Author: Slingshot robot #1

By Duncan Autrey

The world is scary. The problems we face are complex, our future is uncertain, and we are bound up with many people we don’t necessarily trust or understand. On top of that, our brains are wired to crave simplicity — a story that makes sense, a side to pick, a good guy and a bad guy.

Politicians and media feed that craving. They sell us simple answers to complex problems and profit by stoking fear. But the real work of freedom demands the opposite: that we face ambiguity and complexity honestly, and take responsibility for what we do next.

That means choosing to act not from habit, fear, or ideology, but from a recognition of our interdependence. We are not just isolated individuals or opposing camps. We’re one entangled system. In the U.S., even our founding motto, E Pluribus Unum, gestures at this truth: “Out of many, one.”

But how do we live that? How do we hold complexity without giving up, falling into despair, or grabbing for control?

Ambiguity and Responsibility

Simone de Beauvoir, the French philosopher and feminist, wrote about this in The Ethics of Ambiguity. In response to Sartre’s famous line — “Man is condemned to be free” — she laid out a path for navigating the tension between our limitations and our agency.

She wasn’t offering a fixed path or a new ideology. She was naming something many of us already feel: that freedom isn’t clean or individual. It’s messy, relational, and full of contradiction.

We are born into systems we didn’t choose, shaped by histories we didn’t write. And yet, we are still responsible for how we show up, how we act, and what we create. There’s no ultimate playbook. No perfect values. No fixed meaning handed down from above.

This is the ambiguity at the heart of freedom: we are both subject and object, insignificant and significant, bound and free. Each choice we make defines what we become. And because we live in relationship with others, our freedom only matters when it includes theirs too.

A Map of Habits of Freedom

Beauvoir offers a kind of existential cartography — a map of how people tend to respond to the burden of freedom. These aren’t levels to conquer. They’re roles we shift in and out of, ways we survive, resist, or make sense of chaos. Most of us carry more than one at once.

The Child

Children don’t choose their values. They accept what adults tell them is good or evil. Everything feels absolute. The child is free, but it is a freedom rooted in ignorance of our interdependence. As adults, we can carry this mindset forward, clinging to inherited truths as if they are eternal.

The Sub-Man

This is the person who tries not to engage at all. They reject responsibility, withdraw from the world, and try to live without choosing. But not choosing is still a choice — one that denies freedom while continuing to exist within systems that shape others’ lives.

The Serious Man

The Serious Man finds relief in certainty. In the face of overwhelming chaos, they grab hold of a system — a cause, a mission, an ideology — and pour everything into it. It gives structure. Meaning. Discipline. And for a while, it works.

Most of us have been here. Many of us are here now. In activist spaces, it’s easy to mistake dedication for liberation — to swap one kind of authority (state, church, market) for another (movement, theory, dogma). We call it freedom, but often it’s just obedience with better branding.

There’s no shame in this. The Serious Man is trying to survive, to make sense of the mess by holding something still. But the danger is this: when we believe our cause is absolutely right, we stop asking questions. We stop listening. We start policing ourselves and others.

The hardest truth is this: even our best ideas might be temporary. Even our most righteous projects might not be the final answer.

The way out isn’t apathy. It’s deeper freedom — the kind that doesn’t cling, but commits without illusion.

What if the cause isn’t the destination, but the conversation?

What Comes Next?

When we realize those systems are flawed — that there’s no perfect ideology, no universal truth — we can fall into nihilism. If nothing is ultimately true, then maybe nothing matters.

But that’s not the end of the road. It’s a passage.

The Nihilist

The nihilist sees through the Serious Man’s illusions, but gets stuck. They recognize that external systems are flawed, that there may be no universal truth, no perfect ideology. But instead of moving forward, they collapse inward.

From here, it’s easy to fall into disengagement, irony, or fatalism. If nothing is true, maybe nothing matters. If everything is complex, maybe nothing can change. This mindset can wear radical clothing — “burn it all down” — but underneath, it’s still despair.

Nihilism masquerades as insight, but it’s really just fear in a new form. The risk isn’t just personal disconnection — it’s collective paralysis.

The Adventurer

The adventurer has moved beyond despair. They embrace their freedom and live by their own rules. They create, explore, build, play. They don’t ask for permission, and that’s powerful. But it’s also incomplete.

This is the realm of creative freelancers, lifestyle anarchists, personal growth junkies, and edge-runners of all stripes. And while it can be liberating, it can also be escapist. They create their own values, but remain disconnected from others. If joy depends on looking away from harm, it’s not transformation.

The adventurer hasn’t yet realized that freedom isn’t just about breaking chains. It’s about choosing to be bound in care.

The Passionate One

A level up is the passionate person — someone who commits their freedom to a passion project or cause. It could be family, music, writing, organizing. They want to create change, leave a mark, do something that matters. They freely choose something, and their dedication is powerful. But their passion can become rigid. They may not realize that no cause, no matter how noble, can resolve the permanent ambiguity of life.

Without reflection, passion can become ideology all over again.

Genuine Freedom

The highest form of freedom is one that includes others. This is genuine freedom — the recognition that your liberation is bound up with everyone else’s. That meaning is co-created, and that responsibility is not just personal but mutual.

Genuine freedom asks us to act in ways that expand freedom for others. To see that every moment is a choice, and that our relationships, communities, and collective futures are shaped by how we show up.

This is not freedom as escape. It’s freedom as interdependence. This freedom is generative and self-reinforcing. Genuine freedom isn’t an answer. It’s a way of staying in the question.

It’s never finished. It has to be re-chosen, re-built, and re-lived — especially with others.

The Tyrant

De Beauvoir includes one more category: the tyrant. Someone who claims their own freedom, but uses it to dominate, suppress, or dehumanize others. They exploit ambiguity not to explore it, but to manipulate and control.

The tyrant may believe they are free, but they deny others that same possibility. They replace one system of control with another.

Where We Are Now

Look around. This map mirrors the state of U.S. culture today.

We’ve moved from childlike dependence on empire and religion to serious devotion to causes. We’ve seen waves of nihilism, cynicism, and escapism. We’ve seen adventurers building freedom without responsibility. We’ve seen passionate leaders driven by ideals, sometimes toward transformation, sometimes toward control. And we’ve seen tyrants rise, capitalizing on fear and uncertainty.

The choice in front of us now is whether we will move toward genuine freedom together.

Freedom as Practice

If we want liberation, it can’t be theoretical. It has to be lived.

We must learn to live in ambiguity. We can learn to face complexity without clinging to certainty. We can build communities where people don’t have to choose between autonomy and belonging. To be free, we need to create systems that reflect the truth that freedom is relational, not individual. Our freedom is bound up with one another’s.

This kind of freedom doesn’t come from purity or isolation. It grows through relationship — through shared work, shared care, shared risk. It’s how we resist despair, and how we keep our movements alive.

There are no final answers. But there are better questions. There are deeper commitments. There are freer ways to live.

Freedom isn’t something we win once. It’s something we practice together.

By Decay

I started the morning uneasy, torn between having to go to work and the unknown timeline of the forced closure of the sheds housing some formerly homeless residents of the “Wood Street Commons”. The sheds (a temporary housing program) started two years ago, an imposition of the City of Oakland and the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) after they carried out sweeps of Wood Street Commons, the largest homeless encampment in Northern California – and one where its hundreds of residents had self-organized to resist their removal by the City of Oakland.

During the pre-shed 2023 sweeps, I was a passerby. More recently, I had returned to the site to continue distributing food and aid while working a summer teaching job nearby. Eviction notices from Oakland (dated for 5pm of July 14th, 2025) had littered shed doors during my previous week of food distribution. Yesterday, 5pm had come and gone, and once again, the evictions were delayed. The mutual aid group that showed up with food and water wouldn’t be available today and I was terrified about what might happen when the cops arrived with nobody to film or watch them.

That evening, like the one before, I helped several residents move belongings, tend to their dehydration and nausea, and process the utter helplessness they were experiencing. My fears were mostly quelled; I wasn’t alone as an observer, and members of the Wood Street Commons were there with other community members filming, moving, and supporting their neighbors. I rushed through the abandoned cabins with two of them after the police left, desperately hauling off more personal items nearly ruined by the fire that broke out earlier, tracking down the site coordinator to confirm contact information, and for a moment just… looking. Looking at the walls covered in paint, pictures, bodily fluids, lipstick, messages, dirt — all these signs of life that desperately remained. Trash piled up around makeshift porches, the “Private Property” sticker slapped on one cabin, the square of fake grass as a lawn in front of another. Out of sight and away from the core of Oakland, it would be easy enough for the city to try and bury what happened here. 

Over the last decade, police have continually pushed residents from various tent encampments towards the Wood Street Corridor in West Oakland, promising that they wouldn’t be bothered there as Caltrans enacted a brutal series of sweeps across the city. For years, residents petitioned Oakland officials for dumpsters, fire extinguishers, and basic sanitation throughout the settlement — a quarter mile of tents and vehicles tucked under the freeway overpasses of Interstate 880. Fed up with the neglect and constant fires, organizers within the community began gathering to coordinate group meetings, discuss what they needed, and plan events. By 2021, an autonomous collective of volunteers and community members built Cob on Wood: a haven of beautifully decorated (and fire resistant!) cob cabins that hosted a free clinic, hot shower, community store, pizza oven, gardens, and other community resources. As city officials sunk $12.6 million into pushing curbside communities from street to street, something permanent was beginning to solidify. 

When Caltrans eventually posted eviction notices throughout the camp in 2022, those same community members quickly secured a temporary restraining order, citing the impossibly short timeline and lack of alternative housing plans. In front of a district judge, the City of Oakland, Alameda County, and Caltrans each avoided responsibility for hundreds of lives, admitting they had nowhere left to push residents and no housing program to fill the gaps. Residents pointed to Cob on Wood, reminding the City that they had already built a self-sustaining civic center that could be expanded and given full legitimacy. Resident efforts and wisdom were ignored again, and a month later, the order was lifted with only 40 emergency shelter beds secured for the 200-300 residents. The moral rot exposed in the hearing was sufficiently concealed with a thin veneer of due diligence, it seemed. Oakland came up with a three-phase plan to tear down the encampment, and within weeks, California Highway Patrol and Caltrans workers descended upon the camp wielding threats of arrest and bulldozers. The scope of the law was “too narrow” for any meaningful change, you see. They had been pushed here for years, and now, they’d be pushed somewhere else.

The first phase targeted the quarter mile where the majority of residents had settled on Caltrans property. By 2023, they turned to the remaining members on a smaller parcel of city land to begin the second phase. The property, 1707 Wood Street, had been left abandoned since its purchase in 2007 and was now the headquarters of the Wood Street Commons, who still provided food, clothing, storage facilities, and harm reduction supplies. During this phase, the City moved some of the residents into hastily built sheds and an RV lot down the street (the rest decided to “self-relocate”), promising housing support and job opportunities. Now that people were corralled into this program, service provider Building Opportunities for Self-Sufficiency (BOSS) could swoop in and profit off of pantomiming the work already being done by mutual aid groups. At every step, the city systematically removed people from their support systems, destroyed property, and rejected any alternative to the inhumane sweeps. What I witnessed in July was the third phase — after whittling the encampment down to 50-100 program participants, they could finally shut it down and cover their tracks. 

So… about those promises of temporary housing and transitional support. Shuffling people into temporary isolation chambers in hopes that they can be slotted neatly back into the crumbling infrastructure around us after years of trauma doesn’t work. It was never supposed to work. Capitalism relies on the threat of homelessness and instability to keep us compliant, and when that fails, they turn to state-sanctioned terrorism to keep us scattered. The cruelty inflicted on people trying to survive isn’t new or unique; it’s part of an ongoing war against community building through endless cycles of displacement. The war is escalating — troops have been deployed in Washington to “end vagrancy” while Grants Pass v. Johnson (2024) opens the floodgates for states to enforce relentless anti-camping laws. They want us to remain hidden. One would imagine this to be the end of something fragile, a final nail in the coffin as America turns the full weight of its power against the people held hostage within it. An ouroboros of destruction and expulsion coming to a bloody end. One would be wrong.

Years into the wreckage and removal of their belongings, pets, and lives, the largest homeless encampment in Northern California produced something separate from the narrative of pain and suffering detailed here. Millions of dollars and hundreds of police officers cannot undo the progress made by members of the Wood Street Commons in building and caring for their community. Each phase of evictions brought more engagement, more work, and more organizing. Through that work, people have been housed, recovered from addiction, accessed life-saving medical care, and fully joined the fight against displacement. These stories matter. We often focus on the trauma of homelessness — and there’s a place for that discussion and documentation. In this article, I discuss it to preserve a piece of history that the City of Oakland wants us to forget. I want the truth to be out there. But if we’re going to survive the onslaught of fascism as organizers and community members, our eyes need to be fixed on the horizon ahead. We need to hold onto the fact that when the state comes to knock down our spaces, we find new ones. Months after the final evictions, Wood Street Commons is still in full operation planning events and campaigns. 

While Oakland officials made excuses and fell behind in their payments to BOSS this year, members of the Commons put together the Mandela Parkway Proposal: a detailed permanent supportive housing solution. A few weeks after the July evictions, they co-hosted a Good Neighbors Assembly and brought in long-time housing activist and current Oakland city councilmember (and “Moms for Housing” organizer) Carroll Fife to discuss community needs. We strategized around the $800 million dollars of Measure W funding being dedicated to address homelessness and planned statements for upcoming city council board meetings. As this paper is being assembled, Wood Street Commons will be conducting their 4th annual solidarity bike ride from Oakland to Sacramento: a tradition they’ve used to raise funds for the community, build connections between unhoused groups, and visit state legislators to demand policy changes. Between events, they manage food distribution, medical support, press releases, and more. The constant displacement and violence didn’t destroy the community — it gave people a reason to stick together and learn how to fight back. 

We know that the price of successful organizing will always be a target on our backs, the force of the state bearing down on our movements and communities. Other groups, with projects like People’s Park in Berkeley and Camp Resolution in Sacramento, will continue to develop and subsequently be met with bulldozers and arrests. Some reach historic wins; some reach historic losses; several will have both. Even so, months or years after “defeat,” these movements are able to capture and reproduce something dangerous: self-governed safety. The more we can disentangle ourselves from the trappings of capital and root ourselves in what will inevitably outlive it, the more difficult it is to coerce us into compliance. We need to learn from this and understand that the very mechanisms they use to threaten and target us are, ultimately, the same mechanisms that give rise to coordinated opposition. 

This isn’t just about housing advocacy and solidarity movements. This is about resistance as a whole. I admit that I have no words of wisdom for what comes next — but I know we’ll face it arm in arm, covered in dust and sweat. They can’t stop us. We have no other choice.

More information about the Wood Street Commons and their ongoing work (including an upcoming documentary!) can be found at www.woodstreetcommons.org

Grassroots organizations involved in this story include: Wood Street Commons, Homefulness, Living Earth Structures, Essential Food and Medicine, Artists Building Communities, Moms 4 Housing, Black Solutions Lab, Community Ready Corps, and Anti-Police Terror Project.

By E

Why would we want to resolve conflict lovingly? One could answer is that love is the antidote to hate. Hate and the fear below it fuel fascism and authoritarianism.

Love is not something we simply feel or don’t feel or something that is. Love is a verb. Something we do, as bell hooks points out in her book All About Love.

Oligarchs, fascists, emperors, ruling elites and techno-feudalists have a set of values focused on domination, profit-exploitation, and first and foremost power. They use fear and hate as tools to get power by convincing an overwhelmed, precarious, even desperate population that they need violent protection from a dangerous, dehumanized other. As power centralizes and violence escalates, people feel even further deprived of safely relating to others.

Autocracy creates a non-sustainable, low-nurturing, and life-denying sphere of scarcity, where only those favored by those in power can be safe.

Improving our skills in lovingly resolving conflict can improve our ability to have more peaceful, connecting, difficult conversations. We live in an increasingly fractured, divided, untrusting world. Activist cancel culture is part of the problem. Let’s help each other to create ecosystems of lovingly relating with a commitment to reciprocally being in each other’s care.

Other tools and mindsets that can help are curiosity, listening and com-passion — not just empathy, as Bayo Akomolafe points out on bayoakomolafe.net.

Anarcho-capitalism, off-the-charts militarism, and run-away-climate-change hurt all of us.

Please consider having as many difficult and uncomfortable conversations as possible with people you disagree with. Can you move from being an activist by talking to people that you mostly agree with to also becoming an organizer — a person that encourages everyone to create solutions, possibilities, maybe realities that work for all of us?

The points below are from family therapist Pete Walker’s website pete-walker.com. He has also published several very resourceful books on Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (CPTSD) and recovery from it.

1. Normalize the inevitability of conflict and establish a safe forum for it. Discuss and agree to as many of these guidelines as seem useful.

2. The goal is to inform and negotiate for change, not punish. Punishment destroys trust. Love can open the ears of other people’s hearts.

3. Imagine how it would be easiest to hear about your grievance from others. Say how it would be easiest for you to hear. Present a complaint as lovingly and chargelessly as possible.

4. Preface complaints with acknowledgement of the good of the other and your mutual relationship.

5. No name-calling, sarcasm or character assassination.

6. No analyzing the other or mind reading.

7. No interrupting or filibustering.

8. Be dialogical. Give short, concise statements that allow the other to reflect back and paraphrase key points to let you hear that you have been accurately heard.

9. No denial of the others rights. See “Human Bill of Rights” on Pete Walker’s website or “Personal Bill of Rights”.

10. Differences are often not a matter of right or wrong. Both people can be right and merely different. Be willing to sometimes agree to differ.

11. Avoid “you statements.” Use “I statements” that identify your feelings and experience of what you perceive as unfair.

12. Stick to one specific issue with accompanying identifiable behavior at a time. Ask yourself what hurts the most to try to find your key complaint.

13. Stick to the issue until everyone feels fully heard.

14. Take turns presenting issues. 

15. If discussion becomes heated, either person can call timeout (one minute to 24 hours) as long as they suggest a time to resume. Discharge as much of accumulated charge as possible before you resume.

16. Own responsibility for any accumulated anger that might come from not talking about an issue soon enough.

17. Own responsibility for accumulated charge displaced from other hurts (transference, i.e. from other / previous relationship pain).

18. Commit to grow in understanding of how much of the charge comes from childhood abuse / neglect.

19.Commit to recovering from the losses of childhood by effectively identifying, grieving, and reclaiming them.

20. Apologize from an unashamed place. Make whatever amends are possible. Include your intention to correct your behavior in the future. Explain your extenuating circumstances as evidence that you were not trying to be hurtful.

BE CAREFUL WITH EACH OTHER, SO WE CAN BE DANGEROUS TOGETHER!

By Jesse D. Palmer

We cannot keep carrying on with normal life amidst the rapid and concentrated slide into authoritarianism. I’m not saying that I know precisely what you should do or what I should do to respond. Far from it! But everyone can do something now to disobey, defy and refuse to recognize illegitimate authority, withdraw consent, and avoid complicity. Authoritarian power is partially an illusion based on passive consent and anticipatory obedience. There are ways to push back and slow down autocrats to change their trajectory. Nothing that is happening now is inevitable.

However, time is not on our side. Week by week it is getting harder to push back as people get used to each new normal, get more demoralized, and become more afraid to stick their necks out. That’s the idea — the masked snatch teams, lethal boat attacks, kooky criminal charges, and media censorship are intentionally outrageous. Each one is a test to see how much Dumbshit can get away with. 

People are reacting to authoritarianism like they react to climate change — it’s so overwhelming, far away and hard to address that we get paralyzed, feel like we’re powerless and that it’s pointless to do anything. I keep talking to people who say they’ve stopped reading the news for mental self-preservation. Hiding out will not make this go away. There won’t be a red line when you know it’s time to do something.

I don’t want to write another doom bummer article — we’re already swimming in that shit. I’m writing because life feels wondrous, not because I’m depressed. I feel calm and determined, not scared (but I do feel scared sometimes.) Each of us decides how we’re going to spend our time. Wallowing in doom is the worst response. Not only will it become a self-fulfilling prophecy because it cedes agency to our oppressors, but because it will ruin your day with gloom and you’ll be unable to notice the awe inherent in life itself. 

Being risk-averse in this context is the most hazardous option. The thugs are not just coming for immigrants and trans people — recent executive orders defined virtually everyone who isn’t a Christian nationalist as a domestic terrorist.¹ No one escapes oligarchy. Let’s confront these jokers now while they are weaker and their power less consolidated. 

While the authoritarians are cruel, vicious, and scary, they are also surprisingly stupid. They’ve come to believe their own lies.

We don’t have the luxury of un-strategic, feel-good actions or constant infighting — we need a united front that’s smart and focused. 

Even more, we need a massive and broad-based response that goes far beyond the usual suspects. Let’s embrace pluralism and diversity for real, not just in theory, which means getting out of the radical gutter and engaging with people outside our circles. We need to give people credit for being caring, concerned and aware rather than always focusing on any point of disagreement. Everyone is a potential rebel. Let’s talk to strangers more. 

A united front requires a diversity of tactics. If other people do stuff that you think is either too tame or too militant, we can still treat them like comrades if their heart is in the right place. The bullies are using violence to provoke us so they can justify even harsher repression. Sometimes the best response to riot cops is to make fun of them with silly costumes and have a dance party, not build a flaming barricade. 

Autocrats inflame cultural and racial fears to stoke hate and justify repression. We shouldn’t fall for manufactured divisions that serve our oppressors by hating other regular working people who are being used as puppets. Let’s stay focused on uniting against the 1 percent. 

Guerrillas avoid fighting on their opponents’ terms. Despots have troops, prisons, money and giant bureaucratic structures. We have mockery, culture, leaderless, decentralized community, and the ability to slow down and disrupt normal life in subtle and invisible ways like quiet quitting, working to rule and following orders in absurd ways. General strikes in which everyone ditches work or calls in sick are enormously disruptive. Economic boycotts can target complicit businesses. It’s easy for masses of people to overload administrative systems. 

Street tactics don’t have to be high risk. Coincidental group bike rides or walking in crosswalks can tangle traffic. Banging pots and pans or playing loud music can annoy. Movements overseas have picked a color to widely display to signal dissent — what will our color be? Individuals and organizations don’t have tocomply with a depots’ priorities in advance without being required to do so. Many creative, simultaneous and diverse responses are more effective because they’re harder to crush than a single event, tactic or organization. Be water. 

If the army occupies our cities, there’s more of us, we know the terrain and they can’t be everywhere at once. Pick lots of different gathering spots and then some folks can march towards troops while others go the other direction. There are many ways to confront lines of soldiers including with silence. Logistics and transportation won’t function if locals refuse to cooperate. No bathrooms or cafes for ICE is perfect — what else can we come up with? 

Rebellion won’t work if it’s all drudgery and duty and risk. Nurturing kindness, human connections and communities counteracts loneliness, resists state power, and makes our lives more meaningful. The civil rights movement frequently sang together to overcome fear but also because singing with others is so joyful and nourishing. 

If we keep discussion focused on what people actually want rather than just the outrages of our enemies — affordability, freedom, pleasure, clean air, fairness, healthcare, security — that’s a vision that’s ultimately more attractive and sustainable than constant cycles of tension, fear and anger.

Almost everyone wants to live their lives without having to constantly think about politics. There’s a basic humanity to everyone — even MAGA people who’ve been turned towards hate. If our response to hatred is to dehumanize and objectify the haters, we’re playing into the ruler’s hands. To build a world organized about voluntary mutual aid not coercion, we have to heal division rather than dig deeper. On purely strategic grounds, we need to turn towards love. Loving people you’ve defined as the enemy is the hardest kind of love but can be transformative. 

These terrifying times may offer a springboard beyond the collapse of the american empire, capitalism and colonialism to something better.  Preserving status quo institutions that concentrate wealth while reducing most of us to joyless cogs in a machine is a dead end. 

This is a time to stay tender, sensitive and emotional, not become cold and robotic. We can still embrace all of life’s gray areas and remain open to dialogue, so we don’t end up like the totalitarians. We don’t have to live like this if we shake off the numbness and try together. 

¹ See September 22 and 25 executive orders whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions. “Common threads … include … anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; … extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”

By Stu
	In Summer 2002, Slingshot published an article against the growing social dependency on cellular phones. There were no dumbphones at the time — a flip phone was only considered “dumb” not due to the supposed technological superiority of other devices on the market, but instead because of the things it fostered:  isolation, dependency on the state and large corporations, ecocide in the Congo and across the world (yes, folks were talking about this decades ago), and a lack of autonomy and critical thinking skills for whoever was unfortunate enough to get sucked into buying one.
	Today, the concept that a dumbphone would be “too much” for any consumer is widely considered laughable, if it is considered at all. Even in radical spaces, downgrading from a smartphone to something that has physical buttons and can’t access Instagram is just about the limit of peoples’ imaginations. What happened to the resistance to the steady invasion of these parasites into our lives? Have we been totally fooled?
	Well, yes. Maybe we can't be too hard on ourselves - the forces that have pushed these things on us and our communities are much, much bigger than us, and for better or worse the world has changed since 2002. The luddites of the early aughts did not have to get by in the world we live in today with its demands for efficiency, immediacy, and connectivity. Our social landscape has changed and with it so have our needs and challenges. But dammit, we’re anarchists! We are the self-proclaimed co-creators of the liberated world to come, fighting for all that is autonomous! And yet daily we sell ourselves out, sacrificing the very skills necessary to support our own individual autonomy. How will we liberate our communities from oppression if we can’t free ourselves from the most obvious and most optional mechanisms of capitalist psychological manipulation? 
	It is time for us to reimagine the tech resistance. New ways of living must be found in our current version of the techno-hellscape if our movements are to be successful. 
	Luckily, awareness of the issue is stronger than ever. People are disillusioned and want a way out, but we are all so deep in the shit that nobody knows where to start. Your ownership of a device, and its ownership over you, are all but a foregone conclusion. But there are some of us who have taken the leap of faith, and are here to tell you to fear not. It can be done! The below are a few critical learnings from my personal journey of ditching my smartphone and the journeys of others who have walked with me. This is not a guide to the best smartphone alternatives; these exist online if you look for them, but before you go shopping you must take a hard look at yourself and your needs. Everyone is different and the way is complicated. You will have to do the work, you will have to think for yourself. What a blessing!
Ground yourself in Reality
	The things we think we “need” from our phones are not only available on a laptop or desktop computer, which has little to no hold over a person once they leave their home, but in fact these things are available with no computer at all, portable or otherwise. Your neighbor who has lived in your hood for 20 years knows their way around and can give you directions or tell you where to get the best burger. CDs are available by the pound at secondhand stores or garage sales, the radios still work, and your friends can play sweeter music around a bonfire than can be found on any streaming service. The most secure platform for discussing sensitive information is in person, on a walk under the sun. And that dull, ever present itch to turn off your brain and scroll for hours on end, well, it turns out that this isn’t a need at all, but is actually manufactured by the people who make the very devices you use to scratch the itch. 
	This is the most important lesson for us to hold onto in our fight for freedom from tech* - the earth and the communities we build upon it have fulfilled our needs without the help of tech for time immemorial. This fact has not changed; it has just been obscured to us by the people in power.
Kill your Shame, for it does not belong to you
	We all know the feeling, you’re just out of an hour-long doomscroll and can’t fathom why you keep doing this to yourself. You think of all the other things you could have been doing with your time, and yet you still don’t do them because you now feel like all the life has been drained out of you. You know that things could be different, and you know that this will happen again anyways.
	It is important that we recognize our relationship to our devices for what it is - addiction. People have been shaming addicts for generations. Anyone who has been to an AA meeting or is involved in harm reduction work knows that this simply doesn’t work - shame is not an effective mechanism for inspiring action to change behavior when it comes to addiction. Instead, non-judgmental support is required to help someone build themselves up to get out of the hole they are in.
	The same is true for the way we must talk to ourselves about social media and tech addiction. Shaming yourself for scrolling won’t get you anywhere. Corporations and the many thousands of very smart people they employ have been working for decades to make the most potent dopamine-release inducers possible. They know how the human brain works and (ab)use its weaknesses to their advantage, ensuring you will get sucked in again and again. If anyone should be ashamed of your usage, it is them. Do not shame yourself for a situation you did not create. 
	Letting go of shame opens the door to love. When we see someone we love hurting themselves, we are inspired to encourage them to change. The same thing happens when we love ourselves — we start working towards change.
	Shame pops up in one other form that is important to address. When you give up the convenience that a smartphone offers, there will inevitably be times when you have to rely on those around you in ways you aren’t used to. Sometimes my friends have to buy concert merch for me because the seller only takes Venmo. Other times I have to ask a stranger for directions. I am known at work for asking coworkers on occasion to take job-related pictures for me and send them to my email.
	I have found that while some people do look down on me for this kind of thing, usually the strongest resistance I get is from myself. Needing the help of another, how embarrassing! I hate feeling like a burden to the people around me. But tell me this, what is really more embarrassing: being so bought into narratives of capitalist individualism that you are more willing to consult with an AI search bot for your problems than you are with another human being, or simply asking somebody to do something that will not take more than a minute, if that, of their time?
	The truth is that people want to feel helpful. Doing things for one another gives us satisfaction and gives us the opportunity to connect with each other on a material level.
	Strong communities are built on this kind of interaction. When someone has helped us in a small way before, we are more likely to feel comfortable relying on them in times of real distress, and they are more willing to accept the responsibility because they know us and care about our wellbeing. Communities die by a thousand cuts as we increasingly rely not on each other for our most banal needs but turn instead to our devices.
Adjust your Expectations and Embrace Sacrifice
	In our culture, no altar receives such fervent worship as that of the god of Convenience. Capitalism and its goons have turned our bodies, minds, time, and experiences into something that can be bought, sold and stolen not only by nameless conglomerates but also by each other. Every second not spent “bettering” ourselves or producing in some way is considered wasted. Naturally then, we have developed an insatiable hunger for optimizing every aspect of our lives. We trim the fat of life, even though it is the very thing that keeps us warm.
	We always take the fastest route to get where we are going, even if another way is more pleasant. We order things online instead of going to the local store and are frustrated when our goods don’t arrive promptly, despite the thousands of miles that most products travel before they get to us.
	We have come to demand this same efficiency in our relationships, subjecting each other to a constant barrage of notifications informing us that somebody would like to claim our attention this very instant, no matter where we are or what we are doing. This simply will not do.
	Killing the corporation in your pocket means undergoing a process of letting go of certain conveniences. No longer will you have the entire digital world at your fingertips at all times. The portal between your pocket and those of your friends and family will grow narrower, with fewer avenues of interaction.
	My particular dumbphone is very slow to type on (although not all of them are). Texting, to most people, is supposed to be a totally stream-of-consciousness experience. So frequently, I am asked how I can deal with the slowness, how frustrating it must be! To this I say that I am not really texting, as most people have come to understand that term. It is more akin to writing an email or a letter - an activity that requires both attention and intention. I would not whip out my pen and paper in the middle of a conversation to draft a letter to my grandmother. Not only would I not be able to divide my attention adequately for the task, but it would obviously be considered rude to whomever I was physically present with. And when I do write letters, I am not frustrated by how slowly my hand moves across the page because I am focused on the task before me and enjoying it.
	This type of expectation adjustment applies to many of the daily interactions we have become accustomed to. You will start to expect others to respect your time and attention and will expect yourself to be more intentional with your communication. You will become comfortable with the responsibility of safely navigating yourself and others through the world via memory and asking others for directions. At times, you will get lost, you will miss an invite to a party that only went out on social media, you will have days where nothing good is playing on the radio and you are forced to sit in silence on your commute, alone with nothing but your thoughts.
	Through all this, you will become a more capable friend, lover, neighbor, parent, sibling, comrade.
	Others will have to adjust their expectations as well when you take the leap; for the people-pleasers among us this can be the hardest part. Eyes will roll when you say that your phone doesn’t do pictures, can they just show you in person or send it to your email instead? Some will be bothered if your response times begin to grow longer. They will still believe that they have a right to your attention at a moment’s notice, no matter what.
	You may have to explain to these people, lovingly, that attention is a finite resource, and by reserving it you are better able to give yourself to them during the time that you spend together. Some of them will continue to whip out their phones to send a quick text while you are speaking, and you will have to wait for them to finish to make sure they heard you.
	Over time, if not instantly, a lot of these people will see that you are in fact stronger, happier, more present and more capable without the computer in your pocket and the corporations that infest it. They will become curious, even jealous. After all most of us are looking for the same thing — a way out of this horribly dysfunctional situation we have found ourselves in. Together, we can find a new way of connecting, one that is both well suited to modern life and conducive to fostering healthy, autonomous relationships with each other and the world around us.

*for the purpose of this article, “tech” is used to refer to corporate tech algorithms/platforms/institutions like social media, streaming services, and other digital "aides" rather than digital technology as a whole. Not all technology is bad technology!

By DFW Support Committee

After a July 4 noise demonstration at the Prairieland ICE Detention Center in Alvarado, TX, to show solidarity with ICE detainees and protest ongoing deportations, there was an officer-involved shooting. Trump’s Department of Justice skewed the shooting as a terrorist ambush and 17 people were arrested on ruinous charges. Eleven face aggravated assault, attempted murder, and terrorism charges. Six others face accusations including evidence tampering, smuggling of persons, and hindering prosecution of terrorism. Almost all are charged with organized criminal activity, and the state set their bonds as high as $15 million. 

Common practices in activist scenes have been cast as evidence of violent conspiracy. The FBI alleges that use of encrypted messaging app Signal, wearing black clothing, zine distribution, and speech critical of the government are all proof of a conspiracy to ambush police. Even two defendants’ commercial printer has become evidence of criminality. 

But the state lies. We know our loved ones. They devote their free time to caring for people neglected by the state, such as those experiencing homelessness and the queer community of Dallas-Fort Worth. They have families, pets, and lives they intended to return to on July 5. The state is using the people we love to demonize leftists, anarchists, and anyone it deems “Antifa” and to justify its repression of broader left movements. In spite of this, we are only emboldened.

“No one should take you out of your home at gunpoint and bring you to a county you’ve never been to, just for removing someone from a group chat,” said defendant Dario Sanchez, the sole defendant released on bond. “I’ve been arrested and released three times, each one more ridiculous than the last. At times I’ve felt numb or distraught, but more than anything, I’m angry at how my life has been stolen from me. I’m not about to let anyone make me shy away from who I am or what I believe in.”

“With these scare tactics, the government tries to constrain what we imagine is politically possible,” said Lydia Koza, wife of defendant Autumn Hill. “They put my wife in a cage because she objected to putting people in cages. When the FBI raided our house and took her away, I thought they would kill me. Threatening to take everything away from me has only given me more purpose than ever – to fight for justice, for her and everyone.”

Across the world, from Seoul, South Korea, to Athens, Greece, we’ve seen international support. People have hosted banner drops, letter writing campaigns, and solidarity events with the defendants. While on the legal front, the state and federal governments have purposely held defendants in limbo—waiting to indict them, subjecting them to a multitude of abuses in jail—organizing as a collective has helped us feel less alone. Seeing our family, our friends, and our comrades be subject to arbitrary punishment, forced labor, strip searches, bio-hazardous conditions, and denial of medical care while incarcerated only strengthens our belief in dismantling the carceral system and creating a world without police.

A public fundraiser has been organized by the DFW Support Committee at givesendgo.com/SupportDFWprotestors. We ask that you give if you can, but please write letters to the defendants and spread the word of this case: DFWdefendants.wordpress.com. Show the state that repression only breeds resistance.

UPDATE SINCE SLINGSHOT WENT TO THE PRINTING PRESS

Federal Agents Arrest Another Person in Prairieland Case, Bringing Total Number of Defendants to 18

The Arrest Comes More Than Three Months After July 4 Immigrant Solidarity Protest and Less Than a Month After Felony Charges Were Brought Against Johnson County Sheriff Adam King, Who Is Directly Involved in the Prairieland Case

DALLAS-FORT WORTH, TX — In an early morning raid yesterday, federal agents arrested another person in connection with a July 4 protest at the Prairieland ICE Detention Center. More than three months after the protest, Janette Goering was arrested by federal and local police at her home in Carrollton, Texas, on Tuesday, October 21. Goering is being held at Johnson County Jail on a state charge of aiding in the commission of terrorism and has a bond set at $5 million.

Goering’s arrest continues a trend of escalation by police and prosecutors in a case that now involves 18 defendants. The government is using exorbitant bonds of up to $15 million to imprison all but one of the defendants. “It’s unbelievable that more than three months later the state is still trying to widen the net in this case,” said a spokesperson for the DFW Support Committee, a group of family and loved ones of defendants. “They’re attempting to prosecute this as an “Antifa” case in order to terrorize the movement in solidarity with immigrants, but it’s not going to work.”

The case has been hailed by the Trump administration as the first legal case against “Antifa.” On October 15, federal charges were formally brought against two of the Prairieland defendants, Autumn Hill and Zachary Evetts; the charges include 1 count of providing material support to terrorists, 3 counts of attempted murder of officers and employees of the United States, and 3 counts of discharging a firearm during, in relation to, and in furtherance of a crime of violence. FBI director Kash Patel called the defendants “Antifa-aligned anarchist violent extremists,” sharing Fox News coverage of the indictments on X. “This seems like a coordinated political campaign,” said Stephanie Shiver, wife of defendant Meagan Morris. “The feds didn’t do anything for months and then they bring everyone into court just days after Trump designated ‘Antifa’ a priority threat.” On September 25, the White House released the National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 (NSPM-7), which ordered all federal law enforcement agencies to prioritize combating “Antifa” as a domestic terrorism threat. 

The Department of Justice (DOJ) has doubled down on the political nature of the prosecution. In a lengthy federal hearing to establish probable cause to detain the defendants, the federal government raised political ideas expressed in group messages, political literature known as “zines,” and even board games found at defendants’ houses. Of significance was commercial printing equipment seized the week prior from the home of two defendants. The DOJ claimed that this equipment and the defendants’ production of left-wing reading materials, including zines and books, were evidence of their responsibility for criminal acts.

“The recent federal indictment makes false claims, mischaracterizes facts, and takes quotes out of context,” said a spokesperson for the DFW Support Committee. “Claims of adherence to a political ideology, whether true or not, are not grounds to charge someone with terrorism and does not belong in an indictment.”

On October 1, the State of Texas indicted 14 people on charges including terrorism, aggravated assault against a public servant, aggravated assault with a deadly weapon against a peace officer, aiding in the commission of terrorism, smuggling of persons, hindering prosecution of terrorism, and tampering with/fabricating physical evidence; the state imposed an additional charge of “engaging in organized criminal activity” for all 14 defendants. A total of 15 defendants have been indicted on state charges, meaning most defendants will be forced to fight concurrent federal and state cases.

Yesterday’s arrest comes just three weeks after criminal charges were filed against Johnson County Sheriff Adam King, whose office is working with the federal government to prosecute the Prairieland defendants. Supporters of the defendants call into question the credibility and integrity of King and the Johnson County Sheriff’s Office. “I’m just worried about the Johnson County Sheriff’s Office respecting defendants’ rights and following the law,” said Irina Popova, member of the DFW Support Committee. King is facing four felony charges, including aggravated perjury, corrupt influence, and abuse of official capacity, casting doubt about the veracity of the Prairieland case.

False accusations by Johnson County law enforcement play a major role in recent developments in the case against Dario Sanchez, the sole defendant released on bond. Sanchez faces state charges of hindering prosecution of terrorism and tampering with / fabricating physical evidence.

“I’ve been arrested and released three times, each one more ridiculous than the last,” said Sanchez. “At times I’ve felt numb or distraught, but more than anything, I’m angry at how my life has been stolen from me. I’m not about to let anyone make me shy away from who I am or what I believe in.” Sanchez was rearrested on September 22, based on a false claim by the prosecution that he violated his bond conditions. The government was forced to rescind the claim when confronted with proof to the contrary. As part of his release, Sanchez is required to submit to GPS tracking and monitoring and restriction of his electronic device usage. The charges against Sanchez simply stem from him removing someone from private group text chats. “The accusation that someone tampered with evidence for removing someone from a group chat is absurd,” said Popova. “The case against Sanchez shows how desperate the state is to criminalize these defendants.”

“This unending criminal investigation should alarm anyone who believes in the right to protest the government,” reflects Xavier T. de Janon, Director of Mass Defense at the National Lawyers Guild (https://www.nlg.org/nlg-stands-with-anti-ice-dissent-calls-for-solidarity-with-the-prairieland-defendants/). “We cannot tolerate the dangerous criminalization of a noise demonstration against ICE.”

The Prairieland case has garnered widespread attention and expressions of solidarity. On October 3, the DFW Support Committee called for a Day of International Solidarity. Groups of people from Seoul, South Korea, to Athens, Greece, showed support for the Prairieland defendants in the form of banner drops, letter writing campaigns, and other solidarity events.

With the start of the federal cases, the majority of the defendants were transferred to new jails. Ines Soto, Meagan Morris, Benjamin Song, Autumn Hill, and Zachary Evetts are now held at the Federal Medical Facility in Fort Worth, Texas. Elizabeth Soto, Savanna Batten, Maricela Rueda, Joy Gibson, and Rebecca Morgan are now being held at the Wichita County Detention Center. Family members have voiced concerns about the distance and new restrictions faced by those held at the Wichita County facility. Amber Lowrey, sister of Savanna Batten, said, “We now have to drive two and a half hours just to see our sister, and it’s been really hard to make phone calls work between technical issues or some arbitrary discipline.”

The various cases stem from a noise demonstration in solidarity with ICE detainees at the Prairieland ICE Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas, on July 4, 2025. Toward the end of the demonstration, an officer with the Alvarado Police Department arrived and allegedly quickly became involved in an exchange of gunfire with someone else on the scene. The officer sustained minor injuries, and was released from the hospital shortly afterwards. Ten people were arrested at the scene, and a manhunt ensued in the subsequent days for another defendant. Eight more defendants were arrested in the days and weeks following the protest.

Relevant Federal Case Numbers:

4:25-mj-00451-BJ (Sanchez Estrada)
4:25-mj-00452-BJ (Initial 10 arrested)
4:25-mj-00468-BJ (Song)
4:25-mj-00479-BP (Sharp and Thomas)
4:25-mj-00495-BJ (Morgan)
4:25-cr-259-P (Arnold and Evetts)

By Antonio

There’s no getting around it. It’s a fucking scary time to be alive. 

Fascism is on the rise, in the halls of state power (of course), but also among “the people” (at least, certain portions of them) who are lost in the sauce of misinformation, who are taken over by the thrilling feelings of hatred that make their own miseries a bit more tolerable, and who are actively lending their hearts and minds to fascist strongman leaders. 

Those leaders, emboldened by a state apparatus set up to push elite will on the majority even in more “normal” times, are now leveraging that state to attack its scapegoat enemies (mostly migrants and trans folks at this point), while dismantling whatever parts of the state may have actually served some social good. They’re rewriting history to suit their white supremacism and macho penchant for violence. They’re cracking down on dissent — even from the most tepid liberal opposition, but of course preparing the ground for a full-scale attack on leftists, anarchists, antifascists, and anyone who actually gets what’s going on. 

In this context, the liberal institutions that we anarchists tend to oppose — but which compose some form of bulwark against the worst overt abuses of state power in the USA — aren’t even doing their nominal job. The Democrats form a sad, useless, positively counterinsurgent “opposition party”. Media agencies readily bend over to sate authoritarian concerns. University administrators hand over names of pro-Palestinian members of the university community, helping Stephen Miller and his minions target them in future rounds of legal repression. With the exception of some parts of the judicial system (including individual jurors who refused to indict a hero who threw sandwiches at the ICE gestapo), most institutions are falling in line, accepting the fascist turn, and crossing their fingers they won’t be attacked next. 

Meanwhile, the economy stands on edge, between tariff whiplash, job losses from federal cuts of many sorts and the knock-on effects of that which have yet to be fully felt, wholly bad “fundamentals” (i.e. the global lack of highly profitable expansion opportunities for capital), and the looming bubble pop and crash of the over-capitalized “AI” sector. Great for you if you currently have a job. But that may not last. 

So yeah, there’s plenty of good reasons to be freaked out. The world is always a bit fucked. But this time of ours seems unprecedentedly fucked. I mean, I haven’t even mentioned the climate crises!

For many radicals, this feels like an intolerable weight. We know things are fucked, but the litany of specifics is too much to take on. We start checking out. Personally, I’ve stopped paying as close attention to news. No more daily listens to “Depress-a-me Now!” Occasional dives into the headlines or social media feeds are enough to know: bad things keep happening. 

So, what can we do? How can we think about this moment in a way that is not demobilizing, but also not naive? How do we stay informed, but not overwhelmed? How do we take seriously the fascist threat, while also not losing hope and our own humanity?

Here I want to offer two simple ideas that — I think — can help us feel better (which is actually pretty important!) and act more effectively.

First idea: the world is complex, interconnected, chaotic, and it exists beyond the immediate stuff that we tend to see via media and our daily lives. Many parts of planet earth — beings, mountains, natural processes — couldn’t care less who is “President”: elites’ control is as total as the entirety of the planet is controllable. Upon this enormity and complexity, history advances in non-linear and surprising ways. What seems like “end times” with no way out, is not actually the end. There is no end. There is no beginning. There is only the inevitable march of change. When you step outside of our narrow, present-oriented viewpoint, you see a much wider and longer story, where authoritarian power has never held on for long. 

Trump will not last. Capitalism will not exist forever. Fossil fuels will run dry. Nation states we find so horrific are only hundreds of years old! And oh-so-many asshole “leaders” who once seemed impervious to their contemporaries, turned out to not be!

Many times before history has confronted anti-systemic actors like ourselves with seemingly nonstop and unstoppable crises, end times thinking, and the prospect of no hope. Yet, in each case, the world did not in fact end¹. People struggled. People survived. Sometimes, in fact, people improved conditions through their struggles against fascism. Look at Brazil, post-military dictatorship. The Landless Workers Movement (MST) of Brazil have been able to occupy millions of acres of land, growing food and livelihoods for their people and movements, precisely as a result of their wins against a dictatorship that lasted decades. They fought for a constitutional right to land and have (since winning that) used that law to get land and build ecological autonomy. I’m sure if you asked activists under that dictatorship if they were overwhelmed, you’d find reflections of your own current condition. But time did not stop. The military was not invincible. Brazil is no paradise now, but grassroots movements are strong, and at least they are actually punishing their last fascist strongman (Jair Bolsonaro) for his crimes! No one knew, during his reign, that such a turnabout was possible. The future is not foretold.

Surviving is important. Our own happiness is important to our ability and will to survive, and to continuing to take care of each other. It’s important to recognize our self-worth, and the power held in surviving so as to pass on our own ideas and strategies to the next generation. Our literal existence can be resistance. But to survive and to fight back, we need to take care of our own hearts.

In order to do that, I suggest a second idea: this almost unthinkable bigness and unpredictability of the world may make us feel less powerful, but it actually can help us be more effective. How? By reminding us to focus, to see where we fit in specific parts of that larger universe, and to act with concerted and thoughtful effort. 

One person cannot go to all the ICE protests, AND call their “representatives” about Gaza, AND build a mutual aid pod, AND feed the homeless, AND organize for grassroots hormone therapy or birth control provision, AND be a parent, a provider, and a musician, and a reader, and a polycule navigator, and an enjoyer of life. We simply cannot do it all. 

But we can certainly do something. And to the extent we focus, we can do it well. Especially, of course, when we do it with others. Yes, there may be plenty of bootlickers out there. But most people want freedom, and many of us will fight for it. And when we fight, we win.

In the long arc of struggle, it’s critical to remember that we can win. Winning is not certain, sure. It won’t be easy, obviously. But history is often surprising. The forces that we face seem impervious to our power, yet history is full of examples that belie that defeatist position. Leaders are assassinated — or killed by their own hubris and ambitions. Apartheid regimes get called out — and are suddenly determined to be unconscionable after being tolerated for decades. You don’t need to be a Star Wars nerd to know that empires inevitably fall. Just like it’s important to remember that workers outnumber capitalists, let’s remember that (globally) there are more people who hate fascists like Trump than those who support them, by a lot.

Rather than be distracted and overwhelmed by the litany of crimes against humanity and our future, when we find something we care about, and work on it with others, we do three crucial things at once. We refuse to give up or give in, and show others that resistance is possible. We tangibly affect our world. And we embolden ourselves, reminding ourselves that our values matter, our values exist and make sense and cannot be exterminated, and they — we — can change the world. We feel better about ourselves, we maintain a horizon that we are moving toward, and we keep ourselves alive because it feels best to keep on collectively moving toward that horizon, regardless of what the assholes do.

As Assata Shakur famously said (RIP):

“It is our duty to fight for our freedom.

It is our duty to win.

We must love each other and support each other.

We have nothing to lose but our chains.”

¹ I admit that many people died and species were exterminated, but not all.

By Punch Up • Kick Down Distro

The ways we collectively respond to harm in our communities is not only a reflection of our broader values, but a critical part of maintaining cohesive and resilient movements. I know that “Cancel Culture” might feel like an exhausted topic not worth rehashing. However, years after #MeToo, sexual violence is still rampant in DIY/Punk/Activist spaces and society in general. Our personal relationships, subcultural “scenes,” and political projects are regularly fractured and weakened by acts of harm and the resulting personal traumas and social fallouts. An inability to adequately and effectively handle harm continues to be a detriment to our mutual struggle against the oppressive forces of capitalist empire and the logics upon which it is built. Cancel culture has proven ineffectual and damaging because it is an individualized response to a fundamentally social problem which relies on carceral, punitive logic. Destroying an individual does not dismantle the systems which allow harm or abuse to occur, and cancel campaigns rarely encourage going beyond surface level punishments towards root causes and potential solutions.

The police, the carceral state, and the prison industrial complex are all institutions of punishment and violence whose primary function is to uphold structures of capitalist exploitation and imperialism. Not only must we reject these institutions as such but also reject their logics, thinking and acting beyond the social punishments of excommunication and punitive models of dehumanization. We cannot reproduce the dominator model if our aim is a social paradigm free from domination. 

The idea that people who cause harm are exceptionally malicious monsters fails to grapple with how normalized rape culture is, while framing abusive behavior as an exclusively individual moral failing rather than a widespread phenomenon situated among complex social conditions. While neither gender violence nor gender expression exist on a binary, our society is founded on a patriarchal gender hierarchy, and sexual violence has been used as a weapon of domination and subjugation against women throughout history and into the modern day. Popular culture often depicts sexual coercion as normal; teaches young men that they are entitled to women’s bodies as a sexual object. An overwhelming number of young people’s sexual expectations are shaped by an unlimited access to online pornography, a majority of which portray sex as existing solely for male pleasure. Alcohol and drug use are defining aspects of social life, even within our subcultural spaces. Acts of sexual violence so frequently involve substance (ab)use. Combining a culture of excessive drinking, patriarchal indoctrination which sexualizes the female body, and a lack of education about consent are a formula for rampant sexual violence. Of course, none of this absolves anyone for harm they’ve caused, but it’s worth considering all the factors that lead to abuse beyond the fundamental “badness” of the person who perpetrates it. Likewise, while patriarchy benefits men in ways that are often invisible to them, patriarchy and rape culture are structures — a series of social relationships existing within and among other power dynamics — and power is relative. We should not equate the violent and abusive actions of socially, economically, and politically powerful members of the ruling class and the harmful behaviors of the regular people who occupy our lives. 

Public spectacles of punishment, such as social media “call-outs,” or cyber bullying campaigns are inept attempts to root out abuse in the community, one “abuser” at a time. Social media’s profit driven algorithm is fueled by reactive and simplistic moral binaries — these platforms harvest engagement by incentivizing content that instigates moral outrage. Participants in online shaming or harassment campaigns derive a sense of virtuous pleasure for being on the “right side” of a grand moral narrative.

Most punks or leftists have some experience in witnessing an “accountability process” go horribly wrong. Even good faith attempts at responding to harm are too often structured with an orientation of shame and punishment. First of all, if access to support or dignity is conditional on adhering to a “process” imposed by others, it is a form of coercion and ultimately ineffectual. Likewise, the healing of someone who has been harmed is not conditional on the “accountability” or punishment or the person who caused them harm. Support for someone who has been harmed is a markedly different, separate process from one concerning the person who caused harm. Restoration for both parties happens on different timelines and by different means according to the situation, the people involved, and their personal circumstance. 

It is not that community intervention of harm or abuse is impossible or unworthy of our efforts, but the approach, expectation, and understanding of what a “successful” process looks like cannot be an abstraction. It is essential to remain behaviorally specific, focus on realistic and manageable expectations, and practice patience with everyone involved. Mistakes will be made and should be met with reaffirmation of goals and adjustment towards them, rather than a dismissal of those involved in the process or the process itself. There is no “correct” way of confronting harm. These situations are dynamic and contextual. There are no blueprints, no easy answers, no neat categories. What is required is dynamism, critical thinking, and remaining principled in our values against dehumanization. 

While it has become one of those terms frequently misused and co-opted, “accountability,” properly understood, can be a guide for taking responsibility for harm, committing to meaningful change, and repairing damaged relationships. Accountability is not some goal to be achieved, nor is it a constant state that can be objectively defined for all people. It is a fluctuating needle on a spectrum of how much your values and behaviors align in any given moment or decision. 

Accountability must come from a place of authenticity, rather than a performance of shame. Shame only calls attention to flaws rather than building on strengths — it lets people who have caused harm off the hook for being inherently bad, essentializing that behavior and rendering them incapable of ever doing better. 

In contrast to shame, regret is a healthy response to realizing one has acted out of alignment with their values. Regret is a realization that one has taken a regrettable action, while shame internalizes that action as a fundamental part of one’s character. 

Responding to harm productively requires a basic retention of dignity for everyone involved, a willingness to engage in challenging dialogue, and opportunities for people to take responsibility for the harm they’ve caused without threatening their material safety and access to support. For people who have caused harm, the opportunity to be honest and transparent without the threat of public humiliation or the fear of dehumanization is crucial for genuinely reckoning with their harmful behavior in order to change it. If attempting to take responsibility for harm is a guarantee of social exile and public shaming, those who have caused harm will go into hiding, run away, turn to substances, and/or try to justify their behavior.

Embodying our values also means recognizing how truly damaging sexual violence is. When someone in our life causes real harm, we need to take it seriously. As friends and members of shared communities we have a responsibility to provide support, however we are capable, for survivors of abuse. Sexual violence in particular can be profoundly, debilitatingly traumatic. The call for harsh and immediate punishment is justifiable when someone has been abused, violated or traumatized. However, we cannot hope for legitimate forms of restoration or reconciliation to come from a trauma response, and punishment does not incentivize anyone to change their harmful behavior.

Consequences are to be expected when harm is caused, but that does not require punishment. Someone who has caused harm must accept the social ramifications of those actions and diligently respect the needs of the survivor. These are justifiable consequences of harmful behavior, not needlessly cruel punishments or denial of personhood, and it is important not to confuse the two. A consequence of causing harm may be that the trust and respect of members of the community is lost. That consequence becomes dehumanization when someone’s character is set in stone, when the possibility for transformation or reconciliation is denied. Likewise, reminding people that they are expected to make changes to their behavior and encouraging them to do so, does not require punishment and humiliation. It’s important to check people who have caused harm if they are straying from their commitments, or showing signs of slipping back into harmful behavior, as long their autonomy is respected and their humanity maintained.

We must identify and overcome the puritanical ideologies that are adopted from corrupted, outdated, and oppressive judicial and theological systems which rely on fixed, formulaic morality. We have to find ways to confront harm and abuse without getting lost in procedure, seduced by vengeance, burnt out by conflict or demoralized by ineptitude. We need to foster social relationships with trustworthy people where we can be honest in considering the ways we have caused harm without being subjected to cruelty or punitive judgement. Confronting harm, we have to accept the reality of the world we live in and the social context we are all subjected to while challenging the logics of punishment and disposability.

Strong communities of mutual obligation and reciprocal care weaken the potential for harm to take place to begin with. The resilience of these communities is only possible if we keep firmly intact the basic humanity of everyone, even those who cause harm. Our response to abusive behavior must be grounded in the shared fundamental belief that nobody is disposable. It is our shared responsibility to reinforce this belief, to build a collective capacity to handle harm without taking on the logics of our mutual oppressors.

By PhotoNinja Ari

ICE is increasingly hunting for people in and around courthouses after they attend their immigration hearings. They wait outside courtrooms, ready to pounce the moment someone emerges from their hearing.

ICE exploits a vulnerable moment in a person’s life: Just when they think they are safe to walk out of court and go home, the threat of detainment looms. This can drive people to skip court dates, which can impact their immigration status. It’s a cruel catch-22 that tears families apart and causes undocumented folks to live in fear. One way to help out is by organizing court support networks.

What Is Court Support?

Court Support is a type of mutual aid that involves accompanying people to immigration court and assuring they are not alone throughout the process. We keep them company and intervene when ICE lurks nearby. It also involves getting to know people, listening to them, and supporting their need to feel safe as this scary situation unfolds. Sometimes the process can provide comfort, which is actually quite a lot. Just knowing you’re not invisible; that you won’t be kidnapped and disappeared without a crowd protesting, can provide some peace of mind throughout this shitty era of escalating state-sponsored violence against immigrants.

Grounded in Abolitionist Values: Solidarity, not Charity

This isn’t charity — it’s abolitionist mutual aid. Court support uproots the logic of surveillance, detention, and coercion. We’re building a world based on mutual aid, solidarity, and consent.

Imagine a world without immigration detention. Immigration detention is a scam after all, designed to funnel taxpayer money into the hands of private prison corporations like GeoGroup. If we don’t stand up for undocumented people, our own communities will be next. Those who profit from the prison industrial complex will keep finding new groups to target for mass incarceration until we put them out of business. Fighting to abolish ICE detention keeps all of us safer.

Court support is actually working!

Since the court support movement in SF began, the number of people who have been abducted after their court hearings has been drastically reduced here. ICE is far less likely to act if people with cameras and glitter are standing by. We’re the DIY paparazzi, shedding light on ICE atrocities by exposing their kidnapping ring. They may be hiding their faces, but we aren’t letting their crimes stay hidden.

Why It Works—And Actually Saves People from Abduction

• Visibility as protection: ICE is less likely to snatch someone right after court when there’s a crowd. Being watched de-escalates their tactics.
• Emergency intervention: If ICE tries to swoop in, the support team documents, witnesses, raises the alarm, calls legal help, and sometimes blocks them. This creates delays that can derail snap arrests.

Tip: Be sure to get enough volunteers to cover all the court dates and times. You want to avoid leaving a gap in which ICE could slip in and kidnap people. As long as there are always people there ready to document and pay attention to what is happening, ICE is far more likely to get camera-shy and back off.

From the Detention Watch Network’s #CommunitiesNotCages toolkit: “Abolitionist mutual aid is about forming non-hierarchical networks that respond directly to the needs of those under ICE terror, working in solidarity with those inside and impacted communities outside.” 

Learn more and find tips for how to start a Detention Watch Network in your community here: detentionwatchnetwork.org

By Hazel

You are trying to talk to someone, maybe a friend or a family member, about political action. You’re trying to convince them that, rather than the time for despair, now is the time for hope; and not hope in the system, but hope in themself and each other. The uncertainty of the moment has softened them, American preconceptions are crumbling, and the flag of patriotism once tinged is now covered with a decadent rot, but still you are fighting against a lifetime of habit.

There are many traits that mark an effective organizer. One of them is the ability to understand and respond to the context of each person you talk to. I will draw out three limitations in particular to keep in mind when trying to reach someone in a conversation. It is up to you then, as always, to decide who to commit your energies to and how to approach them. These limitations are fear, imagination, and social pressure.

On the subject of fear, I would hazard a guess that it plays a bigger role for those who have a chance at refuge: the affluent, ostensibly white, and cis-het. This is almost paradoxical, until you remember that most people who fall outside those groups live in a perpetual state of anxiety, if not outright fear. The chilling effect of those emotions simply won’t be as effective in halting the activation of people who are already inoculated to them. There is perhaps another conversation to be had about conservatism primarily among gay men and some lesbians as a performative defense mechanism, also due to fear, also out of a misunderstanding of the struggle they participate in, but that conversation is altogether too complicated to do justice to here.

The attitude of the fearful can be summed up by a surprising insight given by my partner’s father: “They’re not arresting white people, unless they protest.” …Lots to unpack there, huh? The only counter to this kind of thinking, the privileged perspective of those who know that quietude can be an escape for them alone, is to remind them of their lonesomeness. It is true, in all likelihood, that wealthy, quiet whites will be able to live through this particular moment in relative peace; and those that chose to do so will probably contemplate suicide thereafter. They will hate themselves for their cowardice, and they will hate themselves for turning their back on all their friends and relatives who did stand up and resist, who would have been that much safer with another person at their side. 

If you wish to talk with people who are afraid, you have to respect their fear, or else they will withdraw from you. At the same time, every single person who stands up makes every other person standing up that much safer, and everyone needs to understand that. Massacres are made of isolated protests, but when a million people march, five million, ten, no guns can stop them — for the authority would do irreparable damage to itself. (That’s not to say a big march will fix the country, but showing up is the least they can do to keep others safe.) 

Imagination is a precious resource, and it is criminally underutilized in the United States. It is this way because our leaders fear the leadership of the masses, so our education, our labor, and even our home lives have been shoved into boxes that hinder the growth of our imaginative faculties. To this point, it requires patience to talk to someone who cannot imagine an alternative to for-profit health insurance, or endless military spending, for example. You have to walk them through it without theoreticals. 

Don’t say socialism, don’t say capitalism. There is no agreement whatsoever on the definition of those terms. In the American conception, capitalism is always viewed in the ideal, with its wants and needs perfectly balanced in a perpetually virtuous market, while socialism and communism (they are always lumped together) is Stalinism. It is not worth the time it will take to dismantle this conception. It will be easier to create a functional, socially responsible system of governance than it will be to convince some these Boomers that they are just as propagandized as the Russians. So don’t lean on jargon; just describe situations and actions that can be taken to make them better.

In this way, Mamdani’s mayoral campaign has given us all a very polished example to follow. Rather than draw the line at theoreticals, draw the line at dignity and have dignity mean affordability. Can a dignified life be synonymous with an affordable existence? No, not at all, but it’s something people understand. And when your someone asks you how all the changes to our current system will be paid for, the answer is cut ICE funding, replace corporate subsidies with public ones, and tax the rich. And if that doesn’t make sense to them, you can give up. 

Your time is precious. The last thing you have to remember when talking to your someone is the type of social pressure you exert on them­. The reality is that if you have a healthy relationship with a person, your dissent about their political opinions is not a threat to them. In most cases, that’s a good thing. It means your love for each other is unconditional, but it also means that you simply might not be the person to reach them. That doesn’t mean there’s no hope for them, and it doesn’t mean that all your efforts in talking to them about the current situation are wasted. 

Probably, you won’t be the one to change their mind, because they’re just too comfortable talking to you. The family space should be one in which people are comfortable, at least up to a point. If your uncle or your homie is sounding like a eugenicist, you need to get some mutuals together and make a plan. But if your someone is trying their best to understand what they’ve been seeing in the world and still can’t seem to accept the fact that they can do something to change it, it is okay to let go of your obligation to be their guide and instead allow yourself to just be a person with them. 

In truth, you’re better off talking to strangers. Because a stranger’s actions cannot be explained away by personality. Without the context of familiarity, they must be taken at face value. A stranger comes from the unknown and returns to the unknown, like a force of nature. So if you want to change some minds, get out there and be a force of nature.