She’s back with another warning
“We are watching the collapse of the international order in real time,” Carole Cadwalladr insists in a nervous return to TED. Learn how to fight back, she urges. First we have to name it: “It’s a coup.”
“It’s already later than we think.”
This Is What a Digital Coup Looks Like
“It’s a kind of power we’ve never seen before.”
“We are already living within the architecture of totalitarianism. It may not have been deliberate, but we now have to act as though we are living in East Germany, and Instagram is the Stasi.”
“Privacy is power.”
Appropriating your information is “more than theft. It’s a violation. Data rights are human rights.”
“We are not powerless. The 30,000 people who supported me proved that – we are not powerless. Because we know who we are, and we know what we stand for. And my question to Silicon Valley is, do you?”
It’s overwhelming. Between the Trump cult and the digital coup this gets harder every morning. Hell, we’re still trying to certify Justice Allison Riggs’s N.C. state Supreme Court seat she won in November. While we’re not working to stop the spread of global authoritarianism and a digital coup.
Survivors in Gaza and Aleppo have it worse. So it’s chickenshit, isn’t it, for us sitting in front of computers to give in to the creeps trying to threaten or sue us into submission? We’re better than that (I hope).
Street protests do little to change the political battlefield. And I’m as quick as anyone to dismiss them as little more than events designed to make us feel better about issues than to resolve them. But April 5 was a tonic, proving we are not alone. We are many. I’m hoping April 19 comes together bigger than the last, perhaps building toward a national stike.
“We are not powerless.”
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Have you fought autocracy today?
National Day of Action, Saturday, April 19 (Details pending)
The Resistance Lab
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Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink
You Have Power
Chop Wood, Carry Water
Thirty lonely but beautiful actions
Attending a Protest Surveillance Self-Defense