Register throughout: blunt, name the enemy, no hedging. Our entire organising lives are mediated by billionaires who hate us and fund our enemies and we need to stop.
The embodied version: you’ve just got politicised, or just moved to a new city. Everything is on Instagram and in WhatsApp groups you’re not in. Following the wrong account can out you to an employer or the police. Half-dead links and abandoned pages are the norm.
The missing events feature. The algorithm that decides who finds whom. The shadowban that eats pro-Palestine posts. Seemingly "bad" design is a trick to keep you scrolling. Intent behind the mechanism.
The double squeeze: while online life got captured, community venues have been dropping like flies. That’s why collective action feels so hard right now. Body-count stakes.
People here run WordPress, wrangle open source conference platforms, and routinely find the open source option almost does the job. So why does it keep almost working?
The corporate tool arrives with billions in subsidy; the open source tool arrives expecting you to supply hosting, skills, maintenance, someone who cares on a Tuesday. Nobody budgets for that. And the real price: surveillance, moderation policies written by your enemies, data centres run on poverty wages.
Discord age-verification panic: searches for alternatives up 10,000% overnight, Element claimed two million signups, no evidence any of it stuck. People choose the accessible thing over the ethical thing every time, and they’re not wrong to. Stop moralising at individuals.
Anarchist pragmatism cuts both ways: we’re brilliant at making do (we can’t even afford the venue lunches), and making do is exactly how the free corporate thing wins every time.
Not every org running its own server: the unit that owns infrastructure is the partnership, not the organisation. GFSC is living this right now with our own server move: the skills are a real, finite, learnable list, resourced once per partnership.
The Iwi Māori have built their own datacentres sited inside community buildings: it changes how people learn it and whether they feel it’s theirs. Digital sovereignty. Shared community servers are the small, doable first step on that road.
Show the canvas; wave the printed A3 around. The digital layer as a river through your community’s landscape; crossings as bridges. It makes the resourcing question concrete and discussable by people who aren’t tech people. Draft v0.1, illustrated version coming, no date promised.
A platform-controlled crossing is a toll bridge (Meta, Google). Some land needs no bridge at all, and that’s a choice you get to make on purpose. Optional 2-min live moment: "shout out: who controls the space your group organises in?" Take three answers, place them on the metaphor.
Closing image: all the open source people in one corner, all the anarchists in another, everybody else over there. Ask 1: take this thinking to your own scenes: what do we depend on, who owns it, what would owning it ourselves take?
The Full Meta Jacket ending, still true. Land it, pause, then the asks.
Ask 2 and 3: the QR, and PlaceCal organisers: community-owned events infrastructure, a shared river, run by local organisers not developers. "If you’ve ever wanted your town or scene to have this, I’ll help you."