If the Movements of the Last Decade Are Done, What Comes Next?

The collapse and/or exhaustion of Big Tech platforms like Twitter and Facebook is opening up space for new experiments; can the same be true for organizing?

One of my favorite pieces of writing to come out of the tumult of the last few months in the tech world is Robin Sloan’s essay, “A Year of New Avenues.” Sloan is a fiction writer best known for the novel Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, but before establishing himself in fiction he worked at the Poynter Institute, Current TV and Twitter and, as he puts it in his bio, “at all those places, my job had something to do with figuring out the future of media.” To his credit, he’s been an outspoken skeptic of Web3, but with this latest essay, he’s drumming on an old chord that still resonates for a lot of people in the world of tech and beyond: the potential to begin anew.

Now, I know a lot of Connector readers are not techies, and maybe right now you are wondering if you should set this issue aside. I promise, this is not going to be about tech in any hardcore way. Or rather, it’s about what is possible when we stop looking at the dominant structures of our time as fixed and start paying more attention to what can emerge in their cracks.

Sloan starts with the big news of the moment: “THE PLATFORMS OF THE LAST DECADE ARE DONE.” Sloan doesn’t have to spell this out, but just in case you’re not sure: Meta/Facebook is lost on a search for a metaverse no one wants, Twitter is being torn apart by its new owner, and thanks to Sam Bankman-Fried, the crypto collapse is accelerating. More than 150,000 tech employees have been laid off in recent weeks, including 11,000 at Meta, 10,000 and Amazon and 10,000 at Google. The cultural cachet of boisterous billionaire VCs and move-fast-and-break-things founders alike has busted.

What comes next?  It’s 2003 again, Sloan suggests, but with the experiences of the last twenty years to help us avoid making the same mistakes. Every operating system, he notes, “now offers a trivially available web canvas to which you can add anything you want.” Where will the  truly new ideas come from? Not startup VCs, but the “amateur internet; a garage internet; a public library internet; a kitchen table internet.” Lots of experiments are under way, which by definition will be known only to a few people and their close collaborators. “The good stuff is always lonely in the beginning,” he writes.

And no, he’s not making the easy move and pointing to the explosive growth of Mastodon (now at more than eight million users) as the cure for everyone with the Twitter blues. He writes, “When you tell me about Twitter vs. Mastodon, I hear that you got rid of the flesh-eating piranhas and replaced them with federated flesh-eating piranhas. No thanks, I’m still not swimming in that pool! I’m not saying you shouldn’t create a Mastodon account, or that you can’t enjoy fun, percolating conversations on that platform. I’m just saying that it does not, to me, represent a sufficiently interesting experiment, because it accepts too much as settled.”  

What isn’t settled? Well, Sloan is arguing that we still haven’t solved the problem of helping people find each other online “in a way that is healthy and sustainable.” But let’s push this idea further, because we haven’t solved the problem of helping people come together more generally either! If anything, social life out in the “real” world seems more fraught these days.

I’m now thinking of something my beloved yoga teacher said at the beginning of class last Saturday. She was talking about the mood she felt going about her daily errands and sensing a kind of increased surliness as she moved in common spaces. It could be winter and seasonal affective disorder, plus the respiratory colds that so many people are dragging around with. Or it could also be that, post-Covid isolation, we collectively forgot some of our manners and got a few degrees more self-centered. Plus who knows how much unresolved trauma people are carrying from the last few years, along with heightened fears of being in crowds (thanks NRA!). The warning signs of economic recession don’t help either. Or maybe we just know too much about each other thanks to social media, and we’re edgier and crankier as a result.

Whatever it is, the upshot is that getting large groups of people together for common action feels harder. Now imagine you are trying to make a change happen in the world. How will you do that? What are the vehicles you may use to make change? And what happens to them as they get bigger? The answer is confounding. After decades of humans being computationally- and socially-networked, we’ve barely figured out how to pool our energies and sync our minds up at any significant scale.

One solution: be a lone wolf, a prophet, a charismatic hero. From Ralph Nader to Julian Assange, this has worked to a degree, but all too often at great cost, including treating one’s colleagues as disposable pawns or cheap labor. Another solution: hire someone to do the work for you, by making donations to nonprofits and advocacy organizations stocked with professional do-gooders. Which empowers a few people at best, and often leads to unaccountable bureaucracies more attuned to sustaining the organization rather than solving the problem it was created to address. Or, a third approach: give a little bit of your time to tasks that other people have lined up for you to do, just-in-time to nudge one of your fellow citizens to also do one of those little tasks that maybe can alter the direction of things. Not only is voting the least you can do to change the future, this kind of engagement is best described as “entaskment” not empowerment.

Mass participation in democratically running an organization is not something we’re good at, both because it’s really hard to get to and sustain “mass” and to democratically run anything. Just take a look at the Democratic Socialists of America, which experienced a huge growth in members after Bernie Sanders ran for president in 2016, and is now beset with seemingly never-ending internal fights over hyper-ideological differences of interest only to small groups of people. At the local level many DSA chapters engage in disciplined, ongoing community organizing, but that hasn’t scaled up to anything like a national federated body capable of coherent politicking. (How can I say this? Just look at any of the Members of Congress who are DSA members but don’t abide by its national platform.)  

The Momentum family of organizations—If Not Now, Sunrise Movement, and Cosecha in particular—all tried to solve for this problem by designing themselves from the start to be made up of decentralized local hubs whose members all went through the same initial onboarding trainings. This process of “frontloading,” it was hoped, would insure a degree of ongoing consensus as the umbrella organization gained more adherents. But the biggest challenges these new efforts has faced is autonomous chapters doing things in the name of the larger organization that have been, frankly, unstrategic and self-defeating. (See Aaron Freedman’s 2021 piece in Jewish Currents on IfNotNow, and Sunrise co-founders Dyanna Jaye and William Lawrence’s March 2022 piece in Convergence Magazine if you want to dive deeper into the challenges these models have faced.)

It's tempting to conclude that as we enter 2023, it isn’t just the big platforms of the last decade that are done, but also the big movements. The Dreamers, #MeToo, the Women’s March, Black Lives Matter, Indivisible, the March for Our Lives—they all continue to reverberate and in many places local organizers who came together under these banners still are doing lots of work. But a lot of their energy has been spent (or harvested for short-term electoral campaigns) with little left behind. There’s a quiet collapse underway inside lots of decent organizations now as their end of the year fundraising lags; I don’t think the news that Democracy for America, the successor organization to Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential campaign*, is shutting down is going to be an isolated example. (*Drink!)

So now what? Where is the equivalent of the “amateur internet; a garage internet” for organizing? As Sloan writes in his Avenues essay, “A whale dies in the ocean, and its carcass feeds a whole ecosystem for decades.” We should think of the coming year as a time for new experiments, and remember how much a good new idea can spread and take hold. In that spirit, here are some notes on things that have caught my curiosity. Please use the comments section to add your own.

New Tools

Back in mid-August, I (virtually) attended “Tools for Thinking,” a day of panels and demos focused on ways of helping people and groups be more creative, hosted by Betaworks in New York City. And I saw some exciting, promising projects, like Plexus, which is trying to build an online space where meaningful connections are guaranteed. Is it going to succeed? I don’t know; Plexus’ founder Davey Morse, has already pivoted from trying to build a smart writing tool that would respond intelligently to you as you put words on a blank page, to trying to build a smart connecting tool that would develop shared group awareness alongside large group chats. If Morse and his team are successful, maybe someday his vision of “a million-person community [that feels] as intimate as a small group chat” could be part of a new normal. If that sounds weird, welcome to the edge-land where truly new ways of relating and connecting get incubated.

The Arc browser, from The Browser Company, is another example of a new tool that is tickling my spidey-sense. It’s in early beta, but having gotten an invite, I’m struck by how it wants to solve one of my own biggest problems right off the bat: information overload and focus. Here’s a video that explains its basic architecture.

Promising Collabs

Last week, Blue Tent and the Donor Organizer Hub shared the results of the 2022 Political Donor Survey. A total of 1,215 donors to Democratic and progressive organizations responded, and while the survey itself is not scientific, its findings were still enlightening. (You can look at them here.) More important, to my mind, is that this effort was the result of nine organizing networks deciding to collaborate with each other on trying to address a very hard collective action problem: how to get more people to give their political dollars strategically instead of impulsively. It’s slow going when most of these highly networked donors say their main sources of information on who to give to are the Democratic party committees and individual campaigns, but there’s progress being made with groups like Movement Voter Project also showing up well in the survey. The co-sponsors of the survey were Bridge to Victory, CivicShout, Democracy for America (sigh), East Bay Activist Alliance, Sister District, Walk the Walk and Women Engaged Steering Committee.

Intriguing New(ish) Efforts

One of the best things about writing this newsletter is the people, and clues, it draws in and often the surprising and energizing things I get to stumble on as a result. Take subscribers and your URLs. Whenever someone new signs up here, I get a notification. Often, a person’s email address offers a clue, and I go looking. And as a result, I’ve learned about lots of intriguing political projects and shops in just the last three months of new signups:

Champion.us: A public benefit LLC that provides philanthropic and political advisory services, and runs a c3 Education Fund that researches how individuals can effectively engage in democracy and a c4 Collective Action Fund to promote progressive local policy ideas.

Cooperative Impact Lab: A space to experiment with strategies to build progressive power, created in partnership with the Movement Cooperative.

CoPalMN.org: A member-based organization leading social impact initiatives to improve the quality of life for Latin American families in Minnesota.

LogOffMovement.org: A movement dedicated to rethinking social media by youth for youth that was started by a high school senior in Birmingham, Alabama.

RisingOrganizers.org: A nonprofit sponsored by the Social Good Fund that grows grassroots movements by training new and emerging leaders to build power in their communities, developing community among organizers, and fostering long-term commitment to organizing and political skills.

Hypha.coop: A worker cooperative based on Toronto that collaborates with communities to build better relationships with technology, with a focus on building decentralized web protocols and peer-to-peer technologies.

TheSocialPractice.org: An “ideologically-driven consultancy based in the US and Europe” that helps “those working for big change to strategize, communicate and organize at scale.” Ok, this one I did know about—it was founded by my friend Becky Bond and her colleague Zack Malitz.

ThisisWorthwhile.com: A creative partnership dedicated to brands that make things better.

ThisSpaceshipEarth.org: A nonprofit organization “focused on our climate crisis with a goal of creating planetary crew consciousness, impacting how we manage the finite resources on this planet,” committed to creating one billion crew members on Spaceship Earth.

TrainingforChange.org: A training and capacity building organization for activists and organizers that’s been around since 1992!

Zetkin.org: A platform for organizing developed since 2015 by the Swedish socialist party Vansterpartiet, that includes several tools to organize activism more efficiently and increase participation, owned and democratically controlled by the members of the Left Party in Malmo.

Universe.app: A campaign in a box tool for local progressive candidates, organizers and nonprofits.

Welcome to The Connector, folks! If you’re seeing yourself mentioned here, maybe add a comment and tell us more about what you’re up to, or what you’re hoping to learn.

Odds and Ends

—Democratic party strategists are planning to spend more on groups of voters who are increasingly spending their time consuming information in private digital environments like TikTok, or large direct-message groups, where political advertising isn’t available, Michael Scherer reports (gift link) for The Washington Post. He writes, “Democratic strategists have concluded that in many cases, volunteers can have more impact by creating or distributing content to their digital communities than by spending their time on more traditional canvassing operations.” Get ready for more “paid relational” campaigning—the bandaid solution to the party’s larger problem of having a brand no one understands or wants to spread on their own.

—“If I Were CEO of Twitter,” Douglas Rushkoff’s latest take (friend link) on the Musk mess, says about all there needs to be said about what we need over there rather than we we’re stuck with.

—Well, Twitter’s former CEO Jack Dorsey has some smart reflections too. A taste: “Of course governments want to shape and control the public conversation, and will use every method at their disposal to do so, including the media. And the power a corporation wields to do the same is only growing. It’s critical that the people have tools to resist this, and that those tools are ultimately owned by the people. Allowing a government or a few corporations to own the public conversation is a path towards centralized control.”

—Privacy, shmivacy: The AP reports on how authorities in China, India and Israel are using health tracking apps designed for the Covid pandemic to surveil and control the movements of ordinary people their government’s deem dangerous.

—Mega-donor MacKenzie Scott has kept her promise to release a searchable database of the more than $14 billion she has given away to more than 1,600 nonprofits so far. Dollar amounts are included for some projects but delayed in many cases at the request of recipients. Searching the “democracy” tab alone yields 73 gifts; who isn’t getting Scott’s money?

—Lensa AI, which makes a viral AI avatar app (you’ve probably seen some of your friends sharing their comic-book hero looks), has an objectification problem, as Melissa Heikkila reports for MIT Technology Review. That is, as a woman of Asian heritage, Lensa produced lots of images of her topless, in extremely skimpy clothes and in overtly sexualized poses.

—Heads up: Unified’s crowdfunding effort, which has already raised more than $104,000 from 111 investors, including me, is about to close.

End Times

I’m never getting a Roomba after this.

The Connector is going on a two week vacation starting next week; see you January 10th. May you have a restful and restorative holiday break!