Digital resistance

One of the blogs I’ve been paying closer attention to over the past few weeks is patrickrhone.net since he’s doing a great job in commenting and sharing both the awful things that are happening in Minnesota, where he’s based, but also some of the positives that are coming out from a moment this tragic.

Reading through his posts made me appreciate how important it is, in moments like these, that we still have the ability to share snippets of reality directly with each other.

Most people will likely remember when mainstream social media could be used as a force for change at a societal level. The Arab Spring is an obvious example. But that was more than a decade ago, and the social media landscape is very different right now, different to the point where I suspect something like that would not be allowed to happen again.

But the existence of personal sites, run by people who are willing to live and share their experience of what’s happening around them, remains an incredibly valuable tool in the context of digital resistance.

Judging by the reports I saw, there are attempts to crack down on Signal groups and the other ways people use to communicate and organize, so I think the more spread out, the more distributed, the more decentralized these movements are, the harder it becomes to keep them under control.

And maybe this is probably the best use case for something like Mastodon, where a multitude of instances can go online easily and make it very hard to censor them all. It might not have the same reach as the mainstream platforms, but I think it’s a lot more resilient and harder to silence.

Countries always have the option to go nuclear and block the entire Internet; we’ve all seen that happening before, but I suspect that’s harder to do in places where most of society needs the Internet to function properly.

And related to this, the other day Seth shared on his blog a link to macrowave and the first thought I had was that this—or similar ones—could become another incredibly useful tools in the context of organized resistance.

All this to say that if you have enough knowledge to set up a personal site, a forum, a Mastodon instance, or any other way to help people share what's happening and connect with each other, that’s probably something worth doing at this point in time.