Anarchism is often exemplified by mutual aid – a voluntary, collective exchange of resources and services for common benefit in overcoming socio-economic barriers, and these resources often include food, clothing, medicine, even education and information, prominent in times of crisis like climate collapse and the Covid-19 pandemic, but also meeting the daily needs of communities without relying upon the establishment. Media can, and must, be a part of this. But how?
It may seem like the obvious option might simply be a media workers’ cooperative, and there are examples of these, in the U.K., the U.S., and elsewhere, but they must still compete in the commercial marketplace, and there is not enough protection for horizontal organisations under capitalism. If there’s one thing you can say about capitalism, it’s that it is highly adaptable: the system has ironically co-opted many co-ops to still exist within the capitalist economy (and that famous cooperative The Associated Press even cooperated with the Nazis). In addition, establishment media loves little more than to lure and indeed co-opt clout-chasing voices of “dissent” determined to further their individual careers, leaving the journalists within workers’ cooperatives subjected to the capitalist economy and its corruptible seduction. Journalism, as mentioned, is a class-exclusive profession, largely a landscape for the “brightest and best” who want to get ahead and are therefore compelled to compromise.
"Tearing down the walls between performer and audience, artist and viewer, author and reader, has long been a liberatory goal." - Shuli Branson, Practical Anarchism
There is another way — beyond the reliance upon journalism as a commodity. One where all involved, including the service users, are empowered, with little division between news “reporter” and news “consumer,” and such hierarchy removed completely. Truly mutual aid media: people reporting and consuming information with, by, and for one another as an essential service; the oxygen of organising.
To reflect all of our communities at a grassroots level, then, the ideal media model must largely rely on citizen journalism where information is seen less as what it became mistakenly accepted as (a commodity) and more of what it truly is (a human right).
"In many ways, the definition of “journalist” has now come full circle. When the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution was adopted, “freedom of the press” referred quite literally to the freedom to publish using a printing press, rather than the freedom of organised entities engaged in the publishing business. … It was not until the late nineteenth century that the concept of the “press” metamorphized into a description of individuals and companies engaged in an often-competitive commercial media enterprise." - Prof. Mary-Rose Papandrea
While establishment media reinforced the capitalist status quo and hid behind the excuse of “impartiality” when regularly refusing to critique capitalism’s brutalisation of our communities, citizen journalism has empowered ordinary people in extraordinary ways.
Based on (and named after) the principles of mutual aid, the French-language Reseau Mutu, or Mutu Network, is comprised of over twenty websites dedicated to local radical news, located in various areas of France, in addition to Switzerland, Belgium, and recently expanding its reach even further to help spawn similar sites across Europe.
The Mutu model has succeeded through a transparent editorial process based on set principles that are not just founded on mutual aid but are also anti-establishment, anti-authoritarian, and anti-fascist at their core. While it has grown fast, there are some activists who feel the separate websites repeat more general information and ideas that do not require an entirely different site. Nonetheless, it further demonstrates the potential for citizen journalism, even if not utilising a similar web platform. Numerous other examples exist, offering different approaches to learn from. Cerveaux non Disponibles, also based in France, quickly soared in popularity with the growth of the Yellow Vest movement and have said "the communication of information is really one of the keys of the war." In Latin America, Avispa Midia was inspired by the Zapatistas and state that "media is a terrain of struggle, where we must confront the commercial and hegemonic media."
There are media activists around the world, gathering, collecting, and sharing information, through imagery, interviews, and fearless journalism; speaking truth to power. On demonstrations week in and week out, protesters are filming police to hold them to account in ways their powerful chiefs and their friends in establishment media rarely ever do. But this is not a recent phenomenon. When we reflect on citizen journalism, we have much to be thankful for over the decades, from George Holliday’s incredible documentation of the Rodney King assault, to the mobilisation of entire movements such as Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street, and the Arab Spring. Yes, those latter causes heavily relied on the utilisation of social media. But now even that is finally being reclaimed.
Something has emerged as the ideal counter-cultural adversary for Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and the “tech bros”: a federated universe (or “Fediverse”) of decentralised social networks.
“Enter the Fediverse, an alternative, open-source social media network that aligns with anarchist values. Rather than being a thinly-veiled attention and data gathering capitalist vortex, the Fediverse is an actual social network, built out of a multitude of federated, autonomous, and decentralised instances. On the Fediverse, we control the infrastructure, we moderate ourselves, and we can gather and share based on our affinities and desires rather than being guided by addictive algorithms. Many anarchists who have dodged the traps of corporate social media are already here, sharing their projects, art, and ideas.” - from the Fedizine
The Fediverse offers Mastodon as an alternative to Twitter, Pixelfed as an alternative to Instagram, PeerTube as an alternative to YouTube, and so on - but each site all largely able to interconnect and interact with one another to varying degrees, free from corporate walled gardens (or rather, conference suites) that ruined our web in the first place.
Considering the absence of profit motives, ads or algorithms of a cynical nature, you can barely even imagine a more fitting opposition to the walled-off corporate conference suites of Twitter (or “X”), Facebook (or “Meta”), and the like.
“The Fediverse is a collection of decentralised social media services that interconnect via ActivityPub, a specification from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The Fediverse is nothing short of a renaissance on the social web because, for the first time in well over a decade, social media has a chance to be truly decentralised. This has massive implications for developers; it may be the best open platform opportunity since the blogosphere in the early 2000s.” - Richard MacManus
Indeed, we lost our way. But we can find our way back – armed with the knowledge gained from the mistakes of Indymedia and the hegemony of corporate, centralised social sites. The way in which the Fediverse exists as an entity reflects the vision many of us cite for society in general, with its immense potential for de-commercialised spaces and decentralisation. So appealing are these concepts to humans at our core – and so at odds with the current economic status quo – that the billionaires are attempting to do what capitalists always do:
They're trying to co-opt them.
“Twitter is the closest thing we have to a global consciousness,” said Jack Dorsey as Elon Musk emerged to purchase the service, before continuing: “In principle, I don’t believe anyone should own or run Twitter. It wants to be a public good at a protocol level, not a company. Solving for the problem of it being a company however, Elon is the singular solution I trust. I trust his mission to extend the light of consciousness.” After the sale of Twitter to Musk, Jack helped spearhead the Twitter spin-off Bluesky, aiming to capture those leaving Elon’s Nazi platform with a clone app “cosplaying decentralisation” and lacking the distributed networks of the Fediverse. Is Bluesky a breath of fresh air after Musk seized control of Twitter? Sure, but that's a low standard. Does it remind us of the Twitter of old? Of course, but what will ultimately stop it from suffering the very same fate?
Meanwhile, Zuck’s Meta held meetings with Fediverse administrators, apparently with a view to plug his Threads system into it, provoking a Fediverse Pact of admins pledging to never federate with his poisonous sites. And this federation is part of the beauty of it: while JD Vance joined Bluesky and its users frantically attempted to organise to shut him out with suggestions to, well, ignore him and his fascist followers in the hopes they'd one day go away, Fediverse servers whose code of conduct have rules against fascism would either not approve his registration in the first place, or simply de-federate from any server that did.
"Bluesky sure seems like a lot of fun! They've pulled tens of millions of users over from other systems, and by all accounts, they've all having a great time. The problem is that without federation, all those users are vulnerable to bad decisions by management (perhaps under pressure from the company's investors) or by a change in management (perhaps instigated by investors if the current management refuses to institute extractive measures that are good for the investors but bad for the users). Federation is to social media what fire-exits are to nightclubs: a way for people to escape if the party turns deadly." - Cory Doctorow
But Bluesky's Twitter 2.0 model is apparently more intuitive for ex-Twitter users, and therefore easier to use than Mastodon. The codes of conduct will play a part in this too, even if users don't realise it: the standards are often just plain higher, people push for more inclusive language, and alt text on images is constantly requested (and rightly so). One representative from a workers' rights group actually told me personally that she was reluctant to have a presence for their guild on Mastodon because of such standards. "It was a rather negative experience for me personally - like how it felt was to go from 'The internet is amazing because it's full of amazing people who build amazing things!' to 'Nevermind, the internet sucks, and people are the reason that people can't have nice things' in like the span of 24 hours," she told me. "I love the idea of Mastodon. I want Mastodon to be a thing, and I want to be a part of it being a thing. But my experience has made me afraid that I'm not allowed to be a human being who makes mistakes on there. And boy do I make a lot of mistakes." She clarified: "Basically the primary thing that I feel is not a good match for Mastodon - like not a good match for me trying to take it on myself in addition to all the other things, is I'm not always able to attach alt text to images. Sometimes I forget, sometimes I literally run out of time." She concluded: "My alt-text for stuff is simply copy [and] pasting the words that are on the image into the box...that is all the people on the Big Tech platforms seem to expect from me."
Aside from putting some of her own minor inconveniences above the major inconveniences of, in this case, Disabled people, surely none of us anti-capitalists really think "people" are fundamentally shitty at heart? Isn't that what the capitalist class prefer us to believe? We want to strive to do better, to be better, to be the change we wish to experience in the world. Of course being called out isn't always easy to take, and it isn't always delivered in the gentlest way, for various reasons, and some of us would rather not keep learning (and unlearning) because it's easier to stay in our comfort zone – such as, yes, the "Big Tech" sites.
"Working and living inside hierarchies does not teach us how to deal with conflict. Most of us avoid conflict either by submitting to others' wills and trying to numb out the impact on us, or by trying to dominate others to get our way and being numb to the impact on others. ...Conflict is a normal part of all groups and relationships. But many of us still seem to think that if conflict happens, it means there is something wrong – and then we seek out someone to blame. ...The emergence of conflict does not have to mean that someone is bad or to blame, and the more we can normalise conflict, the more likely we can address it and come through it stronger, rather than burning out and leaving the group or the movement, and/or causing damage to others." - Dean Spade
In fact, I joined a radical communal care collective via Mastodon, and we held regular online meetings and agreed on Dean Spade's book Mutual Aid as a key guide for us going forward, but when the "founder" (and sole admin) of the group had conflict with another member, and was reminded of the book's section on conflict, he suddenly dismissed it because it didn't suit him. Several of us left and while his group later collapsed "because people" (his words), ours has continued to this day – yes, with living breathing people as part of it, partly lasting so long because we learned from such guides and experiences, while it seems he, sadly, did not. It's hard to unlearn hierarchy when we're brought up with it in our lives. But suggesting people – human beings – are innately shitty seems like a cop-out too many use to justify doing shitty things. And it's straight from the capitalist hymn sheet. It's what capitalists prefer us to believe and say because it justifies their system of hierarchy and exploitation.
"Do you believe that human beings are fundamentally corrupt and evil, or that certain sorts of people (women, people of colour, ordinary folk who are not rich or highly educated) are inferior specimens, destined to be ruled by their betters? If you answered 'yes', then, well, it looks like you aren’t an anarchist after all. But if you answered 'no', then chances are you already subscribe to 90% of anarchist principles, and, likely as not, are living your life largely in accord with them." - David Graeber
For now, Mastodon will likely continue to be perceived as lesser to Bluesky until the inevitable "enshittification" occurs, at which point more people will (perhaps finally) realise that Mastodon, and the Fediverse as a whole, reflects the world we want, and it's one worth fighting for (yes, even if that includes a little conflict with those of us on the same side along the way).
Fundamentally, private entities are desperately attempting to retain their dominance on the social media landscape. Beyond the billionaires’ ideological motivation to essentially influence public discourse, there is also the obvious base incentive for them, as capitalist endeavours, to sustain their services in order to meet their business aims. While they may enjoy the narrative that us Fediverse users are a small minority on the fringes of a social media world where their sites are still “the places to be,” their recent actions only betray their concerns that there are, instead, more and more people attracted to the core principles of the Fediverse.
Those old social media sites aren’t just facing an existential crisis; they were flawed creations to begin with, built on sand – as mentioned, they were never perfect.
The Fediverse isn’t perfect, either, although it is structured on stronger foundations from the start – foundations compatible with anarchist principles. And as anarchists, we realise that perfectionism is the enemy of good. But we can still try to do better, even in the face of adversity.
For starters, servers cost money, and instances of the Fediverse face a scarcity of resources that the likes of Elon and Zuck don’t have to worry about so much. There are other challenges too. Yes, servers must become more transparent, accountable, and democratic, but that will require more rights alongside more responsibilities for users, if they are so willing. Yes, Nazi punks can set up their own vile servers, but the rest of us will simply de-federate from them, setting them adrift alone; ostracised, as they deserve to be. And yes, even servers with codes of conduct that promote safe spaces for marginalised people have their own problems with ignorance, or lack of understanding of privilege and power imbalances, but unlike X and Meta and sites like them, such instances are often experiencing critical yet constructive, diplomatic discussions about how to improve the form and content of the servers in question, which cannot exist in the first place in centralised, corporate social media – because X and Meta are, inherently, incompatible with democracy. This is why the Fediverse is important to value, nurture, and improve. As difficult as it can be in this time of crisis, we must remember to learn the lessons of Indymedia.
Challenges also arise when speaking about the Fediverse as one entity, when in fact it is, by its very definition, comprised of many different networks like Mastodon, Pixelfed, PeerTube, Castopod, Lemmy, and more, each with different form and content, offering publishing opportunities for text, images, video, music, you name it. These remain crucial tools for a much-needed multi-media citizen journalism at the grass-roots level. But not all software is the same, and this requires consideration.
What was described as a Twitter ”exodus” when Elon Musk took over the service saw swathes of users switching to Mastodon on a matter of principle: they may have wanted a social network that functioned similarly to what they were familiar with on Twitter, but without the corporate ownership and increasingly fascistic culture. Meanwhile, the Reddit boycott was arguably more about Reddit charging third-party developers for commercial access to its application programming interface (or API). Thus, the culture on Reddit alternatives such as Lemmy may be more comparable to Reddit itself, than most Mastodon servers can be compared with Twitter.
"The medium is the message." - Marshall McLuhan
If, like Reddit, a site has an “up-vote” and “down-vote” system on its posts, the discourse is inevitably influenced through that consideration by the user, which is not always useful. The exception is the Beehaw instance, which took away down-votes entirely and indefinitely in an attempt to nurture a kinder culture, based on the logical assumption that if a post brings little to the conversation, it will simply lack up-votes, negating any need for a down-vote feature that can be – and often is – abused on Lemmy, just as it is on Reddit.
Activists have long called on social movements to campaign “wherever people are” but, morally, that can no longer include the social networks of late capitalism’s billionaires, be it the proverbial Nazi bar of Elon’s X, the misinformation hive that is Zuck’s Meta, Trump's “Big Tech” enablers, or the next big “tech bro” offering. The Fediverse is ours to utilise, and create. By its very definition, it is collectivism over individualism. By its very structure, it can be order without power. This is why we can utilise the Fediverse to develop our radical media networks - building the new world in the shell of the old; seizing the means of social media.
Forget closed-off Facebook groups and X accounts. Forget about wondering where to find information on the latest meetings, campaigns, demonstrations and resources of interest to anti-capitalists and anti-fascists. With a Fediverse radical media network based on something similar to Beehaw's form and inspired by Mutu's content, we can build a framework to find and disseminate such details – town by town, region by region. Wherever we are that day; getting involved, learning and sharing and changing our communities for the better. Rejecting disinformation and helping people to better understand the principles of mutual aid, tackling the challenges we face, together. Intersectionality at its core.
I for one plan to do my best to help build this Intersection. If you'd like to, as well, email me. And let's keep communicating via the Fediverse!
