Obama’s election incited a frenzy of right-wing militia activity in the United States. Likewise, the assent of Trump has engendered widespread interest in the language of physical confrontation among people with egalitarian values. As millions are threatened with deportation, as hate crimes have risen with the election, as we very nervously examine the symbiosis of populist authoritarianism and non-state violence, and as open racism is emerging as a viable tool in public discourse, many are having conversations about how to defend the people in their communities from attack.
There have been many urgent meetings and many nascent structures exist to respond to violence on the street. Some people are focusing solely on deescalation and others are training for outright conflict if deescalation simply is not an option. Whatever the mode of engagement, a fundamental commonality all such groups and networks share is a need to be able to respond to a situation as it is occurring.
Happily, a tool exists which is designed to allow an individual to alert members of their community to an emergency. It’s an app called Cell411, a crypto-anarchist effort which has seen substantial use from South African farmers facing endemic violence and corrupt police to American activists facing, well, endemic violence and corrupt police. The app’s creator also describes European security firms and cab drivers developing networks of mutual aid based on the technology. Police don’t seem to particularly like it.
Cell411 uses location data to alert others with the technology to a variety of situations (there are a number of specially tailored alarm types, such as “I am in danger” or “I am pulled over”). When in patrol mode, the app alerts a user to any other user’s alarm within an adjustable area. People can identify friends and form groups on it. It allows livestreaming and has the option of a Bluetooth panic button. This video demonstrates its use in more detail.
We should not expect brave attacks—it is not for nothing that the word xenophobe, when heard literally, describes someone who is afraid.
White supremacists and others will, if the past is any indication, wait to initiate violence until people are alone or in small groups. There are moments, such as pre-announced rallies, in which a confrontation can be planned for. Realistically, however, all our conversations about intervening in attacks don’t have much utility unless people can notify networks of responders who are in the immediate area in real time, and some of those responders are organized into groups with a coherent sense of how and under what circumstances they will respond.
A few considerations suggest themselves. First, obviously, the actual technology has to be in the hands of sufficient people for someone being attacked or witnessing an attack to use it, and for people to hear and answer the alarm. This would imply some sort of social marketing strategy. As much as the internet is a central character in seemingly every modern story, and as much as we all love speculating about why some things do better than others on the internet and applying it to our current campaign, I think clear arguments can be made for a strategy of dissemination which is heavily reliant on paper flyering.
Real fliers posted in neighborhoods—encouraging people to get Cell411, to form groups that make plans and train for various contingencies, and to use the app to alert nearby people/groups to the an emergency if one is occurring—create a different psychological context than an internet campaign. They orient people to thinking in geographic terms, to making basic connections between their kitchen table banter about defending neighbors and a semblance of a plan for doing so in their actual neighborhood. Paper fliers communicate the basic reality that someone was already physically doing something in the area, that groups and momentum already exist. People like that sort of thing.
It’s easy enough to imagine hammering out a flier or two of this ilk, posting some, spreading it on the internet, and hoping others do the same. “We will survive together because we will defend one another. Our community will do everything in its power to avoid violence but will not be victimized by it. Get Cell411 and use it to tell your neighbors and friends if someone is being harassed, threatened, or attacked. Form groups that can make plans to respond to emergencies.” Etc. These sorts of things are not hard to write.
It’s worth asking, however, if—and here we come to perhaps the first complicated question involving technology—such a fliering campaign might not merge into something better developed which, as groups formed, could feature a neighborhood phone number as well. The obvious benefit would be that if someone saw an emergency and did not have Cell411, they could still notify the network, so long as they had a phone. The interface between the phone number and the app might entail complexities—the simplest strategy would be a cell phone scheduled to always be with someone awake (or wakeable) who would simply issue a Cell411 alert themselves. A more complex strategy, potentially circumventing some of the issues of centralization and reliability inherent in the simple approach, would be some technological marvel that allows a phone call to more directly engage the app.
People directly using the app would arguably be preferable for a host of reasons both technical and socio-political. But the question is not “Is a more decentralized and technologically uniform approach better?” The question is: “Acknowledging not everyone will possess this technology anytime soon, is it better for people to be able to utilize it through a flawed mechanism rather than not at all?”
It seems conceivable that fliers informing people of a neighborhood decentralized emergency response network, which functions to protect the vulnerable populations Trump and others are targeting, perhaps especially with a hotline number, would in and of itself decrease violence. Again, let us acknowledge we should not anticipate brave attacks. Ideally, this work functions primarily not to effectively organize and deploy responses to demographically targeted violence, but to diminish the possibility of it.
Thus far we’ve talked about geographically organized decentralized response networks as a useful tool for responding to violence, and as a means of diminishing the cultural impetus and emboldenment attacks require. Now let us briefly envisage the possibilities for using such tools to create broad counter-power to Trump, authoritarianism, etc.
In addition to a sudden, avid interest in self-defense among egalitarians, one of the most palpable and widespread results of Trump’s election was an interest in Murray Boochkin-esque efforts at remaking municipalities, at creating structures of direct democratic participation at very local levels—and networks of such structures at greater scales—to serve as a counterpoint to centralized institutional power. This is both a result of an inherent interest in such structures and also an acknowledgement that the new administration is unique in it precarious relationship with at least some institutions which normally collaborate with US presidents: there is real potential to leverage their power against federal power. Taking over (or at least directly engaging with) the existing apparatus of city and other local governments is being discussed in some cases, as the Spanish municipalist movement has done.
It is also worth noting that geographically-defined political organizing allows vastly more room for people to actually develop substantial experiences working together, and to make unscripted decisions based on emergent needs, than the more common urban model. In this model, everyone in a given city who belongs to a given group gets off work and comes to a meeting for a couple hours, before leaving for their respective houses with their respective tasks. This is one reason blockades and uprisings and other long-term political undertakings have so much meaning: for their inherent effect, but also because they allow us to actually do work in a way that simply doesn’t happen otherwise. From Bolivia to Rojava, neighborhood councils have been used to defeat abusive power and create new societies—this is the political moment in the US where such structures seem like the least of a longshot.
Local councils are being formed all over to consider a variety of issues and cultivate a variety of types of power. To persist and gain momentum, such efforts require a creative tension between being sufficiently abstract and long-term to create fundamental change, and being sufficiently tangible and immediate that people are actually motivated to keep doing the work.
Trump got elected, everyone freaked out and formed a new group and said “let’s reimagine politics”: It’s not hard to imagine this story ending with most of the groups falling apart, most of the people going back to their routines, and the world returning to its already scheduled burning. It may not be insane to imagine capturing some of the energy for directly defending people from attack—some of the group formation, decisionmaking structure, and network formation inherent in such discussions—and translating it into broader political structures.
Not that we should create a political landscape solely out of emergency response networks. But the work of directly defending people is work people are already feeling a visceral connection to, and finding that visceral connection is necessary to do the insanely complex and often boring work of democracy. It may be a useful tool for pushing broader and more meaningful structures than simply getting people into rooms to talk about what neighborhood councils should do in the abstract.
The final and most potentially demanding consideration is thus if a fliering and general social marketing campaign should do much more than simply offer general organizational suggestions and links to resources. The alternative would be for groups to offer some kind of process for coming into a neighborhood, calling a round of initial discussions about community defense, perhaps describing a range of models used by groups in other places, and perhaps making suggestions for how the community can move forward with making decisions and creating structures. Presumably this would often be a somewhat long-term process, perhaps involving offering help facilitating meetings and the like for an initial period of time.
The question is essentially: “If we put up fliers advertising the formation of participatory democratic structures, will people come? If we put up fliers advertising the formation of groups to defend the mosques and gay people and women and immigrants in the neighborhood, will people come and be forced to learn how to have a meeting?” No one is suggesting the work would be easy or represent a panacea of any kind, but it does seem possible that focusing on the nexus of Cell411 social marketing, community defense groups, and structures for direct democracy would be more worthwhile than focusing on many other sets of interrelated variables.
These are the arguments and considerations. Let us clarify the intention in laying them out and call for further work and discussion.
1) This is written with the intention of soliciting responses from groups that are already discussing community defense, from local groups to those engaging in municipality-wide meta-structures. Concerns, considerations, insights, etc. will be graciously received. Likewise people creating local or municipally focused structures who have thoughts and observations about how defense projects interface with their work are encouraged to communicate.
2) This is not written from a particularly technology-literate perspective. There are many, many considerations—e.g. organized groups potentially revealing themselves to perpetrators of violence through their use of technology, all the complicated possible interactions between hotlines and Cell411, potential interactions between Cell411 and other technological organizing tools like Signal groups—which would best be assessed by cohorts of tech-savvy folks before a widespread effort of any kind was undertaken. This is also a call for tech folks to get in touch if they have thoughts or concerns.
3) Anyone else who feels like they have something pertinent to say should also consider themselves invited.
butterflyeffect@riseup.net