Feednet Vol 9. (The Earth is Burning, Want to Come to a Public Speaking Workshop?)

Feednet is a quarterly-ish news roundup on technology, community organizing, and this month, a lot of feelings about YouTube.

This month’s Feednet is an exciting mixture of suffering and excitement.

The Amazon is burning, BUT people love unions now!

Income inequality is worse than it’s ever been… but maybe Milton Friedman is finally discredited!

Sweeps in Hong Kong mean that many movement leaders were arrested… but 50% of the Koch Brothers are dead!

This month I tried to balance the good news with the bad as a way of saying, ‘it’s almost Libra season’.

Here’s the Roundup:

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how we talk about online relationships, from “engagement” to “membership” to “content farming”. Particularly as radical right wing groups build online power (both through propaganda and networks), I think about the ‘arc’ of indoctrination for violent white supremacists (as described by the media).

Ideology is formed through media consumption and engagement, directed by community. Action comes from trust. Our enemies are building decentralized, relational communities that will keep taking action, no matter how many domains major tech companies shut them down.

HOWEVER, that just means that we have to keep thinking about organizing, and organizing as an offshoot of community building, in new ways.