Because of our movements, we have a map of who is fucking us. Time to use it.
I sometimes get despairing, and I think to myself: our movements have all come to a horrifying dead end; we never even stopped losing ground, not once. What was it all for?
It’s hard to find comfort or the will to go on in punishing, and thus far, almost totally futile work if you are looking at actual MATERIAL gains. One of the only things that keeps me alive is that, in the past decades of movements, a.) we got irrefutable legal evidence that the power structure will not reform to a place that is even humane on the most fundamental levels and b.) we have established a pretty decent model of how this system is SPECIFICALLY functioning in the present, down to the people who are operating it.
What I have learned in 10 years of activism is that, at the end of the day, no matter how much we talk about systemic this and unconscious this and subtle that and representation this, everything really does come down to individual people doing individual things. These are not abstract notions, that have their hand on our necks; while abstract notions may explain some of what we experience, it is very clear that there are PEOPLE, there are VERY SMALL GROUPS of people, inside very specific institutions in very specific places, that combined are responsible for at least 80% if not more of the material oppression in this country. The need for materialism, in light of that awareness, is very clear.
I think about a lot of social justice investigation/exploration in terms of creating a map. A map that shows who is being hurt, how they are being hurt, what the effects are; a map that shows how oppression flows through various social structures and institutions; a map that shows how power works in the system, and what are the individuals and narrow interests are that are controlling it. Once we have that map across many movements — from police violence to abortion, from sexual violence to surveillance — we can start to get a real picture of what people are running this bullshit, and need to get neutralized ASAP.
For example, working in tech, I can tell you, in a very short span of time, the top 20 worst companies, the top 3 worst VC firms; within those I can tell you who are the major players with the most power and the most culpability, as well as their crimes against the People ranked in order of severity; in fact, within a few hours, I could deliver you the names of 500 people who I know for a fact are personal causers of mass scale human rights abuses and war criminals, who are personally responsible as well as structurally responsible for, ongoing tech industry crimes, and who are in charge of significant mechanisms and infrastructure causing these outcomes. I can tell you what would most likely happen if we were able to neutralize them, and how we could go about directly and materially removing them. I have a good idea of where they are dispersed geographically and what kind of security situation they are likely to have. I know which people are part of what conspiracy. In short, I can deliver you the names and legal evidence needed to neutralize these parties, in a very short amount of time. Other long-term organizers can do the same for their respective areas; we have truly come to know who we are fighting, who is the enemy.
One of the things that happens when you get a hyperconcentration of power and capital, is you get vulnerability in the system: the single points of failure, the centralization, the extreme reliance on small groups and even individuals. The system is relying on too many centralized parts. That is where an engineering opportunity opens. From every single movement, we have been able to identify and document these hyperconcentrations in very material ways, often simply by how resistance to us manifested. That is actually a tremendous amount of not only legal documentation of how these crimes and conspiracies have been committed “systemically”, but documentation of who is responsible.
On almost every social justice movement I can think of, we know who the people are who are doing this absolute bullshit, the stealing and the lying and the murder and the exploitation and the weapons development and the police violence and the surveillance and who took away abortion. When it comes to housing justice we have housing activists in every city that can tell us who the major developers are, who are the politicians who have been bought, who are the major employers who are bringing in their offices and leveling cities. In areas like abortion, we know what the major funders of the legislation have been, we know who has been responsible for backing it and putting it forward; in other words, we know who did Roe v Wade. Take something like police violence — we know, down to a PRECINCT, exactly who and what we are dealing with, thanks to the incredible work of Black revolutionaries before, during and after Ferguson. We know who is literally shooting the people. We even have people who have been focusing full time on the Epstein case, before it even broke: people who have collected huge amounts of evidence of the other significant players in that ring, and have continued investigation where the system has refused to. INCLUDING information on ties between Epstein and I.e. technology schools and the tech industry itself, as well as many other structures especially the intelligence community; that’s a great example of where we can overlay the maps from the tech industry with the ones from pedophile hunters and the ones of the CIA “conspiracy theorists”, and truly get down to very specific points of where our greatest points of hyper concentration of power, money, community/societal, crimes or what have you, reside.
The thing that this map of hyperconcentration does, is allow us to really *scope* our response based on what we see in the map, instead of on much more ephemeral and in-actionable concepts like bias, discrimination, etc. These are incredibly difficult to scope; the resources required to affect these things in a blanket way by transforming interpersonal relations, is truly phenomenal; we have seen plenty of evidence that this is not an approach that yields results fast enough to save us, if at all. The map makes the problem space much smaller, and it inherently and materially suggests structural weaknesses where we can strike at to get a massive, discontinuous result instead of this slow, slow process of reforming, for example, sexism as a broad category.
For an example of how we are now able to scope more effectively and establish very material grounds for action: there are 4.4 million programmers in the computing industry … but that 500 people I mentioned up there, the ones who have the gravest responsibility; those 500 people are almost to the point of being mathematically irrelevent as a population within the sector, and yet, I can guarantee you with 99% accuracy, that if they were neutralized and replaced with people who were not psychopathic robber baron criminals, you would see absolutely immediate, discontinuous material improvements in the tech industry as well as free much of it to actually begin to operate on the people’s terms and in a way which would contribute to the people. I.e., democratizing technology platforms like Twitter into public utilities, or stripping them for parts and reallocating them to other causes.
What have we learned from the last 10 years of movements? If nothing else, it is this: a damn good map of the enemy. People in each field who have been working there for the past 10 years are the ones that can tell us, specifically, who the enemy is; where they are, what they are like, who their cronies are. People know the enemies of the spaces they work in; we must use that to our advantage and respect this as a MATERIAL gain from the last 10 years of work, a platform for what happens next now that the ruling class has said FUCK YOU to literally EVERYTHING we tried. We need to start discussing in our movement how we can use the information and the map that we have of who is hurting us, and get a really good action plan going based on the map. Specifically, I think we need to be talking about things like what are the bare minimum amounts of forced takeover at various centralization points we need to forward and obtain a needed result, what kind of overall security situation we would be facing in the event of a need to move towards large-scale citizen arrests, how to coordinate convergence on elusive criminal cells, how to pull war criminals from their nests or simply interrupt them at their offices, etc.
If the movements of the past ten years do not result in material action, and soon, then they were all for nothing. This is a way to actually use things that WE built, things the WE analyzed, things that WE fought in the field, and propel them in the material direction of revolution.