may provide the financial capital, but value is derived from the users themselves—giving users a surprising degree of power. Advertisers know this and ad industry publications have spent much time and energy over the past year fretting about the shift to privacy as a fundamental threat to modern advertising. Without so-called “consumers,” the advertiser-tech partnership becomes nothing but an insatiable ouroboros, eating its own tail.

Book Review: Social Contagion, By Chuang (Charles H. Kerr Publishing Co, 2021)

Review By Carob Chip

Social Contagion is a new book focusing on the COVID pandemic in China, written by a collective of anti-state Chinese communists. Their blogs and journals have highlighted struggles of workers across China against the government and factory bosses.

The book is named after its main essay, “Social Contagion,” which went viral online before getting revised and published here. In it, Chuang trace how the development of capitalism in China (and elsewhere) has created the conditions for a pandemic like COVID by exploiting labor and land.

In addition to their essays, there’s a casual interview with their friends in Wuhan about the lockdown, and a helpful English translation of a blog post from a mainland left group.

Social Contagion makes several provocative arguments which can richly inform our thinking and action. Based on their interviews and first-hand accounts, Chuangargue that the COVID virus was not contained in China primarily through authoritarian state measures, but mostly through largely voluntary mass mobilization of people to achieve the state’s goal of suppressing it. While Chinese media claims this globally as a triumph of state machinery, Chuang paint a different picture where the state’s power is far more distributed – reliant on village/building committees and private security guards with few ties to the Communist Party.

In the West, we are flooded with narratives of China as a draconian, all-knowing state, sometimes inflected with anti-Asian xenophobia. There’s also an emerging tankie boosterism which views China as the torchbearer of international socialism. (Twitter main characters Qiao Collective are the most prominent promoters of the latter line.) What all these perspectives lack is an analysis of China’s state-building from the perspective of the workers on whose backs it is built.

According to Chuang, “the Chinese Communist Party functions as a vanguard for the global capitalist class.” As the class war against workers and the rural poor intensifies, and the bill for decades of environmental plunder comes due, the Chinese government is building new tools to stay in power. Social Contagion expands our knowledge of what these tools might be and what (admittedly meager) flickers of resistance are happening in mainland China. Workers everywhere must build upon this hope to abolish global capitalism once and for all, before a pandemic abolishes us!

Book Review: How to Blow up a Pipeline

Book Review: How to Blow up a Pipeline, By Andreas Malm (Verso Books, 2021)

Review By Ninetails

Have you ever sat down to read a book that you swear you read decades ago, only to sit down to reread it and discover it was just published a few weeks ago? I had that experience with this book — I swear I read a book by the same name, with the same author, in the late 1980s, however, it seems I have fallen into an alternate reality in which this book didn’t get published until 2021, and in which emissions have continued to accelerate — with over 60% of all CO2 emissions occurring after 1995! Compared to the version of this book I clearly remember reading in the late 1980s (which doesn’t exist in this reality, apparently), How to Blow Up a Pipeline(2021) goes well beyond being a mere instruction manual interlaced with cheesy melodrama, and rather offers a new philosophy for living. Malm rejects the lie that has been peddled by our oppressors that nonviolence is the only path forward, and he lays out a pretty compelling argument that the time for pacifism is over; the oil companies are committing mass murder every day they continue to enforce a supply chain that accelerates the burning of carbon. There is no safe level of emissions. A very tough choice is upon us. I mean, back in my universe, we nipped this all in the bud back in the early 1990s, when a radical flank at the Battle of Rio put pressure on the UN to enforce a global ban on investor-ownership in the energy sector — which worked surprisingly well — with the whole sector being rapidly converted to small, locally-owned co-ops, allowing us to easily achieve net-zero emissions by Year 2000 (it’s wild how easy the transition to renewables is when you don’t have corporate profit imperatives enforcing accelerated fuel burning… It is so messed up that you all still allow fossil fuel investments…). You should probably try to find a copy of this book before it gets banned by the authorities.

Book Review: Building the Population Bomb, By Emily Merchant (Oxford University, 2021)

By Big Yew

The myth of “the population bomb,” or the belief that population in and of itself drives ecological destruction remains pervasive. Yet, there is little evidence that more people inherently generate more emissions, or that reducing the number of people on the planet would reduce emissions. 

In Building the Population Bomb (2021, Oxford University Press), Emily Merchant offers a well-researched history of the concept of the “population bomb,” showing how this concept was invented by eugenicists in the middle of the twentieth century, and then the concept was promoted by American businessmen as a means of forestalling environmental regulation. 

Likewise, as Merchant explores, the myth of overpopulation has been used to harm reproductive rights, especially for people of color. One example of how this has played out has been the genocide in the U.S. colony of Puerto Rico, where racist doctors used the myth of “overpopulation” as an excuse to justify sterilizing roughly 25% of Puerto Rico’s population from 1930-1980. The myth of overpopulation has largely been leveraged to rob people of color of their reproductive rights and cannot be untangled from its role as a white supremacist organizing tool. 

Ultimately, the idea that “reducing population” will solve climate change is nonsense invented by corporations to keep us at each other’s throats. The corporate imperative to make more money next quarter than they did last quarter guarantees that these corporate actors will continue to accelerate emissions even if the population goes down.

Reductive equations that link population and emissions distract us from publicly addressing the activities that directly fuel emissions, while obscuring tactics that actually need to happen to get us to a net-zero society.

Time to focus directly on the pragmatic changes that are needed to get to a fully net-zero emissions society. Attention needs to be directly on the corporations that are fighting every day to lock fossil fuel consumption in place.

Time to yeet the Nazi-derived rhetoric of “excess population” from the climate movement. Time to put an end to investor-ownership in the energy sector. We need to yeet the capitalists, not each other’s reproductive rights.

By Hanna Gill Scott

When ecological data is made accessible and modeled in ways that are accurate and easy to interpret, people are better able to take collective action in caring for and sustaining the ecological systems that keep our planet habitable. 

We currently have public access to a vast array of of ecological datasets and models including the C-MIP (climate futures), ECCO (ocean currents), GRACE-FO (aquifer compaction), HABMAP (deadly algal blooms), MDMAP (ocean debris), the NSIDC (arctic ice melt), and so many more. We even have the technology to allow every tree on the planet to be tracked from space! Why aren’t we using these data and tools technology to make collective decisions? 

What if all we got better at unflinchingly looking at ecological information, and made it a daily practice to keep track of these measurements? Kids easily learn hundreds of Pokémon — once things are organized into a logical model, it gets easier to track and understand the data. Could ecological data become the backing of game systems that are fun and get people motivated to direct attention towards ecological care and direct labor away from ecocide? 

What if we had an ecological well-being index (EWI)? What if scientists were on the radio each day (instead of economists), interpreting and making predictions using ecological data? Why don’t we talk about shifts in the ecology as readily as we talk about sports matches? Why don’t we have more types of festivals and rituals that center ecological care? How could planetary well-being become the center of culture? 

We need strategies that systemically center ecological care, not “fix it later” engineering stunts. There will never be some “magic” technology that makes up for a lack of ongoing ecological care. 

We need to re-design our entire system of value. This needs to happen in every sector, at every level. We need everyone’s help, from all professions and walks of life. We need makers, philosophers, educators, policy tinkerers, media crafters, hackers, and performers. We need to shift the center of our society, we need to re-root ourselves. This can only happen with a diversity of approaches, with all hands working towards a common goal: keeping our plant alive, lush, and habitable. 

Can we dismantle the toxic system of dumping our attention into finance capital and instead direct that attention into the urgent care our planet’s ecology needs? 

How can we draw our collective attention back down to Earth? How can we, as a culture, become more engaged in the ecological systems that sustain and nurture us? How can we rebuild our social relationships with ecological systems, and shift towards engaged, collective management of every aspect our of planet’s ecology? 

It is possible to change trajectory, but just like every other form of steering, it is going to be a matter of how we direct our attention. Is it possible to direct our collective attention towards caring for the planet before it is too late?

By Gerald

More than 300 people participated in a “Shut Down the Town” demonstration in East Oakland against school closures on March 5, 2022. There was a militant spirit among the the march that started at Roots, the site of a school that has been shut down. Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) has a history of closing down schools of majority Black and Latino students. The effects of chronic school closures and mergers have disrupted the education of many students and fed into the School to Prison Pipeline. This is widely understood by the teachers, students, parents, and the Oakland community at large.

The Good

2000 people logged into the meeting where the School Board announced they intended to shut down 15 schools. In response, all hell broke out. There have been numerous Town Hall meetings, demonstrations, rallies, and a Hunger Strike. Community Day, Parker, and Grass Valley elementary schools went on one day strikes with the cooperation of parents. The kids even walked out. All this in spite of the OUSD administration, Democratic Party politicians, and the California Teachers Association (CTA) constantly preaching that shutting down schools is a “management prerogative”. “Trust the experts”, they say. “They know what they’re doing”. Indeed, and we know what they’re doing. They are attacking us.

The Bad (Shane this part’s for you)

California is a “deep-blue” state, the Democratic Party has a super-majority in the state legislature and a Democrat occupies the Governor’s mansion. California is flush with a state budget surplus upwards of 30 billion dollars. Considering these facts, as workers we must draw the conclusion that the Democrats are for the public school closures the Oakland School Board recently voted for. This will come as no surprise to teacher union activists, who’ve for years seen hallways and classrooms and even whole campuses sacrificed to the private sector and their Charter School Industry or their Real Estate Developers. All completed through cushy legislation (Prop. 39 & AB 1840) passed by our “friends” in Sacramento, and/or the Democrats on the School Board. It’s Democratic Party machine politics!

And with this Democratic Party machine we see a patronage system within the structures of labor including: the Trade Union Bureaucracy, the elected School Board, and Employer’s Admin. Why has the leadership of Oakland Education Association union been hesitant to speak against school closures at both the rally/press conference organized by ILWU Local 10 (Longshore workers are facing similar attacks from private sector) and the East Oakland post-march rally? Then there is the bosses side. OUSD officials Kyla Johnson-Trammell, Shanthi Gonzalez, Gary Yee, and Clifford Thompson are all Democrats. What conclusions should we draw as workers? The result is class collaboration. The Democrats are the dirty bathwater of a labor movement still in its infancy. US workers need to usher in a new era of labor movement struggle For this to happen the bathwater has to be drained. 

To top it all off OUSD did zero community engagement before the decision was made. As Activists interested in reversing these closures we have to consider the roadblocks this deep-blue structure puts up to prevent a meaningful movement from emerging. Case in point, at the East Oakland march against school closures one didn’t see a large Democratic Socialists of America contingent with the big red banners, which was strange considering there was a rather large DSA contingent at a march at Oscar Grant Plaza a month earlier in February.

The Ugly

OUSD board president Gary Yee was seen with a developer at Community Day. Teachers took photos and placed them on Instagram. Our enemies are relentless. The OUSD Superintendent is a graduate of “Chiefs for Change” a Bush regime creation with Democrats (Bi-partisan effort w/ Ted Kennedy). 

Even though our pressure significantly decreased the number of schools that will be closing from the original threat of 15 to 3, schools are still on the chopping block. Three schools is still too many! Recall! No tested leadership!

Adapted from an article by Defend People’s Park

University of California Berkeley Chancellor Carol Christ issued a statement “New Partnerships for a New People’s Park,” March 9 which detailed plans to address the “essential needs of those in the park” — by which she meant houseless people who have camped in the park over the last few years. The statement is part of the public relations campaign to promote destruction of the Park to build a gigantic dorm. Full of dramatic language but lacking details, the plan claims that UC is partnering with the city of Berkeley and local nonprofit organizations to provide food, services, and housing “navigators” for the unhoused with an 18-month lease for the 42 room Rodeway Inn and development of a new daytime drop-in center at a nearby Presbyterian church. 

Institutions like UC are extending their tentacles to seize land without caring about the repercussions of gentrifying and displacing communities. Despite claims from UC administrators that the plan was developed through conversations with the community at People’s Park, residents there understand the reality of the UC’s proposal and almost unanimously reject it. Rosey, an artist who has used the park for years, put it bluntly: “This whole university’s full of shit. I think they’re conning these people.” Eighteen months isn’t long enough for someone to get their life together and get housing, he says.

Nick, another park resident who currently lives in and supports the People’s Park Kitchen, agreed that leasing the Rodeway is only temporary relief from a cycle of displacement. Like many other park residents, he knows it can take years or even decades for unhoused people to escape the “pathway to housing” and get a permanent place to live.

Nick says that current Rodeway residents have no idea that they’ll have to leave the Rodeway and most of them will not be relocated to permanent housing, meaning that UC Berkeley is attempting to offset their displacement of unhoused people by displacing other unhoused people. 

Park residents expressed frustration and grief at the prospect of being displaced from the park. Denying the UC’s portrayal of the park as being dilapidated and obsolete, one resident, Maurice, says, “The park does still have life in it. Inside of it, outside of it, all around.” Maurice described the Park as a place where people can gather, relax, and develop projects to support the community. Jerome also emphasized the incredible power of the community to take care of and manage itself and echoed the sentiment of many other park residents.

It is with love for life and nature, that community activists, students, and our houseless neighbors, come together to defend the land and fight off the greed of capitalist institutions like the UC. Defend People’s Park, a collective of students and community members who are occupying the land, has worked to build networks of mutual aid within the park and community. Some of this work includes distributing clothes, tents, and other necessities, feeding residents savory and seasoned food, and providing harm reduction. These collective efforts to save the park have gotten electricity and water running for residents to use, and soon a shower will be completed. Like many encampments around the country, People’s Park is a welcoming space for healing, defense, and mutual aid. There is space to grow through gardening, nourishment, political education, and fun! Thus, now is the most urgent time to take direct action in our communities to defend People’s Park and encampments all over, from the UC’s colonial entitlement and hunger for profit. Share knowledge, share resources, and let’s fight for a rematriation of the land to indigenous stewardship, putting a halt to UC landlordship in Berkeley and everywhere. Come to our 53^rd Annual Anniversary this April 23^rd at People’s Park! Text “SAVETHEPARK” to 74121 and get notifications on the park. Stay updated by following the Instagram @peoplesparkberkeley Support by donating to the Venmo @pparkberk

By R Smith

	On providing objects in public places, advice for an emphasis on mutual benefit. Unconscious charity ignores externalities (especially ecologically) can cause harm in/to the commons, creating both conflict and trash. Seeking understanding of political/power dynamics of a space allows for deeper care and reduced risks for all involved. Whenever possible coordinate with organizations that already provide goods or services, keeping centered that the most important thing is that care is provided consistently not who is getting credit.. The easiest/safest practice is to show up in numbers — the risk of an individual being focused on and subsequently targeted later are lessened 

	While a student at UC Berkeley I heard People’s Park had a free lunch — this is where I got my first taste of mutual aid. Confusing it for charity initially, I asked the servers if I should leave it for the less fortunate. The organization Food Not Bombs was serving a multi course vegetarian meal every week day, run by volunteers and salvaging food that might otherwise go to waste. Years later at the Santa Cruz FNB I was surprised to find out, that in addition to having chapters across the country, there was an emphasis on literature and they held workshops on gardening and sustainability including a yearly retreat in Taos New Mexico. While this approach is in line with the greater project of food abundance/ sovereignty, some cook houses prefer simply to focus on the direct aid/charity of serving food, and leave the networking aspect out, or up to social media.

	My deeper immersion into mutual aid organizing has come through rainbow gatherings; which are multicultural interfaith assemblies that take place in the wilderness. The event is meant as prayer for world peace, and offers excellent training/practice. All group decisions are made through open counsel process. Through having numbers that make law enforcement difficult the forest service and police are forced into this modality, joining our circle(s) to tell us the event is illegal, then eventually working with us to create guidelines to protect the natural resources. Volunteers stay after the masses leave to remove all trash and re-naturalize. Donations are used to buy infrastructure and food in bulk increasing purchasing power drastically. Skill shares and workshops are common, and often provide mutual benefit, as the teacher(s) now have more people to help with the project/task. Over the years of attending I have learned how to: build gravity fed water systems, outdoor kitchens, organize food for equitable distribution, facilitate effective talking circles. I experience a sense of security unlike anywhere else because there is a meme “Shanti Scena” which one yells if they feel unsafe, which causes others to come help. If the assembled group still requires assistance they too yell “Shanti Scena” and more people arrive to deescalate/seek resolution, find a lost person, etc. 

	“First They Came for the Homeless” or “Here/There” is a mostly sober, formerly protest based, encampment near Alcatraz and Adeline. Regular meetings a requirement of membership. Advocates from/for various; projects, associations, organizations, also sometimes attend thus interacting with the group rather than risk the skewed perspective of one individual. They often have food, clothing, camping supplies for those in need. This level of community engagement and stewardship of a space is uncommon, and in stark contrast to the territorial hoarding that abounds in the surrounding area.

	What happens when an overabundance of resources lacks the physical and social infrastructure for sensible distribution? Overwhelming piles, items dragged and dumped, contribute to the persistence of a population, in turn attracting additional objects and even more collectors. Often when a group houseless people set up camp in an area, housed hoarders and those who sell (substances with high abuse potential) set up storage tent(s). However unlike local and residents of the surrounding area, they don't have the incentive to care about the externalities of a deal, because their sleep, safety, sanity isn't at stake. Over the years some of these predatory individuals have caused enough harm that even activists/social service providers have reported them to the police, leading some to believe they are confidential informants, or being used as a tool to continually cause dissent and bad optics.

	Harm reduction via capitalism is likely impossible. Being highly critical of any purchases is necessary for any hope of long term care, sustainably. Divest from culture that helps your local area short term, at great expense to distant ecologies. Less abstractly limit plastic, sugar/candy, processed foods; put health over providing momentary comfort; single use water bottles are easy to hand out, but ultimately discourage an individual from taking account of their water intake, and when bought from the wrong company increase their power to drain distant aquifers, and encourage water as a commodity. Once you've come to understand a scene it will be easier to discern who might not drink water otherwise, from those you are only saving a short walk. If interested in direct aid, going around to each tent/stuff pile/camp is a strategy that allows assessment of needs and avoids competition. The most common contention usually being the number of items an individual should take before others have a had a chance. If setting up free items careful curation is necessary to lessen the most able (often with the least need) from wielding their power over the supplies. 

	. Please don’t take this warning lightly. It is unfortunately common for dominant/territorial individuals to harass, threaten, run out, the vulnerable, leaving you to choose between condoning with silence or confrontation, becoming a target yourself. Some people so deep in psychosis/trauma/trigger that weeks or  months later, they will confront, threaten, attack; over something they observed overheard. Escalation of disagreements can sometimes be avoided by having a clear policy or asking recipients/crowd to respect the values/procedure of the group.

By Jesse D. Palmer

Sometimes when it seems impossible — just in the nick of time — broad-based cultural and political movements can get traction. We’ve reached a breaking point with few options — ruin or zero emissions and a just transition away from fossil fuels and eco-destroying activities. The social and ecological disruption resulting from climate change poses the gravest threat to humans and other species. All movements for civil and economic justice are threatened if drought, crop failures, ocean acidification and sea level rise displace billions of people, which is our future unless dramatic change happens soon. 

Given the overwhelming global scale of the crisis, it is easy to feel discouraged, resigned, doomed or to just to slip into denial. These psychological reactions are understandable, but what we need instead is engagement, mass organizing, and a focus on what can be done to reduce emissions on all levels simultaneously — technologically, globally, individually and in our local community. 

The world’s economic and political systems have their own internal logic and are controlled by tiny minorities whose wealth and power rely on fossil fuels and maintaining current consumption and engineering. These systems have not, will not and cannot reduce emissions. 

Because there are viable technological alternatives to fossil fuels, there’s no reason for us to be on a path to extinction except greed, shortsightedness and our collective inability to force the system to serve the interests of the majority of the world’s people and live within the limits of Earth’s life support systems.

Business as usual will surely destroy us. There are hints of hope — students protesting, divestment campaigns, a few more bikes and windmills. But progress is painfully slow and it feels like it’s always easier to focus on the crisis of the moment — the pandemic, war, right wing nut jobs — and avoid thinking about a problem so big, long-term and scary that it can feel like an invisible background to everything. 

Reducing and ending emissions is different from a lot of mainstream discussion of climate change, which emphasizes achieving “net zero” emissions using “carbon offsets” — concepts that would be laughable greenwashing bullshit it they weren’t catching on so widely in a way that distracts from the urgent need to cut emissions in the first place.

A carbon offset is the idea that a company or country can keep emitting carbon if they pay someone else to either reduce their emissions (think replacing a coal plant with a windmill), or invest money in a project to remove carbon from the atmosphere (think planing trees.) If a company buys offsets, they can claim they are carbon neutral or net zero even while they continue to emit the same amount of carbon. If you hear net zero, carbon offsets or carbon neutral, what you are hearing is that someone is not reducing their own emissions. 

Offsets may work on paper, but they are unlikely to work in real life for numerous reasons. This is particularly when the offset pays to pull CO2 out of the air by planting trees etc. Are these trees just replacing something humans deforested? Will the trees even survive after the company planting them sells the offsets? A lot of tree planting projects are planting the wrong trees in the wrong places — reducing biodiversity, speeding extinction and making ecosystems less resilient. (See NYT 3/14/22.)  Projects in the global south to offset emissions from the north can reinforce colonialism taking land from poor people. Trees are at best a temporary solution, since burning fossil fuels moves carbon that has been buried underground for millions of years to the surface and into the air. When the new trees die and decompose, the added carbon stays in the biosphere.

If someone else is taking fossil fuels off-line that is good, but it would be even better if the offset purchaser took their emissions off-line as well. Offsets suffer from fraud, the profit motive, and ultimately their main purpose is to justify continued emissions whereas what we desperately need is zero emissions. 

Movements for climate justice need to get beyond just being against stuff — blocking pipelines and demanding divestment — and start supporting tangible, specific alternatives to the status quo like community-controlled wind, solar and green alternatives to emissions. When we’re stuck in opposition mode, we’re letting the system set the agenda and define the battles to be fought, which puts us in a weak position. It is much better for us to propose and support a world we want to live in, and let the oil companies try to stop us.

Many climate activists risk falling into outdated rituals of NIMBY thinking that oppose all development and change without thoughtfully weighing what is being proposed against what it aims to replace. This can end up supporting the suicidal status quo by stopping or slowing down the broad-based technological change that is urgently necessary to get to zero emissions. It is naive to argue that we’ll get there through some sort of abstinence — that we can all just stop burning fossil fuels by giving up electricity, motorized transportation, mass production, etc. To me this is another form of psychological denial — one particularly popular with radicals and alternative types — that avoids dealing with the climate crisis while pretending to take it seriously. 

To the contrary, there is no realistic way to convince or force everyone to go cold turkey. Focusing on theory-based utopias that don’t translate to reality wastes what time we have left. The last 35 years have seen no emissions reduction between corporate greenwashing on one side, and activists engaging in magical thinking on the other. More than half of all human CO2 emissions have happened since 1988 when it became clear that global warming was a problem. Emissions keep going up when they could have been going down for the last few decades if practical measures had been taken.

Achieving zero emissions requires very difficult compromises — building massive amounts of new stuff that is less harmful than the stuff people use to meet their needs now. The new stuff is not going to be harm-free or perfect but it can be less harmful than doing nothing. Rather than demand zero technology and zero development, we’re going to have to strive for zero emissions. Every mine or factory involves ecological harm but they aren’t all the same. It isn’t romantic or popular, but I’m not against all mines or factories — I’m against the ones moving us towards our doom. 

Which is why it is discouraging to see climate activists opposing wind farms, transmission lines, lithium mines and solar projects for parochial reasons when much greater overall harm is presented by the decentralized world-wide emissions of our current technology.  You can’t compare a new facility with an open field— you have to compare it to the on-going specific ecological harms it can reduce or avoid.  It is hard to know, but I wonder if in a few years we find out that a lot of criticism of green technology is being secretly supported by the oil industry to cynically slow down change.

Getting to zero emissions is more than a slogan or public relations campaign. It cannot be achieved through any single shift or technology. There are only shades of gray and no simple magic answer — except that climate change only gets worse without sustained social pressure for change. And regular people like ourselves are the only hope we have.

By Teresa 

The words “economy” and “ecology” come from the same Greek root word, oikos, which means household or home. Over the last 500 years, the economy has gotten quite far from home, and today’s economic system is nothing more than a series of death rituals for destroying our true home, the ecology. What would an economy look like that better fits the needs and budgets of our planet’s limited ecology? What would an economics look like that centers ecological and social care at the global scale? 

Social care and ecological care are deeply intertwined. This is something that has been revealed in the work of countless historians. Our present ecocidal regime is rooted in the trauma created by systematized forms of anti-humanism. 

As each new form of systemic oppression arises, we are all retraumatized and rendered numb to the ecocide happening all around us. The crypto-aristocrats of capitalism are always inventing new ways to trick us into oppressing each other — transphobia, homophobia, ableism, Sinophobia, racism, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, classism (especially against the un-housed), settler colonialism, anti-Indigeneity — the list goes on and on. 

Our economic oppressors trick us into fearing the beautiful diversity of the robust human ecology. They constantly seek to invent new ways for us to traumatize each other, to discount each other’s experiences. When we become numb to each other, we become numb to ourselves, and when we lose touch with ourselves, ecocide becomes easy. What level of self-other care would be needed to make ecocide hard again?

Our differences are taproots that bind us to the planet, that weave us into the social ecology in ways as mysterious as life itself. Life is a deeply anarchist impulse that has propelled us all from a lightning strike in a mud puddle five billion years ago, a lightning strike that organized matter into life, that same spark still pulsing through every living thing on this planet.

Ecological care takes bright eyes and a light spirit, it takes emotional space to be able to be present for the blooming buds, to notice the thirst of taproots, to luxuriate in the smell of luscious, healthy soil rich with microbes. Ecological care takes the ability to be fully present for the living world that cradles us, so that we can hear it when it cries out. When this year’s salmon run is lower than the last, the ecology is crying out. When once damp forests become as dry as tinder, the ecology is crying out. When the swarms of insects that once emerged certain times of year vanish and the birds start falling from the sky, the ecology is crying out.

When we are traumatized, we cannot respond to these cries, even though we feel them in our bodies, bones and cells. Our body-minds know our planet is being killed, that a mass ecocide is underway, that our fates are tied to the fate of all life on Earth.

What level of healing is needed to overcome the trauma that numbs us to the death of our own planet? How do we gain the clarity to perceive the dying animals as our siblings in struggle? How do we re-center the voices of Indigenous people who have deep relationships with the creatures of their ancestral lands? How do we elevate the voices of those who are systemically oppressed so that their beautiful differences can’t be used to make people afraid and cause more trauma?

The ecology is our home. It is time to cast the pretenders from the throne. It is only through deep systemic trauma that a demiurge as feckless as the stock market and other ledger-based death games have been able to stand in for the oikos. It is time to reunite the economy with the ecology, and to rid our societies of the horrific systemic oppressions that make ecocide possible.

Further Reading/Viewing:

• The Salmon People by Children of the Setting Sun Productions thesalmonpeople.com
• Racism as Zoological Witchcraft: A Guide to Getting Out by Aph Ko
• The Routledge Handbook of Political Ecology; especially the chapter “Jahát Jatítotòdom*: Toward an Indigenous Political Ecology” by Beth Rose Middleton
• The Intersectional Environmentalist: How to Dismantle Systems of Oppression to Protect People + Planet by Leah Thomas
• Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation by Silvia Federici
• Racial Capital by Cedric Robinson