UPDATE: Listen to an interview I did with the Allison Horrocks from the Lowell National Historical Park: https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/lowell-talks-a-community-conversation.htm

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Here it is. “100,000 Days A Year” is an illustration of the links between the Merrimack Manufacturing Company’s cotton textile mills and the slave labor camps along the Mississippi River. Thank you to Madeline Dall for her artistry.

This project grew out of an attempt to summarize three books about the “new history” of capitalism — i.e., how slavery in the USA was an essential feature of the origins of modern industrial capitalism.

Instead of writing something, I designed this visualization and hired an illustrator. I tried to put all the elements of the process on one page. Hoping it can be used as a learning aide for people interested in this period of history.

Specifically, I made this for people who are interested in learning about the “Southern connection” between the Lowell mills and the slave labor camps along the Mississippi River. There is much more work to be done in tracing these historical connections.

Pedagogy-wise, I made this in order to extend Silvia Federici’s argument about the nature of capitalist primitive accumulation. Primitive accumulation is not a phase which begins and ends prior to the development of capitalism.

Rather, primitive accumulation is always and already part of capitalist profit-making. Capitalist profit depends on expropriation, oppression, and degradation at every moment. It was true for New England’s textile mills in the 19th century. It’s true now for smart phone manufacturers. Here are the elements of the visualization:

Title: Historian Edward E. Baptist, in “The Half Has Never Been Told,” estimates that the mills in Lowell, Massachusetts, consumed, on average, 100,000 days worth of slave labor per year, embodied in tons of cotton bales.

Land: The “cotton frontier” was violently expropriated from the Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole peoples. The land was developed for cotton production by slaves coerced through the interstate slave trade from the Southeastern coasts of the USA.

Cotton harvesting: Clearing the land, planting cotton seed, packing, weighing, pressing, baling, shipping. The slave labor camps were organized in the “long lot” plantation style, which gave the highest number of planters access to riverfront.

Transit: The cotton bales were sent first by steamship down the Mississippi and then via packet line from New Orleans to Boston. The vast majority of cotton was shipped from New Orleans to New York to Liverpool, where it was consumed in the English mill complexes.

Transit: From Boston, the cotton was shipped along the Boston and Lowell Railroad to Lowell. Cotton textile production was a very large part of New England’s economy in the 19th century.

The Power loom: Using hundreds of machines, the mills transformed raw cotton bales into cotton textiles. The machines were powered by canal and water turbine. The steps included picking, carding, spinning, weaving. Women and children worked the machines. Lowell eventually became a hotbed for labor organizing in the USA.

The Lords of the Loom: The “Boston Associates” who financed and profited from the development of the Lowell mills. Anyone familiar with New England geography will recognize many these names, since they can be found on buildings, businesses, and street names all over the region.

All these elements were necessary to reap profit from what Baptist calls the “whipping machine.” Finance capital. Stolen land. Stolen soil. Slave labor. Wage labor. Is it anachronistic to talk about the “North” and the “South” before the Civil War, when the regions were tied so closely together through slavery?

Ironically, one of the Merrimack Manufacturing Company mills, the Lowell Mill, produced very coarse cloth, called “negro cloth,” which was sold back to the slave labor camps. In theory, a slave could have picked cotton and then seen that cotton returned to them in the form of a shirt.

For inquiries and rights, please reach out to me at seeder.llc@gmail.com

Andreas Malm’s book Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming (Verso 2016) is a history of the steam engine’s role during the origins of industrial capitalism. The book is not a history of “technological innovation” in Silicon Valley’s utopic sense of the phrase. Malm’s description of the Plug Plot Riots, for example, goes far to show that capitalists adopted the steam engine to quell the political power of organized labor in the cotton industry (see Chapter 10).

In Chapter 13, Fossil Capital: The Energy Basis of Bourgeois Property Relations, Malm explains his “General Formula of Fossil Capital.” This short summary will walk through the formula. Throughout I will use a simplified example of capitalist production of cotton commodities.

C-M-C’

This formula is read out loud as: “Commodity — Money — Commodity Prime.” A commodity (C) is sold for money (M) which is used to buy a new commodity (C’). In a capitalist market, I enter bourgeois property relations by selling my labor (C) for a wage (M). I use my wages to purchase the commodities I need to sustain myself, such as food to eat (C’), so that I may work another day — AKA the “social reproduction” of labor.

M-C-M’

This formula is read out loud as: “Money — Commodity — Money Prime.” Money (M) is used to buy a commodity (C) which is then sold on the market for profit (M’). A capitalist buys raw cotton. They transform the raw cotton into a finished cotton textile and then they sell it for a profit. But in order to make a profit, a capitalist must drive down their costs of production. Some costs remain fixed while others are more fungible. While the wages paid to a laborer for, say, 6 hours of work are enough for the laborer to “socially reproduce” themselves — pay rent, buy food, buy clothes— a capitalist will try to keep that laborer working more than 6 hours a day. Marx argues that the ultimate source of capitalist profit is in the production of this “surplus-value,” meaning that capitalists have an incentive to increase working hours and decrease wages.

M-C(L+MP)…P…C’-M’

This extended formula better represents the reality of commodity production. The first commodity (C) is bracketed by (L+MP), where the L stands for Labor Power and the MP stands for Means of Production. In our example, a capitalist purchases raw cotton. They can’t just magically transform the material into a new commodity (C’). Labor must work (LP) the raw cotton through weaving and spinning machines (MP) to complete the process. The P in this formula stands for Production, which, Malm argues, is closely related to the Marxist concept Stoffwechsel (“metabolism” or “material substratum”).

Here, Production (P) is the combination of all the “ancillary” raw materials that go into the production process: “‘coal by a steam-engine, oil by a wheel, hay by draft-horse,’ fulfilling their function and instantly expiring” (Malm 283). Cotton, labor power, and the means of production get combined in a process with “ancillary” materials to produce a new commodity, like cotton clothe, which is then sold for profit. The repetition of this process is called the accumulation of capital, where profits are reinvested in the production process to buy more cotton, more coal, more machines, more labor, more profit.

M-C(L+MP(F))…P^CO2…C’-M’

This is Malm’s General Formula of Fossil Capital. He argues that:

“at a certain stage in the historical development of capital, fossil fuels become a necessary material substratum for the production of surplus-value…they are utilised across the spectrum of commodity production as the material that sets it in motion” (288).

Fossil fuels (F) are combusted to set the means of production (MP) into motion. Carbon dioxide is, of course, expelled during the fossil fuel combustion process. Given that it is not possible to burn fossil fuels without emitting carbon dioxide, carbon dioxide becomes another necessary “ancillary” material of the production process (P^CO2). Fossil capital describes the process where “self-sustaining growth [is] in general welded to the combustion of fossil fuels” (292).

Malm uses the General Formula of Fossil Capital to interpret the “hockey-stick” graph of GDP growth for Japan, Western Europe, Latina America, and Asia between 1000–1998. GDP growth starts to sky rocket in the late 18th century. Malm argues that the new growth represents “different rules of reproduction” for capital. Namely, the new growth marks the beginnings of fossil capital. In short, no industrial capitalism without fossil fuel, no planetary combustion of fossil fuel without industrial capitalism.

Hope you read Andreas Malm’s Fossil Capital!

The full title of Kathleen Belew’s book is Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America (Harvard University Press, 2018). Like my summary of Jane Mayer’s book “Dark Money,” I wrote this summary to spread information that I think others should know.

Belew’s book is a history of the white power movement’s “groundswell” in the United States, between 1979 and 1995, culminating in the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City by Timothy McVeigh, Terry Nichols, and Michael Fortier. Among the book’s other accomplishments toward the historical record, Belew permanently dispels the “lone wolf” narrative about the bombing, a narrative which McVeigh himself tried to perpetuate after his arrest.

Grounded in years of archival research, Bring the War Home offers a powerful critique of the lone wolf narrative more broadly. One of the book’s central arguments is that the white power movement is indeed a real social movement in the United States with a history and strategy, a strategy which relies on decentralized, cell-style organizing. Lone wolves are creatures of the white power movement.

The movement “brought together members of the Klan, militias, radical tax resisters, white separatists, neo-Nazis, and proponents of white theologies such as Christian Identity, Odinism, and Dualism” (ix). What was it about the movement that brought these ideologies together?

The promise of violence — rather, the promise that members would get to inflict violence on other people. Belew writes that as the white power movement matured, it became more violent, and “[as] violence came to the fore of the movement, distinctions among white power factions melted away” (60). Belew calls this process “violent community formation” (34). Yet as a social movement, Belew makes a distinction between the white power movement’s “revolutionary violence” and the Ku Klux Klan’s “vigilante violence.”

Vigilante violence “served to constitute, shore up, and enforce systemic power” (106). Given that the U.S. government has a long history of “defending vigilante violence by refusing to enforce the law” (99), law enforcement inaction and vigilante violence may be understood together as a case of one hand washing the other. Revolutionary violence, however, sought to overthrow the state. It is the white power movement’s goal of overthrowing the federal government that sets it apart in the history of white supremacy in the U.S.

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Bring the War Home is divided into three parts. Each part corresponds to a different phase of the white power movement. Part 1, “Formation,” as its title suggests, is an account of the early years of the white power movement when it emerged from within and then splintered off from the KKK, when the KKK had some 10,000 members and more than 75,000 “active sympathizers” (58).

The “formative” years of the white power movement, between 1979 and 1983, are defined by experiences of the Vietnam War (the “War” in “Bring the War Home”). Belew calls the Vietnam War “the first real test of an integrated army” for the United States. The test’s failure was marked by “racial violence that plagued soldiers of color in combat and at home” (22). She writes that: “Embattled white power activists saw the Vietnam War as emblematic of all that had gone wrong” (30). What had “gone wrong” in this case was, to be sure, found in the psychological trauma and violence of combat experience, as well as the kind of society white, racist Vietnam War veterans returned to in the United States.

Belew refers to the farm foreclosure crisis, stagflation, and job loss as some of the “threatening changes of the 1970s that had turned their world upside down” (20), which, combined with anti-war protests and the civil rights movement, unmoored the white supremacist’s perceived position atop the state-backed racial economic hierarchy in the United States. Although the exact symbolic meaning of the Vietnam War shifted among white power activists over time (cf. 24), the war acted as the “principal signifier of the movement’s paramilitarism” (32). Veterans were among the white power movement’s key organizers, including Louis Beam, Richard Butler, Tom Metzger (who popularized the phrase “lone wolf”), Robert Miles, Glenn Miller, and Tom Posey.

Louis Beam returned from the Vietnam War, where he served as a Huey door gunner, and pinned his field medals onto his Klan robes. When Beam called on fellow white power activists to bring the Vietnam War back home, “he meant a literal extension of military-style combat into civilian space” (3). Beam became the Grand Wizard of the Texas Knights of the Ku Klux Klan before organizing his own “Texas Emergency Reserve, a Special-Forces-style Klan unit with extensive weaponry and rigorous training” (37).

Beam and other white power activists organized paramilitary training camps believing that they would begin society anew after a final clash with communism.

Beam’s Camp Puller prepared white power activists to “wage a race war” right at the moment when the United States and the Soviet Union would bomb each other with nuclear warheads. The “white separatist army” would take control of territory in the nuclear-torn United States under the assumption that the nuclear-torn Soviet Union would not have the strength for a land invasion, leaving territory in the United States open for capture. Beam would tell recruits (and an undercover reporter): “‘We’ll set up our own state here and announce that all non-whites have 24 hours to leave’” (40). By 1980, 500 men had trained at the camp.

Groups like the California KKKK, the Christian Patriots Defense League, the Invisible Empire KKKK, and the Covenant, Sword, and the Arm of the Lord organized paramilitary camps all across the country (51). Beam built “at least” 4 paramilitary boot camps in Texas: Camp Puller near Houston, Camp Bravo in Liberty, Camp Winnie in Winnie, and Camp Alpha, “location unknown” (53). The camps “emerged directly from the combat experiences of key activists in Vietnam” (34), meaning that the camps “sought to remake recruits and inculcate a disposition toward violence” (36).

The camps were not just for show. Belew details three frightening examples of early white power organizing: The Greensboro massacre and subsequent acquittal of 14 Neo-Nazis and Klansman, which “had the effect of consolidating and unifying the white power movement” in 1979 (75); Klan Border Watch patrols along the US-Mexico border, which culminated in July 1986, when Tom Posey “detained sixteen men, women, and children, forcing them to stand at gunpoint for ninety minutes with their legs spread and their hands over their heads” (97); and the Texas KKKK’s terrorizing of a Vietnamese refugee fishing community living on the coast of Galveston (45).

Belew calls the KKKK’s campaign in Galveston a “bellwether” of the white power violence to come. After Galveston, a federal judge ordered “ the Klan to ‘stop paramilitary training,’ in Texas entirely, and permanently enjoined the Klan from combat, combat-related training, or parading in public with firearms” (53). The camps moved to Idaho. The ease with which organizers relocated paramilitary compounds to another part of the country goes far to demonstrate the national reach of the white power movement’s ideology.

Some of the people who trained at white power paramilitary camps were in fact mercenaries. And the U.S. government put their military training to use. For example, Tom Posey and the white power group Civilian Military Assistance supported the Contras and “acted covertly [in Nicaragua] on behalf of the U.S. government — it was funded by the CIA and supplied by the U.S. military” (78). Mercenaries like Posey and, notably, members of the editorial board of Soldier of Fortune played an important role in creating paramilitary training camps in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Costa Rica on behalf of the U.S. government.

Belew details Operation Red Dog, when, in 1981, 10 mercenaries planned to overthrow Dominica, a country in the Caribbean.

The FBI and the ATF arrested the mercenaries and seized “eight Bushmaster automatic rifles, ten shotguns, five rifles, ten handguns, ten pounds of dynamite, 5,236 round of ammunition, Nazi and Confederate flags, the neo-Nazi newspaper National Vanguard, and various military manuals” (86). With the weapons, the men wanted to install a “puppet regime that would funnel millions of dollars to the Klan in the United States” (86).

They were charged with violating the Neutrality Act. 7 pleaded guilty while 2 were found guilty by jury. Michael Norris, however, was acquitted on grounds of gullibility: “He claimed he didn’t know any better and stumbled into mercenary action by accident” (87). Emphasis mine.

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In Part 2, “The War Comes Home,” Belew identifies the white power movement’s “revolutionary turn” to a single moment in time: The 1983 Aryan Nations World Congress in Hayden Lake, Idaho, when, during a “private, heavily guarded meeting,” the white power movement went from carrying out paramilitary actions on behalf of the United States to carrying out paramilitary actions to overthrow the United States.

It is unclear who exactly attended the meeting. Belew notes that Richard Butler convened the meeting and Louis Beam, Robert Miles, Robert Mathews, David Lane, and Bruce Pierce were at the World Congress. Whoever attended came out of that meeting with a new plan:

“Following the convention in Idaho, activists widely adopted two new strategies: using computer networks to mobilize and coordinate action, and ‘leaderless resistance,’ cell-style organizing in which activists could work in common purpose without direct communication from movement leaders” (105).

How does a cell-style organizing strategy sustain itself? Belew describes how the “recruitment efforts, publications, and training infrastructure” of the white power movement’s formative years “paved the way” for the long-term success of resistance cells. White power activists created a shared culture by training together and consuming the same media.

The Turner Diaries, a racist novel by William Luther Pierce published in 1978, is the key to understanding the strategy of the white power movement. The post-nuclear-fallout plot that Beam shared with new recruits at Camp Puller was taken directly from The Turner Diaries.

In addition to The Turner Diaries, pages 319–321 of the book are a list of 32 sources that make up an archive of white power literature. These include newspapers, newsletters, and periodicals published in print, while other images and symbols were disseminated over an online message board called Liberty Net. Liberty Net is still active. White power organizers were early adopters of social media.

Shared symbolism helped drive the white power movement’s strategy, but symbolism by itself couldn’t sustain a movement. That said, it is telling that Belew does not reprint images that are still under copyright by white power groups, as purchasing permissions “might constitute a financial contribution to their cause” (x).

Shared kinship networks were established and kept intact with extremist, separatist religious beliefs that dictated the roles of women and the family. Belew calls the extent of intermarriage between white power groups “startling” and finds evidence for the widow of a member of the Order getting passed to another member (180). Founder of the Aryan Nations, Richard Butler, developed religious commitments in the white power ideology (116). The white woman was the focus of worship. Belew dedicates a chapter of Bring the War Home to the role white women played in the movement:

“Protection of white women and their reproductive capacity represented one ideology motivating white power activists to wage war. The future of the white race, activists believed, rested with the mothers of white children. In the movement, this went far beyond anti-miscegenation to the demand that every white woman attempt to bear children” (160).

Control over white women’s reproduction worked as a “unifying force” between white power activists. Birth announcements were a regular feature in white power literature and infants were an important symbol for the white power movement.

For example, Members of the Order traveled to Robert Mathews’s farm to take their oath, where they surrounded a white infant girl, “raised their arms in a ‘Hitler salute,’” and “pledged their lives to race war until victory or until death” (116). Members of the Order modeled their name and their strategy directly from the Turner Diaries and planned to establish a “white separatist nation” in the Pacific Northwest. If David Duke represents the public-facing side of the white power movement, the Order represents an underground “paramilitary strike force.”

Shared training, shared media, and shared families tied white power activists together. As did violent crime. Ultimately the material conditions of the white power movement depended on stealing cash, weapons, and ammunition. One armored car robbery in 1984 may have sustained the movement for years. Twelve Order members stole $3.6 million in Ukiah, California and then, according to a federal indictment, distributed hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash to other white power organizers in North Carolina, California, Arkansas, Virginia, Idaho, and Michigan (133). A document likely authored by David Lane was discovered after Lane was arrested in connection to the assassination of radio personality Alan Berg. “Lane’s Laws” described a plan to arm each Order cell with “two .308-caliber automatics, two rifles, and two .45-caliber automatics” (131). The FBI seized four such caches in the mid-1980s. Belew claims that the “archive supports” the picture that the Order was then in a “phase of major expansion.”

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If law enforcement inaction is a pattern during the formative years of the white power movement, catastrophic law enforcement action defined the later years. The rest of Belew’s history describes escalating white power violence in the wake of law enforcement sieges at Ruby Ridge and Waco. Among some white power activists, Ruby Ridge and Waco represented the fulfillment of an apocalyptic vision that had become the focal point of their ideology. The title of Part 3 of Bring the War Home is “Apocalypse.”

Both Louis Beam and Timothy McVeigh were present at the Waco police line. McVeigh was selling bumber stickers that said “When Guns Are Outlawed, I Will Become an Outlaw.” When the siege finally ended, McVeigh watched on television “with tears streaming down his face” (206).

The passage of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act in 1994, however, was the final motivating force behind the Oklahoma City bombing plot (221). The white power activists behind the plot — McVeigh, Terry Nichols, and Michael Fortier — staged their actions from a compound in Elohim City, Oklahoma. The truck bomb was prepared from a design described in The Turner Diaries. The explosion killed 167 people, including 19 children.

The final chapter of Belew’s book is a deep chronological account of the Oklahoma City bombing and its aftermath. The 1995 bombing marks the culmination of the white power movement’s groundswell. All that comes after remains to be seen.

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An historian, Belew says there is “insufficient historical distance or archival material to offer large-scale interpretations of the present moment” (239), although her book exposes the “genealogical through-lines” that link the early days of the white power movement to white power violence today. As such, Belew’s history describes important aspects of the white power movement’s current strategy.

To be clear: The white power movement’s goal is to incite a “race war” and then overthrow the U.S. government. Over the decades, the movement built an underground network of cells by training together, reading the same literature and sharing it over social media, by inter-marrying and enforcing religious control over women’s bodies, by stealing weapons and cash, counterfeiting money, and committing acts of violence. The success of this strategy depends in part by staying invisible to the public.

So remember that when the lone wolf narrative talking point is used to explain away the white power movement’s bloodshed, it should be counted as a small victory for the white power movement itself — a success in which speakers of the lone wolf narrative become complicit.

To learn more about this important part of U.S. history, I recommend you go check out a copy of Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America by Kathleen Belew.

Stream the video here. Download the slides here. Reach out to me on Twitter if you’re interested in collaborating.

Thank you to the LibrePlanet organizers, the Free Software Foundation, and MIT’s Student Information Processing Board.

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Good afternoon,

Thank you for joining me today at LibrePlanet. Thank you to the Free Software Foundation and MIT’s Student Information Processing Board for this opportunity. My name is Andrew Seeder. This strategic action session is called “Technology for Direct Actions.” I hope you’re in the right room!

For those listening here and online, my presentation is meant for educational purposes only. It does not reflect the opinions of my employer. TW: I will mention violence against activists in terms of numbers of injuries and deaths. Let me take a moment to read LibrePlanet’s safe space policy:

Safe Space Policy

If you need to file a report, find a staff member or ask a volunteer to help you find one.

The FSF is dedicated to providing a harassment-free LibrePlanet experience for everyone.

We do not tolerate harassment of conference participants in any form. Offensive or graphic sexual language and imagery is not appropriate for any conference venue, including talks.

Conference participants violating these rules may be sanctioned or expelled from the conference at the discretion of the conference organizers.

Harassment includes offensive verbal comments related to gender, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, age, body size, race, religion, sexual images in public spaces, deliberate intimidation, stalking, following, harassing photography or recording, sustained disruption of talks or other events, inappropriate physical contact, and unwelcome sexual attention.

Participants asked to stop any harassing behavior are expected to comply immediately.

If a participant engages in harassing behavior, the conference organizers may take any action they deem appropriate, including warning the offender or expulsion from the conference.

If you are being harassed, notice that someone else is being harassed, or have any other concerns, please contact a member of the FSF staff immediately. FSF staff are available in every conference session and at the information desk throughout the conference.

Conference staff will be happy to help participants contact hotel/venue security or local law enforcement, provide escorts, or otherwise assist those experiencing harassment to feel safe for the duration of the conference.

We value your attendance and hope you enjoy the conference.

Speaking of whom, would any FSF staff or conference volunteers raise their hand? Please join me in thanking them. Thank you for organizing this conference.

My goal today is to describe some of the challenges and opportunities technology brings to direct actions. What kinds of direct actions? Let’s start with protests.

The Admirality in Hong Kong. September 2014. An organized public assembly to protest changes to Hong Kong’s electoral system. This photograph was taken during the Umbrella Revolution. By the end of November there would be nearly 500 injuries and 1,000 arrests. Especially important for our purposes today because more than 100,000 people installed Open Garden’s FireChat mobile application precisely for the action that was taking place. The app uses individuals’ smart phones to create a peer-to-peer mesh network over Bluetooth or WiFi. Helps people create a local, site-specific communication channel. But as organizers we need to make sure that the tools we use — like for when you need to communicate online and expect the internet to get cut — that these tools also respect our privacy. We need private communication. But take my recommendation with a grain of salt. For those of us who don’t have the expertise to fully audit an app, including myself, who would you trust to tell you whether FireChat or Signal or Riot or Whatsapp is safe to use?

Yorohoco, Desaguadero, Peru. More specifically, the Peru-Bolivia border. It’s May 16, 2011. Thousands of indigenous people organized a direct action against a Bear Creek project to mine silver on the shores of Lake Titicaca. The Canadian company has mining projects across the region. You’ll see a caravan of trucks in the background trying to cross into Peru from Bolivia. Instead of building a vertical barricade against the oncoming traffic, the organizers built a foot tall barricade along the road.

In an action the next month, two people died and 12 wounded in June 2011 at an action over an airport in Pruno and the Peruvian government canceled a Bear Creek Mining Corp project. Another project was canceled in Arequipa. I can’t say for sure whether the Lake Titicaca project was stalled. These actions did not attract global attention.

I juxtapose these two photographs to remind you that your cell phone contains cassiterite and lead and gold and that these metals are extracted at the expense of natural environments and human lives. For the record, the cassiterite in your phone’s solder likely came from the Bisie mine in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. So I ask you, in whose hands is the power of technology? On one hand, transformative political power. A tool of democratic liberation. On the other, a tool of violence and oppression.

Today, I’ll be talking primarily about three things: Versions of private corporate control that stop direct actions from happening, the use of military surveillance technology to capture direct actions in the United States, and what concrete steps organizers can take to use technology that protects their direct actions.

As technologists, we build tools of liberation by sharing a security culture with organizers of direct actions.

So.

Direct actions need organizers. And those organizers are on social media. That’s fine, except when all the organizing happens *through* social media, you end up sacrificing much-needed privacy.

Here are almost 4,000 of the companies that are trying to profit from your personal data by selling it to other companies who want, in turn, to sell you something you’ll buy. I saw this slide while watching a video of Wolfie Christl’s presentation at this year’s Chaos Communication Congress, called Corporate Surveillance, Digital Tracking, Data & Privacy. Highly recommend you also watch it.

This almost goes without saying to this audience, but, believe it or not, there has been a frenzy of interest in your data. And what’s at stake when you have so much interest in the data which makes you you? At the extreme, let me quote the CEO of Strategic Communication Laboratories, known in America as Cambridge Analytica, named Alexander Nix, who said, “Persuading somebody to vote a certain way is really very similar to persuading 14- to 25-year-old boys in Indonesia to not join Al Qaeda.” The company claims to have thousands of data points on 220 million Americans.

Organizers of direct actions need to understand that while they are surfing social media there are also sharks in the water. How do you recognize whether an online organizing space is actually safe? Or what if social media turns against you?

#YaMeCanse. Spanish for “I’ve had enough” — the hashtag used to organize actions in the wake of the disappearance of 43 Ayotzinapa students in Iguala, Mexico in 2014. Found this image from Tanya O’Carroll’s article, Mexico’s misinformation wars: How organized troll networks attack and harass journalists and activists in Mexico. The article is about the effects of this troll network and Alberto Escoria’s burden of trying to persuade Twitter that troll accounts are indeed troll accounts. The image was created by software called Gephi. Let me quote from the original image caption:

The orange smudge at the top is the start of the troll offensive against #YaMeCanse. The protesters had to change to #YaMeCanse2, and then 3, all the way to 33, in order to stay ahead of the trolls who flooded the hashtag with spam.

Very difficult to organize a direct action when you’re getting pinned down by bots. O’Carroll reports that the troll attacks brought organizational capacity down by 20%.

Say you wanted to organize the old fashioned way, without any kind of digital technology to aid your efforts, to limit your digital footprint. Is it possible to extricate yourself from the data machine?

Here is a photo provided by B of a security checkpoint at Disneyland. That there is an adorable RFID scanner and a fingerprint reader convenient for someone just at the right height for the average child. B related that this checkpoint was part of a process that resembled going through an airport. Who has a copy of your fingerprint?

Here’s a piece of technology that relies on open source software. Immigration and Customs Enforcement proposed process flow for a case management system, a diagram obtained by The Intercept_ and reported by Spencer Woodman in an article called, Palantir Provides the Engine for Donald Trump’s Deportation Machine. The same machine, by the way, developed by past presidential administrations, as Kade highlighted this morning. This image is from a funding document. Palantir eventually got the bid. Would it be right if, as libre technologists, all we demanded was a free software solution for this system? I ask again, in whose hands is the power of technology?

Free software is in itself a kind of direct action. As you might already know, there are many direct actions specifically about free software! Last year, at LibrePlanet, there was an organized protest against Digital Restrictions Management, DRM. Other FSF campaigns include Free JavaScript, Secure Boot vs. Restricted Boot, upgrading from Windows, the free BIOS campaign, and a campaign for free hardware. Underlying all these campaigns are the four essential freedoms of free software. Want to call out a condition of possibility for these freedoms: Access to the source code.

I hope one day organizers of direct actions should look for a libre solutions FIRST, because underlying these freedoms is quality assurance. The ability to review and modify source code supports the free software ecosystem. Even if you can’t understand a lick of programming, knowing that there’s an active community who hack source code should be assuring. Why? Because there’s a virtuous circle between what’s accessible, what’s auditable, and who’s held accountable. Accessible. Auditable. Accountable.

Some Economic Democracy Apps (via Ujima Project)

● ioby

● hOurworld

● Community Weaver 3

● Democracy OS

● Swich

● Buycott

● GoodGuide

● Loomio

● Delib

● Your Priorities

● Consul

● D21

● Voatz

● Kiva

● Platform co-operativism

Frankly, I don’t know how many of these solutions, if any, technically qualify as “free software.” I share them today because they give you a sense of some operational priorities that organizers are thinking about. The Ujima Project builds community controlled economic democracy in Boston. Through their research, specifically from Aaron Tanaka, Hendrix Berry, and Sarah Jimenez, they’ve pulled together a list of apps which are poised to help organizers. Many seem to market themselves as “ethical alternatives” to other apps. I won’t go through all of them in detail, aside from noting that they span a range of interests which technologists do not often think about, but which are absolutely crucial to organizers of economic democracy. Volunteer management. Time banking. Group governance, decision making, and voting. Shout out to platform co-operativism, the digital version of worker co-ops. Check out Micky Metts’s presentation tomorrow afternoon. Quick show of hands: How many people here are part of a worker co-op?

A lot of us here have strong commitments to free software. Yet when we’re working with organizers of direct actions, we’re going to come up against the pragmatist’s dilemma time and again: Practical expediency versus commitment to values. Whereas one organizer might recommend Signal as a secure communication technology with a growing user base, another might not because it uses proprietary technology. Put another way: For organizers, the perfect is the enemy of the done.

There is a great place to create spaces where organizers and activists can come to learn and share best practices, build that shared security culture among free software experts and organizers. Here’s the impenetrable ghost back door to the cryptoparty in Boston. It’s actually in Somerville. Very secure. At our cryptoparties we try to create the most welcoming, accessible space that we can. Because, lately, there’s been a lot of interest in “Digital Security 101” trainings. Here’s an outline of those agendas:

I’m not going to recommend specific apps for these solutions. I will leave that to the bonafide experts. If you want to learn about encryption tools and public key cryptopgraphy, there’s a cryptoparty going on this weekend here. There are lots of resources about how to do this! I’ve also put up some good further reading resources. Noah Kelley of HACK*BLOSSOM just launched a new website, DIY Cybersecurity for Victims of Domestic Violence, by the way.

For all these technology solutions, it’s important to note that, organizers, there will be moments when in your work it would serve you best to put your phone in the fridge, battery out. There are also many situations when you it’s extremely dangerous to give technology recommendations if you don’t know the situation on the ground, such as for border crossings and international travel, or which you have no first-hand experience.

That said, there is one tool I think should be normalized as soon as possible.

You know what’s cool? Checksums. Checksums are cool. If we, as a community, could make checksum verification a regular part of installing software for non-experts, that would be a real victory. What’s a checksum? A code that tells you whether the software you’re running is the software that someone else uploaded. Huge thanks to Troy Sankey for helping me with this slide — and for holding my hand as I learned what any of this actually means. Bear with me.

A cryptoparty participant brought a computer and asked to install a new libre operating system on it. Easier said than done. This process was complicated and would not have been possible without the hands-on help of technology experts — and, I might add, an extra working computer and an extra USB drive to do the installation.

To install the new operating system we went to the website of a Linux distribution. Then we downloaded the operating file system, usually appended .iso. There’s more to just downloading the file and right-clicking on it. Turns out to install the new operating system securely, we also have to know something about public key cryptography. O.M.G.

The checksum file is the code that tells us whether the .iso file, the raw data of the operating system, is in fact the same file that was uploaded by the webmaster. You do that by running the same algorithm, in this case it is named SHA512, a mathematical hash function, on the raw operating system files. If you run the same algorithm and you get the same result, your codes match, then you can feel secure that your original .iso files match, too.

The clever among you are already thinking, but wait, if you are worried about the .iso file being somehow corrupted on the website, and you get the checksum file from that same website, how do you know whether the checksum file is the same one that was uploaded by the webmaster. Fortunately for us, the checksum came signed with a special signature unique to the webmaster, a key. We downloaded the signing key, which ends with .gpg.

The dollar signs are commands on the command line. The first command runs the SHA512 algorithm against the .iso and sees whether it matches the SHA512 result posted by the webmaster. The second program verifies the signing key.

Next we format the USB to hold the operating system so we can use the USB to install the operating system on a computer. The command $ lsblk checks where your devices are mounted. The first sudo command, meaning you are running as root, as admin, unmounts the USB from the rest of the computers file system, so you don’t accidentally wipe a part of your hard drive. The last line, runs the $ dd command. This clears the USB drive and installs the .iso onto it. Be very careful with this command! Although it doesn’t have a formal name, what do some people call it? Disk destroyer.

The different steps in this process are often seen as yet another “obstacle” in a complicated installation process for organizers, but in reality each of these steps is responsible for a pretty robust security process. Instead of a bundled executable that “just works,” these steps, while potential points of failure, add another layer of accountability into the installation process. Checksums are a great example of the process-oriented approach of digital security.

The process reveals something crucial about our shared security culture. Namely, that a lot of the work can be done by changing the language we use and shifting frames of mind.

Phew!

Here are just the headings from the Albert Einstein Institute. Lots of direct actions, lots of ways of showing solidarity.

Protests. January 28th. Copley Square. This protest was mobilized against the Muslim travel ban through social media in less than 24 hours. That’s how I heard about it. During a speech, a city councilor from Cambridge asked everyone in the crowd to pull out their phones, log into a popular social media company, and “like” the event’s page. This is problematic.

Hard to compete with the speed of this popular social media company. The only way someone is going to choose a free software alternative over something with a vast user base is if they value security. Plain and simple.

Meanwhile, during the protest, I saw someone walking around asking for people to pose with their posters. Problem is, it’s not just randos taking photos in the crowd that we should think about. Law enforcement, too. Here are three surveillance technologies that organizers need to be familiar with:

The cell site simulator, popularly known as a Stingray, although a Stingray is a product made by one company, the Harris Corporation. These devices pretend to be a cell tower so your phone connects to it. The simulator then retrieves data about your phone, such as your unique International Mobile Subscriber Identity number. This infographic and the next two, by Katie Martin, illustrate how city police departments have been inundated with military-grade surveillance technology. The infographics were prepared for George Joseph’s article in the Atlantic’s City Lab, called Cellphone Spy Tools Have Flooded Local Police Departments. The article details how these technologies jam, intercept, and extract your communications. Joseph reports that 11 departments of purchased cell site simulators from the Harris Corporation.

The dirtybox, also known as the DRT, for Boeing’s Digital Receiver Technology, Inc. Like a Stingray but more powerful and mounted on a helicopter.

Departments have spent more than $700,000 on tools like Cellebrite’s “Universal Forensic Extraction Device,” which is said to

Allow cops to scoop up both data immediately visible on the phone and that which has been deleted or hidden.

It’s what law enforcement uses to crack and gather data from your cellphone after you’ve been put on the curb. For organizers of protests listening, note that while you may be compelled to unlock your phone with your fingerprint, you can’t be so compelled to enter a password, because a password is considered testimony, whereas your fingerprint is not. Thank you to Ben Cook for that pro-tip!

If you’re an organizer and you haven’t heard of these technologies, you might think, jeez, is there some way I can protect myself against these intrusions? The answer is yes, don’t bring your cell phone. Don’t bring your laptop.

Maybe the fight to roll back the acquisition of these technologies is not possible, maybe we can’t put the toothpaste back into the tube. We know that law enforcement has this technology and they’re going to use it. Which is why Community Control of Police Surveillance (CCOPS) is such an important policy approach.

Unfortunately, in many cases the privacy of a corporation outweighs the public’s interests. Here’s a screen shot from Elizabeth Joh’s article The Undue Influence of Surveillance Technology Companies on Policing. It quotes a section of a Non-Disclosure Agreement made between the Harris Corporation and the Baltimore Police Department in 2011. It’s this last bullet point that frightens me the most. “We caught this criminal and are protecting the public, but y’know what, we have to drop the case instead of revealing intellectual property about the technology.” Is that just?

Still, there are technologies that can help protect against surveillance. You can find them yourself by looking for “sousveillance” solutions.

Here’s AIMSICD. What happens is you download the app and as you walk around it captures data about Access Points which are nearby. If you then go to a public assembly and discover an Access Point which was not there the day or two before, you might be in the presence of a cell site simulator.

More sousveillance. Another cryptoparty organizer, Steve Revilak, has gone and mapped all of the surveillance cameras at the Arlington Housing Authority. This was done on Open Street Maps. We need more of this. Much more of this. Our local Pirate Party has an online map you should contribute to. Stay tuned for a larger campaign around mapping cameras this way.

Would be remiss if I talked about sousveillance without mentioning M.C. McGrath. The Surveillance Industry Index is a project of the Transparency Toolkit. Compiling data about the surveillance industry is a critical piece of power mapping for direct actions.

More Projects

●Forensic Architecture
●Witness
●The Syrian Archive
●OpenOil
●Lucy Parsons Lab Open Oversight
●Security Without Borders

More examples of systems that use open source intelligence and that organizers can build from. Emphasis on sousveillance and the power of visualization.

Before we move to Q&A where you should please share projects or tools that you know of, I’d like to address two broader, more speculative ideas. Mostly because I’m curious whether anyone here knows if they’ve been done already.

Here’s an infographic from the Prison Policy Initiative about the United States prison population. 2.5 million people are incarcerated. 2.5 million. Look a little closer and you’ll see a segment of the jailed population who have not been convicted of any crime. Why are they still caged? Because many of them are too poor to pay the cash bond.

There are organizations out there trying to do something about this. Take the Chicago Community Bond Fund. There are bond or bail funds all over the world. What do libre technologists have to do with it? During a presentation during Chi Hack Night last October, Micah Gates mentioned how difficult it was to 1) Create a website where you could join a mailing list and 2) Also accept donations. We should have a solution for this. Please, as you choose the project you contribute to, consider whether they work for those organizing actions.

But what about bond funds more broadly? Ideally, they wouldn’t need to exist because we wouldn’t jail people for being poor. But, for now, bond funds are a valuable instrument in fighting against our unjust penal system. So is the creation of a bond fund something automatable? Using decentralized autonomous organizations, the know-how of libre technologists, lawyers, could we establish 500 such bond funds in year? 5,000? How do you batch incorporate a bond fund?

This last one I am just going to smash together. Mesh networks. Shucks do I love mesh networks. People powered. Community media. Here’s a map of Guifi’s 27,000 nodes. Those lines coming across are connections to other countries. Italy and Germany have really strong mesh network and ad-hoc network communities. The mesh network movement is growing in cities in North America, especially New York, Pittsburgh, Denver, Toronto. In Toronto they’re using cjdns, a network routing protocol that encrypts traffic. “Pop-up” networks would be very useful ways of sharing resources during public assemblies without going through an ISP. These mesh networks are built on trust in the spirit of sharing. Real, person to person relationships of trust. Community technology and direct actions go hand in glove.

Say, hypothetically, we wanted to organize a long-term boycott and a series of protests against private companies that didn’t divest from illegal oil pipelines that violate native lands. Gets to the point where a mid-sized sanctuary city shuts down completely, mass staging of actions in solidarity with native peoples. The powers that be shut down access to the internet to try to quell the city’s protests, fueled as they are by social media. Mesh networks are, for organizers, a forked communications grid, controlled by the people maintaining it. But it would need to be organized before internet gets cut. Let’s take this technology to its logical conclusion. How might we securely move food, water, and other resources through the network?

The Feral Trade Network. A human-to-human, trust-built, low-technology way of distributing resources. To quote from their website:

The Feral Trade Network is a live shipping database for a freight network running outside commercial systems. The database offers dedicated tracking of feral trade products in circulation, archives every shipment and generates freight documents on the fly.

Now imagine we organized the distribution of resources over a community-controlled communications network. Trust is the foundation of a global mutual aid network.

Back to Hong Kong, five years ago. Technology didn’t do this for anyone. People organized for themselves. We can’t assume that technology will solve any of our organizing challenges — in fact, on the contrary, technology creates many serious challenges for organizing. Which is why technologists and organizers must share a security culture.

Thank you.

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Thank you for reading!

Mayer exposes the inner workings of a billionaire donor network intent on dismantling the American government from within. These ultra-wealthy few share a belief — rather, an interest — in “an ideological war aimed at freeing American business from the grip of government” (Mayer 120). The attacks are waged against Americans from all walks of life, at the expense of our public good, primarily to grow the wealth of a handful of scions.

What wealth it is! Mayer shines a light on the political legacies of brothers Charles and David Koch, whose father amassed a fortune building oil refineries for the Soviets and the Nazis (28–31). The brothers have a combined worth of over $80 billion. The company they inherited, called Koch Industries, Inc., is the second largest in America, with $100 billion in revenue this year. It is also one of the country’s biggest polluters, topping the EPA’s Toxic Release Inventory database. In 2012, Koch Industries produced 950 million pounds of toxic waste, including the equivalent of 5 million cars’ worth of carbon dioxide (275). Never heard of them?

These two men have at their disposal an “ideology machine,” the Kochtopus (142). It is financed by what Mayer calls “dark money,” and is designed to absorb parts of society, like mass media outlets, industries, branches of government, courts, town commons, you name it.

Mayer details how, over decades, the Kochtopus, both in ideology and in infrastructure, was fulfilled by: Richard M. Scaife (deceased), John M. Olin (deceased), Richard “Dick” DeVos, Jr., Harry and Lynde Bradley (both deceased), and James Arthur “Art” Pope. Other core members of the network are counted as those who attend the Koch annual seminar.

Forget about the millionaires. There were 18 billionaires present at last year’s seminar: Charles Koch, David Koch, Sheldon Adelson, Harold Hamm, Stephen Schwarzman, Philip Anschutz, Steven Cohen, John Menard, Jr., Ken Griffin, Charles Schwab, Dick DeVos, Diane Hendricks, Ken Langone, Stephen Bechtel, Jr., Richard Farmer, Stan Hubbard, Joe Craft, and Elaine Marshall (381). Combined they are worth $222 billion. There are of course many professional political operatives and strategists who contributed to the creation of the Kochtopus.

Hard to say exactly how much money this network has poured into the American political system over the years.

Mayer estimates that the donor network spent $889 million on the 2016 presidential election alone, rivaling the two major political parties (377). During the 2012 election cycle, one man, Sheldon Adelson, “dumped nearly $150 million, $92 million of which was disclosed” (331). Between 2010 and 2015, the network “contributed over $760 million to mysterious and ostensibly apolitical nonprofits” (373), through which members influence our government. What is known about the funding and coordination is astounding. But it’s not just a spending battle over our government. It’s a battle over our minds.

People organize grassroots campaigns, big businesses organize Astroturf campaigns. DCI Group, a public relations firm founded in 1996, has “truly professionalized the modern use of phony ‘Astroturf’ campaigns on behalf of big-money interests” (191). Clients include ExxonMobil and the Teamsters. The Astroturf strategy came out of work Doug Goodyear and Tim Hyde did for the tobacco industry. They are both founders of DCI Group. In 1990, Hyde wrote a memo for R.J. Reynolds that described how

Instead of pitching cigarette sales, it would create fake ‘smokers’ rights groups’ who would agitate against smoking restrictions as a fundamental matter of liberty… The company needed to ‘create a movement’ that would ‘build broad coalitions around the issue-cluster of freedom, choice, and privacy.’ The company, Hyde wrote, ‘should proceed along two tracks.’ One was the ‘intellectual track within the DC-New York corridor,’ which could influence elite opinion with op-ed pieces, lawsuits, and expert think tank studies. The other was ‘a grassroots organization and largely local track,’ which would use front groups to simulate the appearance of popular political support (191).

Sound familiar? The Kochtopus uses the Astroturf strategy to foment dissent for all kinds of issues. They will pack town halls, produce attack ads, turn experts. So, a movement that appears to be a spontaneous expression of grassroots organizing might really be a campaign meant to misinform its audience. Moreover, since ad campaigns are designed using “polls, focus groups, micro-targeting data, and ‘perception analyzers,’” they are able to “distill a complicated subject into a simple, potent, and usually negative symbol” (253). At some time or another you have been targeted by one of these misinformation campaigns. The Kochtopus buys “boots on the ground” organizing and mass media to exert influence over public opinion.

Influence comes through seemingly apolitical think tanks, too. The Koch brothers were early funders of the Center for a Sound Economy, which mobilized popular support for corporate agendas, and eventually became “a prototype for the kinds of corporate-backed opposition campaigns that would proliferate after Obama was elected” (161). Mayer calls Americans for Prosperity its “successor” (244). The talking points for these kinds of campaigns are incubated by the likes of the Center for Competitive Politics, Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the American Legislative Exchange Council, &c &c.

Let’s look at a concrete example.

The inside front cover of Mayer’s book is an information visualization of $485.7 million of anonymous donor spending made between 2009 and 2013. Unlike 501(c)(3) non-profits, 501(c)(4) and 501(c)(6) “social welfare” non-profits allow for anonymous donations. This wave of anonymous spending funded TC4 Trust, Freedom Partners, and the Center to Protect Patients’ Rights. These three non-profits then funded 38 other organizations.

In 2012, Freedom Partners gave a $115 million grant to the Center to Protect Patient Rights (416). The Center was incorporated in 2009 by Sean Noble as nothing but a P.O. box outside of Phoenix. The Center received $3 million within two months of being incorporated and $62 million by the end of 2010 (189). To get so flush so fast, Mayer reports that Noble had been working closely with Randy Kendrick.

Kendrick is a major donor who, while attending the annual Koch summit in 2009, asked “what the group planned to do to stop Obama from overhauling America’s health-care system” (185). After discovering that there were no organizations battling Obama’s efforts to “overhaul” health care, they created the Center (187). The Center to Protect Patient Rights gave a $1.8 million grant to the Coalition to Protect Patient Rights, a “doctor-led coalition” incorporated by a DCI Group accountant (192).

The Coalition recruited “a former head of the America Medical Association named Donald Palmisano [who] appeared on the national media circuit to take swipes at Obama’s health-care proposal…” (192). Palmisano’s endorsement is a small fraction of a campaign funded by the Center to Protect Patient Rights. Still, it illustrates how, exactly, the Kochtopus delivers its message to be consumed by the American public — cloaked in expert debate.

The inside back cover is an information visualization, too. It demonstrates how one person, acting as the head of multiple foundations, can serve to braid business interests with foundation spending. Richard Fink, formerly an Executive Vice President at Koch Industries, happens to be the President of the Charles G. Koch Foundation, the President of the Knowledge and Progress Fund, and the President of the Claude R. Lambe Foundation.

Between 2009 and 2013, these three organizations gave $87.9 million to 40 non-profits, with more than half that amount going to George Mason University, the Charles Koch Institute, DonorsTrust, the Heritage Foundation, and the American Enterprise Institute. Behind this spending lurks an intellectual agenda.

In 1976, Fink wrote an essay called “The Structure of Social Change”, which

approached the manufacture of political change like any other product…The first phase required an ‘investment’ in intellectuals whose ideals would serve as the ‘raw products.’ The second required an investment in think tanks that would turn the ideas into marketable policies. And the third phase required the subsidization of ‘citizens’ groups that would, along with ‘special interests,’ pressure elected officials to implement the policies (142).

If “The Structure of Social Change” served as the blueprint for the Kochtopus, Hyde’s memo served as a tactical guide. Informing both documents, though, was Lewis Powell’s 1971 memo, “Attack on American Free Enterprise System.” It was the call to arms for the corporate rights movement and

urged America’s capitalists to wage ‘guerrilla warfare’ against those seeking to ‘insidiously’ undermine them. Conservatives must capture public opinion, he argued, by exerting influence over the institutions that shape it, which he identified academia, the media, the churches, and the courts.

Powell, a Director at Philip Morris for much of his career, later served as Associate Justice of the Supreme Court. Mayer’s book is a history that describes the legacy of Powell’s Memo and Fink’s plan, how their thinking provided the foundational arguments for the “ideological war,” and ultimately served to justify the Kochtopus.

With the ideology, you have reason to create mass media campaigns, to subsidize “citizen groups” who organize Astroturf campaigns, reason to invest in intellectuals as “raw products” and think tanks as the marketplace for their products. All to exert control over public opinion and government institutions. How do they get away with it?

The Kochtopus uses a screen of corporate entities to hide donors’ identities, when necessary. Here’s what part of the Kochtopus looks like in the wild. It’s an infographic of political spending with “dark money”:

This shell game sidesteps campaign finance law limits on political spending and it obscures donor identities using “social welfare” non-profits. The aim, of course, is to advance the economic interests of the donor network. The consequence unravels the fabric of American government. Yes, many of the people responsible for this spending have a deep-seated ideological commitment to limited government. But the commitment to principles only goes so far. In the words of Phil Dubose, a Koch Industries manager:

‘They call themselves libertarians. For lack of a better word, what it means is that if you’re big enough to get away with it, you can get away with it. No government. If it’s good for their business, they think it’s good for America’ (377).

What’s good for their business might not be good for our government. The outcomes of local elections can impact donors’ wealth, especially when labor relations are at stake. The Koch brothers reside in Kansas and are therefore unable to cast votes for candidates running for offices in other states. The Kochs’ Political Action Committee, however, contributed in a big way to Scott Walker’s campaign for governor in 2010. They also contributed to 16 legislative races (all won). You can measure the influence of the Kochtopus in organizational support.

Americans for Prosperity “provided him [Walker] with a field operation and speaking platform at its Tea Party rallies…” (308), while the Bradley Foundation created the anti-union policy for the campaign trail. When Walker eventually introduced anti-union legislation, the “furious backlash” (a recall vote) was tempered by Americans for Prosperity, who organized pro-Walker rallies and aired thousands of pro-Walker television and radio ads (311). An independent counsel investigation into Walker’s campaign discovered e-mails about how to finance the anti-recall efforts, to “Take Koch’s money” (312), via the Wisconsin Club for Growth. The Koch brothers founded Americans for Prosperity in 2004. Had enough?

Take Operation REDMAP, the Redistricting Majority Project, created by Ed Gillespie, Sean Noble, and associates. They identified 105 Democratic candidates during the 2010 midterm election and “concentrated on governorships and state legislatures” (249). The candidates were given an index score to assess how likely they would be defeated. The goal was to beat these candidates and gain control of redistricting processes in 2011. Tens of millions of dollars were funneled to “an array of different front groups” to buy attack advertising.

He [Noble] chose a group called the 60 Plus Association…to air attack ads on Democrats in ‘Arizona’s First Congressional District, Florida’s Second and Twenty-Fourth, Indiana’s Second, Minnesota’s Eighth, New York’s Twentieth, Ohio’s Sixteenth, Pennsylvania’s Third, and Wisconsin’s Third and Eighth Congressional Districts.’ Meanwhile, he said, he used another group, Americans for Jobs Security, the same ‘business league’ he had deployed in the Scott Brown Race, to air ads in ‘New York’s Twenty-Fourth, North Carolina’s Second and Eighth, Ohio’s Eighteenth, and Virginia’s Ninth Congressional Districts’ (250).

$2 million of outside spending helped unseat Rick Boucher, 14-term Democratic congressman from Virginia’s Ninth Congressional District. According to Boucher, his Republican challenger, Morgan Griffith, had one key issue. Opposition to climate change. Mayer writes:

Griffith’s victory left Saltville — where the EPA had forced the Olin Corporation to take responsibility for remediating a river that was still too toxic to fish — represented a congressman who painted the EPA as the district’s greatest foe (242).

This kind of political subterfuge is what happens when environmental regulations threaten the business interests of the Kochtopus.

The Kochtopus intervenes in local ballot initiatives, school boards, judicial races, state legislatures, congressional races, in the press, on the campus, in your social media feed. To quote Lisa Graves, “They’re building a party from outside to take over the party — they’re doing it by market segments — it’s like a business plan” (369). It is social engineering at a massive scale.

I hope this summary creates a skepticism in your mind about Kochtopus-funded ideas.

For the entire history, go read Mayer’s book!

Artists in alphabetical order:

CAROLYN JANSSEN — Digital murals and prints

Janssen is in the Artist in Residence Program at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, CA, where she is developing a commission for the North Carolina Museum of Art’s permanent collection. The work will be inspired by Hieronymous Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights. Here is her artist statement:

Adopting the sprawl of the historic landscape, I create mural-sized digital works that exist as photographic and painterly hybrids. Framed as psychedelic Photoshop objects, these images feature über-universes that reference the sublime landscape, digital kitsch, miniaturized science fiction tableaus, and religious mortality tales. Built from elements gleaned from personal snapshots, I use individual objects as brushstrokes, building each scene mark by mark. I utilize the “photoshoppy-ness” of the software program the same way a painter might manipulate the inherent qualities of paint, saturating, abusing, and “anointing” in order to achieve a hyper-superficial, aesthetic surface pleasure. Populating these worlds are figures engaging in ritualistic narratives and mini-dramas, creating uncanny and fetishized scenes that examine the blurred borders of gender, desire, and materiality.

I expect the work for the North Carolina Museum of Art will look similar to previous installations, this one from 2011:

You can find Janssen’s work exhibited next year in a group show, Bring it Home: (Re)Locating Cultural Legacy through the Body, at the main SFAC Gallery in San Francisco between January 22 and May 7.

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FAIG AHMED — Textile, installation

Ahmed’s work has been featured in many group and solo exhibitions all over the world. He lives in Baku, Azerbaijan, where he is turning a traditional cultural medium (carpets) inside out. Here is Ahmed’s artist statement:

I explore ancient traditions, cults and cultures, I make my own research and as I communicate with it, I create art. My carpets, installations and embroideries are the result of this interplay. It is fascinating to observe the process of such an easy transformation of such ancient and stable objects.I am in love with textile. Because fabrics are objects that humanity is using from the beginning of times, till nowadays. Another thing that interests me is pattern. Patterns and ornaments can be found in all cultures, sometimes similar, sometimes very different. I consider them words and phrases that can be read and translated to a language we understand.My art is an experiment. I want to examine the subject matter to see how deep can we go inside something accomplished and holistic and to observe the influence this kind of a change can have on people. What influences and inspires me the most are all kinds of travel. By saying travel I mean either physical travelling to other countries where I can find and explore traditions and cults spread on this certain territory; or travelling in my subconsciousness, different practices and meditations. And there is something I believe: If you want to change the world, start with yourself.

You can find Ahmed’s work exhibited next year until January 16th at the Sharjah Arts Museum for the 18th Islamic Arts Festival. And until January 10th at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston for Crafted: Objects in Flux.

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FALKE PISANO — Installation, concept

Pisano’s installations show how abstract art can work for activists who need to imagine alternative epistemic contexts for their actions. From Pisano’s artist bio:

Her diagrammatic works expose a loop, in which shifting abstract sculptural forms are conceived directly in relation to written and spoken language, implying an ongoing and morphing production of meaning.

You can find Pisano’s The value in mathematics exhibited at the CAC Synagogue de Delme between March 18th and May 29th. Pisano is also part of the Regarding Spectatorship: Revolt and Distant Observer exhibition at Kunstraum Kreuzberg / Betanien until January 17th.

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KATJA NOVITSKOVA — Installation

Novitskova blends digital and physical space so well that she found it necessary to upload a video walk-through of her PATTERN OF ACTIVATION (planetary bonds) installation from this year’s Biennale de Lyon. The video was recorded probably as standard procedure, but I like to think it’s because pieces in this installation look unreal.

I wasn’t able to find upcoming exhibitions of her work in 2016, nor an artist statement. I’ll update this post if I find anything. In the mean time, Novitskova’s description of this installation’s media will have to suffice as a representation of her process:

Approximation (planet Mars HD)
digital print on aluminium dibond

Approximation (enzyme)
digital print on aluminium dibond

Bannini Dodoli de Luxe Grey
electronic baby swing, digital render of a protein molecule, polyurethane resin, epoxy clay, tyraps, nail polish, display clamps, etc.

Discover and Grow jumperoo
baby jumperoo, electronic crabs, epoxy clay, polyurethane resin, tyraps, nail polish, toothpick brushes

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RYOICHI KUROKAWA — Installation, audiovisual

Kurokawa had his first solo show this year, Ordered Disorder, at Espacio Fundacion Telefonica in Lima. As he develops methods for mapping audiovisual “time sculptures” onto 3D-printed structures, his live performances, such as Syn_, will become only more dramatic. From his artist bio:

Kurokawa’s works take on multiple forms such as installation works, recordings, and concert pieces. He composes the time sculpture with the field recordings and the digital generated structures, and reconstructs architecturally the audiovisual phenomenon.

I wasn’t able to find upcoming exhibitions of his work in 2016. Will update this post if I find dates.

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For more digital art, check out the work of artist and curator David Quiles Guilló, whose 2nd edition of The Wrong — New Digital Art Biennale is worth some of your browsing time.

Looking forward to 2016, I’ll be exploring artist-as-researcher / researcher-as-artist collaborations, starting with the work of Xavier Ribas, Simon Starling, and the Dissolutions curatorial project, which includes Martin Howse, Peter Flemming, the Goethe Institute, OBORO, and Perte de Signal.

Until then!

Representatives from different communities are elected to a governing council. The council meets semi-regularly to make decisions that impact the larger group. A position on the council does not pay. It is considered a high honor.

Literacy is not required to be a representative. This reflects the larger group’s value of community participation and direct action. Anyone a community deems fit to represent them is fit, regardless of their formal education. So what happens when written documents have to be reviewed during a council meeting? The documents get read out loud.

Yes, the council meetings last that much longer. That’s what systematic change looks like. The governing structure responds to the needs of those present. Not vice versa.

I used to think systematic change was change made to the parts all at once. Now I see systematic change as an incremental, iterative process, where you make sure your values are present at every step in the system.

I think this idea applies to many different parts of society, especially those parts that benefit from the participation of the community.

Thank you for reading.