Do you

megaphone

Would you

Answer yes to any of the first questions? Then you also said yes to the rest.

surveillance camera

Why? Log out of Instagram for a moment. Can you access the posts? No. That's not because the corporations are protecting you, it's because they need people to log in to track them. Promote your Instagram account, then you promote Instagram. It's the same with all these platforms.

Surveillance capitalism is the massive collection and commodification of personal data by corporations. You make an account, and their business is tracking and correlating your activity on the platform and elsewhere. It gets worse when they get a name, telephone number, date of birth, and maybe a recognisable picture. You pay with your data.

But this is "just" advertising? Not all the time. Sometimes it is used against you: by the corporation, the state, your school, your boss, hackers, fascists. Data is shared and stolen, purposefully and accidentally.

By promoting your (corporate) socials,
you are telling your friends and activists that this is just fine.

But we need outreach. Each of these services have their own rules, and decide what can be said and what can't. Numerous groups had their accounts closed or their messages hidden, because the tech companies did not like what they post about. Be it trans rights, birth control, anti-colonialism... the list is long. Are you already shadow-banned?

There are alternatives. We don't need to use the services offered by surveillance capitalism, because there are alternatives. And the very least you can do is to use your tracked accounts to point people to something better. Link out

Let's grow the services and infrastructures that do not require anybody to sign up, that keep access anonymous, that don't have the information to leak, that resist the use by state authorities, and where nobody is out to make money from your activity.

Tell your friends being tracked is not fine.
Promote alternatives to Capitalism.

Alternatives

star and keyboard

Activists run services for activists. Email, Chat, Social media, Docs and Calc, Forms, Video conferencing, and much more.

You will find anti-capitalist alternatives with groups like Disroot, systemli, Autistici. There's also a long list of more on a page maintained by riseup. Some like Disroot have open registration, others you might need to ask your fellow activists for a registration code.

You can get email from most collectives. Several also have NextCloud for Office Docs. Jitsi for Video conferencing. Have a click through and see whats on offer. But which services to choose? Popular suggestions at the moment:

Mastodon for public social posts like todon or kolektiva.

Social vids on peer tube like kolektiva. You can follow peertube from Mastodon. To get an account to post you usually need to ask, same on Videos Squat.net.

Promote your events on Radar Squat or your local Gancio site.

Chat can be a bit more difficult. Signal isn't activist run, and requires your phone number, but is encrypted and you can hide your number now. Matrix is good for encrypted group chats and doesn't need your phone number so you can make multiple accounts, but you are sharing (meta)data, and development is VC funded, however collectives like systemli and sindominio run their own servers.

In addition to posting on mastodon or in chat have a simple website, a wordpress site from NoBlogs or Network 23, lots of the other radical servers will give you one if you ask too.

Do you need even more? Check that riseup list of collectives or https://www.notrace.how/resources/ https://www.privacytools.io/ for software.

Local

One of the great things about distributed federated activist run services is they can work locally, but share globally. We'd like to start a list of active local accounts to get you started, and more regional server and services collectives here. Mail suggestions to alternative-socials@riseup.net or on Mastodon @alternative_socials.

Netherlands

Services

Accounts