Swinging Pendulum: A Discussion on Corporate Social Media, Deplatforming and the Liberal Security State

TFSR: Would you please introduce yourselves as you see fit and whatever projects you affiliate with for the purpose of this chat?

CrimethInc: For the purpose of this conversation, I'm just a participant in a CrimethInc Ex-Workers Collective associated project.

ItsGoingDown: I work on ItsGoingDown.org, which is a news media platform and podcasts and radio show, along with CrimethInc and The Final Straw, on the Channel Zero Anarchist Podcast Network.

TFSR: Since the right wing riot in DC on January 6, many of the larger social media platforms have begun purging accounts affiliated with far right groups and tendencies present at the Capitol and big data has been de-platforming apps like Parler. Can y'all maybe talk about what you've seen with this and how you think it bodes for anti-authoritarian projects on the left that challenge the state?

IGD: I'll start off. I think one thing to point out is that there's a narrative that this is, like, de-platforming censorship. I mean, obviously, we can point out that this is coming from private companies, not the state. I mean, the First Amendment is supposed to stop the state from censoring speech, and people's ideas. It doesn't have anything to do with private companies. I think which is interesting, because I would argue that there's probably more evidence to support the fact that the government has put more pressure on private companies to de-platform anarchist, antifascist and people on the left. But I would say the tendency to remove far right groups and figures from platforms though has not come from like, you know, people picketing outside Twitter or sort of this push from below. Which is sort of how the right portrays it. It's instead come after large scale incidents, things like at the Capitol, or Charlottesville, where these companies basically have freaked out.

If you read the book Antisocial, which is sort of like a history of the alt right online, I mean, literally, as Charlottesville was happening, the people at Reddit, like the people that run the company, were scrambling because they were terrified they were somehow going to be found legally responsible for what was going on. And they were literally purging all these big accounts. So it really has nothing to do with a personal political stance, or like getting pressure. I mean, from what I've heard from journalists and other people that have talked to people at Twitter, or have relationships, they're very aware that certain people on the far right are literally, for years, have violated the terms of service. But yet they've made a decision not to ban them because either they have big accounts or they feel if they got rid of them that that would just cause too much of a riff, or a problem.

I think Trump is a really good example: they finally got to the point where they're like, okay, we know that he's gonna be on his way out, we can finally make a decision at this point where, you know, we can get rid of him, and we're not gonna be in this weird political situation. Like we can successfully do that. And it'll look fine because he's just messed up so bad. I think like Alex Jones is another good example. They chose to get rid of Alex Jones at a time when he was facing all these lawsuits for the Sandy Hook stuff. So I mean, they made a good decision to take him off, because if they would have allowed him to continue, they might have been held legally responsible.

So I think that we have to remember that these corporations usually are taking these moves to remove stuff because they don't want to be held legally responsible. I think the other side of the coin is like the stuff that they're doing around things like Q-Anon or COVID-19 Truther-ism or stuff like that, there is a lot of pressure for them from different forces to get rid of that stuff. So it's a little bit different. I think, like in that instance, recently, like when ItsGoingDown and CrimethInc was kicked off Facebook, I think that was very much an instance of people that were tied to the Trumpian state putting pressure on Facebook to remove certain pages. And in fact I think it's very telling, in that instance, the names that Facebook gave the press when they were talking about the stuff that they removed, even though it was much larger than just several accounts. But it was you know, ItsGoingDown, CrimethInc, and the Youth Liberation Front in the Pacific Northwest. It was like they got a like an Andy Ngô dream list of accounts, especially for what was happening at the time, which is, you know, Portland was like the big story. So it made total sense to get rid of that stuff is very strategic move, and it had nothing to do with stopping violence or things in the street or anything like that. I think that there's very different dynamics at play, in short, going on in terms of like how people on different sides are getting thrown off, just to start off the conversation,

C: Who they ban is an indication of the balance of power in our society, basically, to build off what what you're saying. They ban people if they think that they could, that their speech on these platforms could contribute to a legal risk, but the legal risks are also determined by the balance of power, what's viewed as legitimate, and how court cases would be likely to go. You know, they certainly would not have banned Trump from Twitter if Trump had won another term by a majority of votes and controlled everything. They would have been trying to figure out how to make peace with him because he would be the one calling the shots. They were able to ban him on his way out, and Jack Dorsey maintains that he was compelled to ban Trump by employees at Twitter who were pressing him to do so, that may be true, that may be the equivalent of labor organizing, but it certainly would not have happened if Trump had less power.

So that's one of the things we're gonna have to talk about, repeatedly in this conversation, is how the line between who is banned and who is not relates to the balance of power and how groups that are already targeted, and that are already marginal, can engage with that. The other thing that I want to speak to regarding the recent bands of Parler, and Donald Trump from social media platforms, is that this is taking place in a context in which the state apparatus, the FBI, the police, and so on, are dramatically refurbishing their image for the Biden years. And this whole sort of liberal centrist discourse that has been sympathetic to criticism of the police or the federal government over the last four years under Trump is shifting to cheer-leading for these things.

This is part of the shift to the right that is taking place across society even as the extreme right is excised from legitimacy. You know, and it's taking place in the same context that now we see self-professed liberals calling for people from the Trump administration to go to Guantanamo Bay. Just accepting the premise that there should be a Guantanamo Bay when not that long ago, liberals were calling for Guantanamo Bay to be abolished.

So we're really seeing state censorship, corporate censorship, and all of these things that previously would have only been endorsed by right wing groups become extended now to to become liberal discourses or even left discourses. And the risk is that whatever corporations, or for that matter governments, do to the far right, they will always use that as a cover to do the same thing to what they perceive to be the opposite numbers of those groups on the far left. So, as my friend said it, it's not a coincidence that in summer when Facebook announced that they were banning Q-Anon militia groups, that they also banned CrimethInc, ItsGoingDown and dozens of other anarchist and antifascist journalists and publishing groups, that they will always take those steps. And so really, what we're seeing is a re-consolidating of power and legitimacy in a political center that will absolutely go after the very same people who have been struggling against fascists all this time.

IGD: Just to kind of drive that point home real quick: two months ago, the New York Times did a little video on like New York Times opinion (if you go on to YouTube and type in “New York Times opinion Q-Anon” it'll pop up) but it's a short 10 minute video about Q-Anon. But like, two thirds of the way through, what they do is they say, like, conspiracy theories aren't logical and then they use like several examples: they talk about conspiracy theories around the JFK assassination, they bring up something else, and then they say “look at anarchism”.

And it's funny, because they have this picture of Noam Chomsky that pops up — which, of course, Chomsky has submitted stuff and had stuff run in the New York Times for years, which I find ironic — but they say “anarchism has always never worked and always imploded whenever it's been put into practice”. Which anybody that knows the history of anarchism knows that actually not true, that it's actually a history of states and outside forces and fascists and Stalinists and capitalists destroying anarchist societies and projects. I think that that example in itself is telling because what they were trying to do is they were trying to create a narrative of that, you know, we're the center, we make sense, you know, we're based on facts and reason. And then there are these crazy people outside, whether it's Q-Anon on on the right, or anarchists on the left, you know, and those are the real wackos, and stuff like that.

I think it's also telling too that we could do a whole thing about Q-Anon and like, you know, the various forces that support it, and have pushed it, whether it's people, state actors, or even people with deep pockets, and, you know, moneyed interests and stuff like that, as opposed to anarchism, which is this grassroots movement from below that's existed for, you know, over 100 years. Wherever poor and working and oppressed people have struggled, there's been anarchists. I mean, obviously, the two are very different, but they're trying to really draw that line between them. I think that example, just kind of like really solidifies for me, at least, you know, the coming terrain of how the center sees things,

C: Right, you know, in a phrase, “narrow the Overton window”, they're not saying “get rid of the far right, because they kill people”. They're, you know, they're saying, “narrow the Overton window, consolidate the legitimacy of the center and emphasize the legitimacy of the other groups”.

IGD: Yeah, and I think that's why, going forward, it's going to be important to push back, in terms of what we're talking about here, but also in terms of any attempt by the state to enact new “domestic terrorism laws” that really are going to come back on us much more hard than anything on the far right. I mean, the state has more than enough tools to arrest everybody that's already going online saying “yes, we will commit the crimes today, and here's my address, and here's what I plan to do, and here's my five buddies I'm talking on discord about it with”. I mean, they're very apt to go after those people if they choose to do so. What they chose to do over the past five years or so, as we've seen an ascendancy of social movements, is instead double down and focus on Black Lives Matter, who they've labeled “Black Identity Extremists”.

We know that there's a “Iron Fist program” that the FBI has developed, this has been documented by outlets like the Intercept, which like COINTELPRO, they've only described in documents as a program to disrupt the Black liberation movement. We know through Fusion Center documents, like police and FBI and homeland security agents are looking at things like InfoWars as like legitimate sources.

If you look at things like the BlueLeaks, some of the stuff that's coming out of that is just incredible, like FBI agents believing that antifascists are being paid by Bitcoin through ads on Craigslist to go to protests. I mean, it's just batshit. But obviously the state has made a decision over the past couple of years to, surprise, surprise, go after autonomous anti-capitalist, anti-colonial, anti-racist movements from below as opposed to looking at the burgeoning far right threat. And now it's outside their door. Now, it's actually at the point where it's starting to disrupt state power. And cause, you know, Democratic senators and house representatives to go into hiding at the Capitol. Now they want to paint it as this big issue where, you know, they've been killing us for years and stacking up corpses, but now they want to paint it as an issue that, you know, has to be dealt with.

TFSR: Well, the whole thing was run by a “Mad Dog” Chomsky, as they say, you know, the whole riot at the at the Capitol on the sixth. Well, I mean, kind of pulling back, you've both made the point that the experiences that you've had around getting pushed off of social media platforms, or fundraising platforms as years before, with subMedia and IGD off of Patreon, has been an effort by private corporations measuring the balance of power, and maybe the proclivities of the people that run those specific platforms in some instances, but oftentimes, worrying about how it's going to look to their stockholders, and kicking off anti-authoritarian, leftist and anarchist projects from those sites in those platforms. Can you talk about a little bit about what the impact has been on your projects during that and sort of how you dealt with that?

C: Well, we were fortunate in that people responded immediately to the news that we'd been kicked off Facebook, when we were kicked off over the summer. There was actually a groundswell of support, I don't think that was about our specific projects, CrimethInc, ItsGoingDown, and the other projects that were kicked off, so much as it was a spreading awareness that, rather than banning groups according to what risks they pose, groups are being banned for political reasons. This is a concern that is going to affect more and more people, I think it's probable that the eventual endpoint of this trajectory is that it will be very difficult to talk about anything except centrist politics on these platforms at all.

So when we were kicked off Facebook, you know, there's this open letter that 1000’s of people signed supporting us and directing attention to the situation, it didn't really impact us that much. Even the groups that we know that we're not kicked off Facebook were negatively impacted by the Facebook algorithms after this, so I think if we had not been kicked off, it would not have been very much different results in the long run. We're still seeing the same amounts of traffic to our website, maybe we'd be seeing more if we hadn't been kicked off?

I think it's really an issue of what is legitimized, if they make it seem socially acceptable to ban people on the basis of their anarchist beliefs, from being able to communicate on these platforms, that is a step towards being able to legitimize other measures targeting people. And certainly when it happened, we were concerned because we're like, well, you know, if you're going to raid a village, first you cut off the electricity to that village, and diminishing our ability to communicate about what's happening to anarchists and other activists against white supremacy and government state oppression is one of the steps that you'd have to take to be able to increase the ways that people are targeted. And when we talk about the push now to invest more resources in the state, those resources are being put directly in the hands of the same sort of people who did the capital building occupations, so we can be sure that there's going to be more repression in the future.

But we've been fortunate in the dying days of the Trump administration, there was not the political will to carry that out. It's possible that there still will not be, but we will have to do a lot of organizing, that doesn't depend on platforms like Facebook and Instagram, to be able to maintain the ties with people necessary to weather the kind of repression that we can expect to see under the Biden administration.

IGD: Yeah, a couple of things. I mean, the thing with Patreon was so funny, because originally far right, I believe it was Greg Johnson, and that whole kind of crew — which is, interestingly enough, tied to Matt Gates in Florida — but I mean, they have launched a campaign to try to get IGD kicked off of Patreon. And originally, somebody from Patreon responded like, you know, well, actually, we think it's really important that antifascists have their work supported and stuff like that. To which they were like, Oh, my God, how could they do that? But when Lauren Southern was then kicked off after she was engaged with a group of white nationalists trying to block and putting the lives of migrants in the Mediterranean Sea in danger because they wanted to create clickbait media for you know, Youtube and stuff like that, they were basically forced to do this kind of pound of flesh thing where they had to kick something off. And people like Tim Pool lobbied them to have ItsGoingDown removed.

I think it's important also to point out that like in the example of Facebook, before they even kicked off, ItsGoingDown and CrimethInc, they really drastically changed the algorithms and the way that pages work. They also made it harder to get certain news sources. I mean, this affected the entire news media industry and anybody creating alternative media was severely impacted. This impacts everybody from Newsweek, down to Democracy Now to us and stuff like that. And that was designed to basically streamline Facebook as a way to generate money, they wanted people to pay to get clicks, basically. Which of course, you know, results in an output, which is that if you have money, you can then pay for more exposure. The end result is something like with the 2016 Trump administration run, where it's like, they have lots of money, and they can actually pay and flood the internet with lies, and, you know, total fabrications.

You can look at everything that Cambridge Analytica did over the past couple years, in terms of the Trump election campaign. There's a great documentary on Netflix called the Social Dilemma that's about social media and the way the algorithms work. But the point is they've been slowly kind of pushing off independent, anti-capitalist left wing voices from the platform, since like, 2017, since Trump came into office. I think if you look at the breakdown of the most trafficked sites that basically are on Facebook, like the websites that are news based, that get the most clicks, it's like The Daily Caller, The Daily Wire, Breitbart. It's like, generally right wing or very far, right Trump-aligned websites.

That's what basically Facebook has become, it's become an echo chamber of boomers, talking about Syrian refugees coming to kill them and kick their puppies and stuff like that. And it's no surprise then that when the pandemic hit, you saw literally like, hundreds and hundreds percent increase in Q-Anon and COVID conspiracies and stuff like that. I think it's telling again, with the ban of the certain antifascist and anarchist accounts, they literally had to go back and create new rules to kick them off. They were like, well it doesn't have to necessarily support violence in the speech, but it can kind of allude to it, or the people that are reading it can support it in the comments or something. It’s so vague that literally anything they could potentially kick off.

But of course, it's just like when police passed a new law against dumpster diving, or like, people smoking outside, or, you know, the homeless people on a bench or something like that. I mean, it's not necessarily that they're gonna enforce it all the time, but that gives the police that tool to selectively enforce it, you know, whenever they want to. So it's a, you know, an invasive instrument, which they can use to attack people whenever they want to. It's been building I mean, the commons of the internet, if you will, has been becoming more and more policed, and obviously, ideas that attack the status quo, especially that are critical of the state, critical of white supremacy critical of capital they've been going after.

TFSR: So it makes me wonder, like, why do, I mean and our project does to some degree engage with social media, and tries to spread our message through it. I fucking hate it personally. But considering all of the downsides to working with social media, considering that there are all these algorithms that you have to constantly try to figure out how to work around, considering getting de-platformed all the time, considering the fact that so many of these social media platforms frequently hand over information or allow backdoors into law enforcement to surveil “extremists”, quote-unquote, in whatever shade you find them, whether it be the far right, or anarchists or autonomists or what have you. How do you all fall on the line of: are we promoting continued use of these platforms by engaging in them? How much are we giving clickbait to law enforcement, who follows who clicks on what? And how much are we actually reaching new audiences? Or are we drawing audiences away from these platforms while still engaging with it?

C: So as we're talking with people from subMedia about this — because they were proposing that we should organize a campaign to have anarchists withdraw from Facebook, for example — coming out of those conversations, I spoke with some comrades overseas. You know, in some parts of the world, anarchist projects still rely chiefly on Facebook. The occupied social center, Rog, that was just evicted today in Ljubljana, Slovenia, the statement about the eviction is on Facebook, that's where you have to go if you want to see it. And I said, if we were to make a concerted push to have anarchists withdraw from at least the most compromised social media platforms that involve the most surveillance, how do we do that in a way that doesn't mean that we lose contact with groups like yours that depended on Facebook chiefly. And they made the reasonable argument the anarchists in their community already are in touch with each other, already communicate with each other through platforms like Signal. But the thing is that they have to be in touch with people outside of their community in order to have the reach that they need to be able to put into effect their ambitious projects to actually change society. And that's why people maintain presences for radical projects on social media platforms, including Facebook and Instagram, despite all the compromises.

For us, as anarchists, I think the challenge is always to be in this world, but not of it, to take action in a social context when the terrain itself is against us. As anarchists we're always fighting not only our adversaries, but against the terrain itself, we're trying to transform it into something that fosters horizontality, even as it surveils us, even as it rewards those who have the money to buy the kind of media exposure that they need, even as it structures the distribution of information according to existing power disparities. So I think you should never use a tool for the purposes it was designed for in a capitalist society, but at the same time, I don't think that that always means that the best thing is for us to just refuse unilaterally to use these tools, because for good or for ill, human discourse has largely been fitted to these structures now and the question is more how to subvert them than how to refuse them entirely. I think that we should evaluate the effectiveness of our interventions on corporate social media platforms, according to how efficiently they move people from those platforms to more secure and more reliable formats for engagement. Does your tweet just result in 1000 likes? Or does it actually compel people to form affinity groups and reading groups and to do in person organizing? These are the sort of questions we need to be asking.

The process of determining who will be banned from social media is also the process of establishing what the social consensus will be. I mentioned earlier that it's determined by the existing balance of power. But it's not just the result of pre-existing conditions, it also gives rise to conditions. And when it comes to this process of establishing social consensus, what isn't and is not acceptable, we have to be in that conversation. You know, and actually, we made a lot of progress over the last couple years in helping to shape widespread notions of what is legitimate and what is illegitimate, you know, many people now are critical of police, are open to the idea that the entire justice system or the state apparatus, the capitalist system needs to be deconstructed, that our society needs to be reorganized. And we have to establish access to all of these people to be able to have the conversations that need to unfold. We just should never trust that the platforms that we're using, the ones that we didn't build, we should never trust that they will do the work for us or that they exist to fulfill our goals.

IGD: Yeah, I mean, I think the question that you're asking is a big one. And I think we should be definitely talking about it. I think that, you know, there are alternatives being built. You know, right now, there are servers that are on Mastodon that are creating basically an alternative to Twitter. Right now ItsGoingDown has like, I think, coming up on almost 5,000 followers, which is pretty good, considering you know, that project hasn't really been promoted that much and it's been slowly building. But there's a growing community of people. They're not only building kind of alternative social media infrastructure, but joining and following being part of the discussion.

What have we gained from like being on social media? I mean, the fact that, for instance, the Washington Post is quoting various Youth Liberation Front collectives across the country about certain things happening, or quoting various tweets from ItsGoingDown. I think what's happened is that as anarchists have become part of the story, our voices then have been harder to basically remove from the conversation. And the fact that it's out there and people are looking at it, that means that they can't just brush it aside and say we don't exist, we don't have something to say. On the other hand, that means that as soon as those voices are gone, or they're taken off, or they're taken away, or even if a corporation can come in and say, “Oh, these people were naughty, and they said bad things, and they're promoting violence” I mean, we can turn around and quote that and run with that. So I mean, if those voices are taken off, that means that we're taking away from the conversation, and it's just as likely that we'll be quickly forgotten, or people won't reach out to talk to us.

I think that going to the Biden administration, I mean I would guess that the platform that anarchists have gotten over the past four years is going to get a lot smaller in terms of doing the mass media is going to be willing to talk to anarchists. I think that there's gonna be some people like journalists, that are anarchists that have developed the following that will continue to write and, you know, continue to get their stuff out there, but I think that it's probably a good guess that they're gonna less, and less be willing to reach out and talk to anarchists about what they think about anti-fascism or community organizing or different struggles happening. I mean, then again, we'll see I mean, who knows what's going to happen in the coming terrain?

You know, I just think, also, too, we've built up a large following in a lot of these projects and hopefully that's not going to go away. Like ItsGoingDown I would say that probably right now, we have just as many people, probably more, that listen to our podcasts than maybe go on the website and read the articles. You know, the podcast community, the people that listen to the show is very massive, and like we have a radio presence and stuff like that. But again, like, as the other person brought up, how do we translate that into like real world engagement?

The last big point I'll make is that I don't think that just because social media is such a defining element of our daily lives that we just basically have to give up and just say, Okay, this is the terrain in which we talk to people on like, this is it, this is the only way. We should actually really work at going back and remember that we can actually interact with people face to face, like we can actually have a public presence. I think like getting back to being really good at that, and doing that well. And, you know, having posters up, having flyers, tabling regularly outside, producing publications, running physical spaces, I mean, we do all that stuff and we do it pretty well. The fact that we have this network of infrastructure, like imagine if the alt right had the same amount of physical stuff that the anarchist and autonomous movements have, it’d be terrifying! You know, like, in some cities there's multiple spaces.

The one great thing about social media is that I mean, if you put something out and it goes very far, or if you're speaking to something that's happening, you have the opportunity to reach other people in the public that are already involved in the anarchist conversation or projects, stuff like that. So I mean, the exposure to anarchist ideas, over the past four or five years has grown exponentially. And obviously, we want that to continue. But I think we've got to plan into that, that we very well may be kicked off a lot of these big platforms. And the way to make sure that that's not going to stop what we're doing is to, you know, have the ability to organize our own communities like in the real world.

TFSR: Yeah, I totally agree. And the work that we're doing online needs to be a first step, or a part of a conversation, that draws more people into those real life engagements, because we're not gonna find liberation, we may find comrades on the way, but we're not gonna find liberation through these platforms. And I know both of the projects that the two of you work with are in and of themselves alternative platforms with so many different facets to how they communicate and the range of voices that they contain within them, which I think is really awesome. I'd like to finish up by asking sort of, are there any like interesting discussions that you think or platforms or directions that people could be taking, where they think about how we diversify the way that we get our voice out, as we've faced, either silencing through platforms shutting down or shutting us out? Or, for instance, the other day when signal was down for a good long period of time, I think people started exploring other encrypted applications. I know that CrimethInc, for instance, is also recently engaged with an app called Signal Boost, which I think is interesting to use a new tool to create encrypted phone trees. I don't know if you had any closing thoughts and examples that you want to bring up.

IGD: Yeah, I think Mastodon is great. The downside of course, is that there's not a huge amount of people that are on it that are outside of you know, the anarchist space. But you know, I’d remind people that like, for instance, on Twitter, we're probably the largest anarchist presences, I think it’s like 1% of the US population is on Twitter, and it skews more towards celebrities and journalists, politicians and stuff. It's definitely not an accurate representation of, you know, the proletariat, the United States or something like that. So, again, even these social media platforms are somewhat limiting, and that I think the real work remains to be done on the streets. And if we can build a visible presence there, I mean, it doesn't matter if they're going to kick us off of some social media. I mean, obviously, it'll matter, but we're still going to have those connections to people where we live, and I think that's ultimately what's what's really important.

But yeah, I would encourage people to check out Mastodon, if you go to itsgoingdown.org, there is a link right on the site where you can go and check out our Mastodon. There's basically, the way the Mastodon works is, there's all these different groups that have servers and they all federate together, it's pretty cool. It's definitely anarchy in action on the internet.

I would also encourage people to check out the Channel Zero Anarchist Podcast Network, which is growing. We just included the Indigenous Action podcast, and Sima Lee’s Maroon podcast, it’s growing all the time, there's great shows, there's just an amazing network of content that's been produced. It's just you know, anarchist politics across the board, from a variety of different groups and perspectives, and also just topics that people are talking about, whether it's people talking about tenant organizing, or stuff that's going on in the prisons, or anti-fascism or news or theory, there's a whole breadth of stuff that's going on, that people are covering.

C: Just to conclude, from our perspective, as an anarchist collective, that’s now more than a quarter of a century old, we proceeded the social media era. You know, when we got started, we're mailing each other packages of raw materials to make zines, basically, via cut and paste, we were talking to each other from payphones, you know, and the different kinds of media platforms that we've had to use to communicate have shifted dramatically since the mid 1990’s. We've won battles and lost battles on each of those fronts, but the terrain keeps changing and the struggle continues, you know.

The good news is that the same forces, the same dynamics and tendencies that are driving us off of some of these corporate media platforms are going to erode the relevance of the platforms themselves. Facebook is not going to be the most important communications platform for the generation that is coming of age right now. And we won't have to reach them on Facebook, we may have to figure out how to make Tiktok videos in which we lip sync to songs in order to get our ideas across. Which is terrifying for people like us, we're basically boomers, you know, but the struggle continues; we just have to adjust to a new context and knowing that that won't be the final phase either.

Throughout all of this, as my comrade said, the engagement in the real world, IRL, on the streets, is going to be one of the most important things. Even if they ban us from every platform, if there are stickers, if there are posters up in public, if there are dramatic actions that speak for themselves, other people are going to report on those and the word will get out there. My hope is that in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, when people start to feel at ease coming back together again, that there will be a renaissance of embodied in person social life, and that people will want to be around each other at gatherings. And that we will see people forming reading groups, hopefully establishing new info shops, and that over the past year, we've gotten to experience the limitations of having our entire social lives take place through zoom, you know, for those who even have computer access. And there will be an eagerness to return to more embodied in person projects and relationships. For me that that is the foundation of the most effective politics, because the ties that you can create there and the things that you can do together are more intimate, more deep rooted and more powerful.

TFSR: It was such a pity that the together space that happened earlier this year and through a lot of the summer couldn't very easily be followed up with a continuation of that, and like a deepening of relationships with all the people that I met in the streets.

C: Exactly.

TFSR: It was definitely like deadened residence afterwards. I want to echo what you said, like, let's hope for this year. Let's make it happen.

C: Yeah, exactly. Let's make it happen. And this is a good time right now for anarchists and other ambitious creative people who have everyone's best interests at heart to be brainstorming what kind of projects we could kick off this summer that will draw people together, that will involve being in physical space together. Maybe this is a time when people could get their hands on spaces that could host some of these mutual aid projects that have gotten off the ground, and then we could be watching films or reading zines and discussing them together or whatever the 2021 version of that would be.

TFSR: Well, thank you so much for taking the time to have this conversation. I've really enjoyed it. And yeah, I'm so glad to engage in similar projects to you and get to share space and call you a comrade.

C: Yeah, we're so fortunate. Thank you so much.