Welcome to Chaos and Convivality!
Welcome to our new media project, Chaos and Conviviality! This is a space to explore current events and culture, their implications for our liberation movements, and the strategies underpinning those movements.
Welcome to our new media project, Chaos and Conviviality! This is a space to explore current events and culture, their implications for our liberation movements, and the strategies underpinning those movements. This week, we published three essays: “Sewer Socialism” is Making a Comeback. But Will it Save Us?, A Libertarian Socialist Response to the Enclosure of the Internet (and Digital Technology in General), and Degrowth (With Teeth) or Doom! We published a podcast (Mamdani’s not a Messiah) too!
Continue reading for more, including urgent crowdfund requests, additional resources to dive deeper on this week's topics, and other stories that we missed. That's all for this week!
Some crowdfunds to contribute to
- Help a Black single mother keep their housing!
- Help a Palestinian father and family member in Gaza support his family!
- Help a disabled enby mother support their kid and cats!
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Commoning in an Age of Crisis
Working inside system is failing us. This week's pieces critically engage with how to respond.
Chaos and Conviviality
"This level of faith in electeds, even though they’ve proven themselves to be ineffectual, traitorous, or both, is concerning. The idea of doing “real politics” in these instances means getting “radical” people in office (which we are unable to do more often than not), and… hoping that they stick to their ethics. What sense does that make when the system itself and the concessionary nature of realpolitik means betraying that?"
Chaos and Conviviality
"This win feels counterinsurgent when you add everything together[...] the amount of energy put into it, from the actual effort of the organizers, to the emotional allegiance (”hearts and minds”) that people have to Mamdani. It serves the function, even while having a different form."
Chaos and Conviviality
"States, corporations, and their lackeys are what have spurred on this climate crisis. Appealing to those same structures to play nice is not only allowing them to avoid meaningful accountability, but it also prevents an understanding of the extent of the issues and what actions their severity requires."
Chaos and Conviviality
"Discord is expanding its sketchy AI-based age verification requirements; the restrictions for 'adult content' will be required across the world–with accounts designated as 'teen' by default. This follows the lead of legal mandates in the UK and Australia. Here in the States, there are a lot of Bad Internet Bills that have been floating around or are coming back up in Congress."
Marginalia
Resources to dive deeper on the week's topics.
- Jacobin has put out a whole issue on municipal socialism: the pragmatic, "bread and butter" approach that Mamdani represents. For a massively deep dive, read Claiming the City; here are some good reviews. Otherwise, some other currents of "municipalist" politics to explore are the Free Cities (this perspective is rooted in the political Right, but it's good to know how they are thinking about things), Rebel Cities, Right to the City, and Libertarian Municipalist movements. It'd be good to pair this with explorations into more autonomous actions, like various squatting movements and Occupy-style things like ZAD and the Student Intifada.
- Degrowth has been explored, especially as it relates to moving away from ecomodernism, by many. Kohei Saito articulates this need the best, especially in Slow Down. These discussions should be paired with deeper explorations of social ecology, ecowomanism, traditional ecological knowledges, and other such marginal understandings of how to relate well to the world. We're especially interested in the intersections between anarchy and degrowth.
- Addressing the proposed changes (age verification, penalizing encryption, and/or proliferation of genAI) to the way we access and engage with the internet cannot be disconnected from wider trends. There's a tendency to individualize these issues, as exemplified by calls to migrate from Discord. However, changes to TikTok and worries about Discord's role in extremist politics can't be seen as unrelated to the situation. More work needs to be done to think about how effective & autonomous organizing might be considered in this context. Learning from existing efforts, including the Rise Against Big Tech Campaign, the books Data Grab and The AI Con, and Notes From Below's issue on Technology and the Worker are a good place for us to dig into.
Other Stories Worth Knowing
News that we didn't focus on, and worthwhile angles that we missed.
- Ethiopia builds secret camp to train Sudan RSF fighters, sources say
- Arab and Muslim nations at UN condemn Israel’s ‘annexation’ plan & Israel just started legalizing its annexation of the West Bank. Here’s what that means.
- Why Jeff Bezos gutted the Washington Post
- ‘Monstrous’: Cyclone Gezani hits Madagascar, leaving at least 20 dead
- Cuba Must Not Fall! Imperialism, Resistance and the Global Stakes of Defending the Cuban Revolution
- Trump, White Farmers and the War on Zimbabwe’s Sovereignty: Why Africans Must Reject this Neo-Colonial Push
- India is gearing up for a historic worker-farmer’s strike on February 12
- New York Is the Latest State to Consider a Data Center Pause
- People’s CDC COVID-19 Weather Report
- After the Earthquakes
- They Are Trying To Kill The Internet
- Trump’s Immigration Officials Don’t Want to Talk About the Cruelty
- The struggle against the Monroe Doctrine continues
- The FBI’s Fulton County Raid Was Based on Debunked Claims By Election Deniers
- Five Years of Coup: Burmese Anarchists within and without the Revolution
- No ICE In Minnesota Bundle Hits $100,000 Goal In Just A Day
- Google Fulfilled ICE Subpoena Demanding Student Journalist Credit Card Number
- Gwich'in fight to protect caribou from Alaska oil development
- Ubisoft workers go on strike after publisher announces job cuts and RTO mandate
