Montréal Counter-information

Anonymous submission to North Shore Counter-Info

Download Imposed PDF for Printing
Contact the author at signalfails [at] riseup [dot] net

Signal is an encrypted messaging service that has been around in different forms for about 10 years. Since then, I have seen the software widely adopted by anarchist networks across Canada and the United States. More and more, for better and for worse, our interpersonal and group conversations have moved onto the Signal platform, to the extent that it has become the dominant way anarchists communicate with each other on this continent, with very little public debate about the implications.

Signal is just a smartphone app. The actual paradigm shift that’s happening is to a life increasingly mediated by smartphone screens and social media. It only took a few short years for smartphones to become mandatory for anyone who wants friends or needs work, outside of a few scattered pockets. Until recently, the anarchist subculture was one of those pockets, where you could refuse to carry a smartphone and still socially exist. Now I’m less sure, and that’s fucking depressing. So I’m going to stubbornly insist throughout this text that there is no substitute for real-world face-to-face relationships, with all the richness and complexity of body language, emotion, and physical context, and they continue to be the most secure way to have a private conversation. So please, let’s leave our phones at home, meet up in a street or forest, conspire together, make some music, build some shit, break some shit, and nurture offline living together. I think this is way more important than using Signal correctly.

The idea for this zine came about a year ago, when I was visiting friends in another city and joking about the ways Signal conversations back home turn into trainwrecks. The patterns were immediately recognized, and I started to realize that this conversation was happening in a lot of places. When I started asking around, everyone had complaints and opinions, but very few shared practices had emerged. So I came up with a list of questions and circulated them. I was pleasantly surprised to receive more than a dozen detailed responses, which combined with several informal conversations, inform the majority of this text.(1)

I’m not an expert – I haven’t studied cryptography and I don’t know how to code. I’m an anarchist with an interest in holistic security, and a skeptical relationship with technology. My goal with this piece is to reflect on how Signal has become so central to anarchist communication in our context, appraise the implications on both our collective security and social organization, and advance a few preliminary proposals towards developing shared practices.

A Brief History of Signal

25 years ago, the technological optimists among us saw enormous potential in the emerging internet as a liberatory tool. Remember that old CBC segment which praised “a computer network called Internet” as “modulated anarchy?” And while there are still powerful ways to securely communicate, co-ordinate and spread ideas online, it’s clear that state and corporate entities are gradually capturing more and more of the online space and using it to subject us to increasingly intense forms of surveillance and social control.(2)

The internet has always been an arms race. In 1991, cryptographer, civil libertarian and peace activist(3) Phil Zimmerman created Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), an open-source application for file encryption and end-to-end encryption for email. I’m avoiding technical details, but basically the importance of end-to-end is that you can securely communicate directly with another person, and your email service can’t see the message, whether it’s Google or Riseup. To this day, as far as we know, PGP encryption has never been broken.(4)

For years, techies and security nerds in certain circles – anarchists, journalists, criminals, etc – tried to spread PGP to their networks as a kind of secure communications infrastructure, with some success. As with everything, there were limitations. My biggest security concern(5) with PGP is the lack of Forward Secrecy, which means that if a private encryption key is ever compromised, all the emails ever sent with that key can be decrypted by an attacker. This is a real concern, given that the NSA is almost certainly storing all your encrypted emails somewhere, and one day quantum computers might be able to break PGP. Don’t ask me how quantum computers work – as far as I’m concerned, evil fucking magic.

The big social problem with PGP, one that strongly informed the Signal project, is the fact that it was never widely adopted outside of niche circles. In my experience, it was even difficult to get anarchists on PGP and using it properly. There were workshops, lots of people got set up, but as soon as a computer crashed or a password was lost, it was back to square one. It just didn’t stick.

Sometime around 2010, smartphones started to popularize and everything changed. The ubiquity of social media, constant instant messaging, and the ability for telecom companies (and thus government) to track users’ every move(6) has completely transformed the threat model. All the work people put into computer security was set back decades: smartphones rely on a completely different architecture than PCs, resulting in far less user control, and the advent of completely unfettered app permissions has made the idea of smartphone privacy almost laughable.

This is the context that Signal emerged from. Anarchist ‘cypherpunk’ Moxie Marlinspike started working on software to bring end-to-end encryption to smartphones, with Forward Secrecy, working on the idea that mass surveillance should be countered with mass encryption. Signal was designed to be usable, pretty, and secure. Moxie agreed to team up with tech giants WhatsApp, Facebook, Google and Skype to implement Signal’s encryption protocol onto their platforms as well.

The big win for us is when a billion people are using WhatsApp and they don’t even know it’s encrypted” – Moxie Marlinspike

Understandably, anarchists are more likely to trust their communications to Signal – a non-profit foundation run by an anarchist – than they are to trust big tech, whose main business model is harvesting and reselling user data. And Signal has some advantages over these other platforms: it’s open-source (and thus subject to peer review), encrypts most metadata, stores as little user data as possible, and offers some very useful features like disappearing messages and safety number verification to guard against interceptions.

Signal has earned nearly universal praise from tech security experts, including endorsements from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and top scores from the respected Electronic Frontier Foundation. In 2014, leaked documents from the NSA described Signal as a “major threat” to its mission (of knowing everything about everyone). Personally, I trust the encryption.

But Signal only really protects one thing, and that’s your communication as it travels between your device and another device. That’s great, but it’s only one piece of a security strategy. That’s why it’s important, when we talk about security, to start with Threat Modeling. The first questions for any security strategy are who is your expected adversary, what are they trying to capture, and how are they likely to go about getting it. The basic idea is that things and practices are only secure or insecure relative to the kind of attack you are expecting to defend against. For example, you might have your data locked down with solid encryption and the best password, but if your attacker is willing to torture you until you give up the data, it doesn’t really matter.

For the purpose of this text, I would propose a working threat model that is primarily concerned with two types of adversaries. The first is global intelligence agencies or powerful hackers engaging in mass surveillance and intercepting communications. The second is police agencies, operating on territory controlled by the Canadian or American government, engaging in targeted surveillance of anarchists. For the police, basic investigative techniques include monitoring email lists and social media, sending undercovers to events, and casual informants. At times when they have more resources, or our networks become a bigger priority, they escalate to more advanced techniques including longer-term infiltration, frequent or continuous physical surveillance (including attempts to capture passwords), bugging devices, intercepting communications, and house raids where devices are seized and subjected to forensic analysis.

I should note that many European jurisdictions are implementing key disclosure laws which legally compel individuals to give their passwords to authorities under certain conditions or face jail time.(7) Maybe it’s only a matter of time, but for now in Canada and the U.S., we are not legally compelled to disclose passwords to authorities, with the notable exception of when we are crossing the border.(8)

If your device is compromised with a keylogger or other malicious software, it doesn’t really matter how secure your communications are. If you’re hanging out with a snitch or a cop it doesn’t really matter if you take the battery out of your phone and talk in a park. Device security and security culture are two concepts not covered by this text that have to be considered to guard against these very real threats. I’ve included a few suggestions in the Further Reading section.

It’s also worth mentioning that Signal is not designed for anonymity. Your Signal account is registered with a phone number, so unless you register using a cash-bought burner phone or an online throwaway number, you’re not anonymous. If you lose control of the phone number used to register your account, someone else could hijack your account. That’s why it’s extra important, if you use an anonymous number to register your account, that you enable the “registration lock” feature.

Primarily for security reasons, Signal has become the standard communication medium in anarchist circles over the last 4 years, eclipsing everything else. But just as “the medium is the message,” Signal is having profound effects on how anarchists relate and organize together that are too often overlooked.

The Sociality of Signal

Signal is useful to the extent that it replaces less secure forms of electronic communication, but it becomes harmful … when it replaces face-to-face communication.” – Contributor

Most of the social implications of Signal are not specifically about the app. They are the implications of increasingly moving our communications, personal expression, organizing efforts, and everything else onto virtual platforms and mediating them with screens. But something that dawned on me as I started sifting through questionnaire responses is that before Signal, I knew several people who outright rejected smartphones for both security and social reasons. When Signal emerged with answers to most of the security concerns, the holdout position was significantly eroded. Today, most of the holdouts have smartphones, either because they were convinced to use Signal or it became effectively mandatory if they wanted to stay involved. Signal acted as a point of entry for some anarchists to smartphones.

On the other hand, insofar as Signal is harm reduction for those of us already ensnared by smartphones, that’s a good thing. I’m glad that people who were primarily socializing and doing political organizing on unencrypted channels like Facebook switched to Signal. In my life, the group chat has replaced the “small email list” and is fairly useful for making plans with friends or sharing links. In the responses I collected, the Signal groups that were the most valuable to folks, or maybe just the least annoying, were the ones that were small, focused and pragmatic. Signal can also be a powerful tool for putting the word out quickly and securely about a pressing matter that requires a rapid response. If Facebook-based organizing has led too many anarchists to believe that organizing with any element of surprise is impossible, Signal has partially salvaged that idea, and I’m grateful for that.

Signal Fails

I first imagined this project as a short series of comic vignettes that I planned to call “Signal Fails,” loosely modeled on the book Come Hell or High Water: A Handbook on Collective Process Gone Awry. Turns out it’s hard to draw interesting pictures representing Signal threads and I suck at drawing. Sorry if I promised anyone that, maybe in the second edition… Either way, I still want to include some Signal Fails, as a way of making fun of us (I include myself in this!) and maybe to gently prod everyone to stop being so fucking annoying.

Bond, James Bond: Having Signal doesn’t make you bulletproof. Give some people a little encryption, and they’ll immediately subject their entire contact list to the absolute sketchiest shit. Your phone is still a tracking device, and trust is still built. Talk with your people about what kinds of things you feel comfortable talking about on the phone, and what you don’t.

Silence is not consent: Ever go to a meeting, make a plans with others, establish a Signal group to coordinate logistics, and then have one or two people rapidly change your collective plans by a rapid series of texts that no one has time to respond to? Not cool.

Hell is an endless meeting: A Signal group isn’t an ongoing meeting. I’m already way too glued to my phone, so I don’t like it when a thread is blowing up my phone and it’s just a long side conversation between two people or someone’s stream of consciousness that is unrelated to the purpose of the group. I appreciate it when conversations have beginnings and ends.

It Wants to Feed: I especially hate this one. Probably because of social media, some of us are used to information being curated for us by a platform. But Signal is not social media, thank fuck. So watch out because when a big Signal group starts becoming THE FEED, you’re in trouble. That means if you’re not on it and paying attention, you will miss out on all kinds of important information, whether it’s upcoming events, people changing their pronouns, or flamewars that lead to social conflict. People start to forget you exist, and eventually, you literally disappear. Kill THE FEED.

Fire in a Crowded Theatre: aka the panic button problem. You’re chillin in a big Signal group with all your sketchy friends and all their actual phone numbers, someone gets pinched for shoplifting or something, and *surprise* their phone isn’t encrypted! Everyone freaks and jumps ship, but it’s too little too late, because if the cops are going through that phone right now, they can see everyone who left and the social mapping is done. Womp womp.

Mission Creep: Someone created a Signal group to co-ordinate a specific, time-limited event. It’s over, but no one wants to let go. Somehow, this very specific ad-hoc formation is now THE PERMANENT ORGANIZATION that has tasked itself with deciding everything to do about all things – indefinitely.

Towards Shared Practices

If you thought this was a guide to best practices on Signal or chat etiquette, I’m sorry you made it this far without realizing it’s not. This is way more of a “we need to talk about Signal” kind of thing. I do believe in developing shared practices within specific social contexts, and recommend we start having this conversation explicitly in our networks. To that end, I do have a few proposals.

There are some obstacles to shared practices. Some people don’t have Signal. If that’s because they’re building relations without smartphones, I have only respect for that. If it’s because they spend all day on Facebook but Signal is “too hard,” I don’t buy it. If nothing else, Signal is easy to install and use for anyone with a smartphone and an internet connection.

I also disagree with the Orwellian-fatalist perspective that sees encryption as pointless: “The cops know everything already!” It’s super disempowering to understand government this way, and thankfully it’s not true – resistance is not yet futile. CSEC or the NSA do have nightmarish capabilities, including many that we don’t know about yet. But there is also ample evidence that encryption is frustrating police investigations, which is why governments are passing laws to thwart these tools.

Perhaps the biggest obstacle to shared practices is a general lack of a “we” – to what extent are we accountable to anyone, and if so to whom? How do we go about ethically constructing shared social norms? Most anarchists agree that it’s wrong to snitch, for example, but how did we get there? I do think that a kind of vulgar liberal individualism is influencing anarchism and making the very question of ‘expectations’ almost taboo to discuss. But that’s a different text for another day.

A Few Proposals for Better Practices

1. Keep it IRL – As one contributor put it, “Communication is not just about sharing information.” Face to face communication builds whole relationships, including trust, and continues to be the most secure way to communicate.

2. Leave your devices at home – at least sometimes? Especially if you’re going across the border, where you can be forced to decrypt your data. If you need a phone when you travel, purchase a travel phone with your friends that doesn’t have any sensitive data, including your contact list, on it.

3. Secure your devices – Most devices (phones and computers) now have the option for full disk encryption. Encryption is only as good as your password and protects your data ‘at rest’, i.e. when your device is OFF or the data is not being used by programs. Your lock screen provides some protection while your device is ON, but can be bypassed by a sophisticated attacker. Some operating systems force you to use the same password for encryption and your lock screen, which is unfortunate as it’s not practical to enter a long password 25 times a day (sometimes in the presence of prying eyes or surveillance cameras).

4. Turn off your devices – If you leave your device unattended, or you’re going to sleep, turn it off. Buy a cheap alarm clock. If your house is ever raided overnight you’ll be glad you did. If your device is off and encrypted with a strong password when it’s seized, cops are far less likely to be able to break into it. If you really want to go the extra mile, acquire a decent safe and lock your devices inside when you’re not using them, which will reduce the risk of them being covertly physically tampered with.

5. Establish boundaries – We have different senses of what’s safe to talk about on our phones and what’s not. Discuss and develop collective boundaries, and where we disagree, respect other people’s boundaries even if you think it’s safe.

6. Agree on a vouching system – If you’re in a group discussing sensitive things, develop an explicit collective understanding of what constitutes a vouch for a new person to join. In an era where anarchists catch conspiracy charges, miscommunications about this can land people in jail.

7. Ask first – If you’re going to add someone to a thread, thereby revealing their phone number to the entire group, ask for their and the group’s consent first.

8. Minimize decision-making – Consider leaving decisions other than yes/no for in person meetings, if possible. In my experience, Signal impoverishes any decision-making process.

9. Defined purpose – Ideally, a Signal group will have a specific purpose. Each new person added to that group should have that purpose clearly explained to them. If that purpose has been served, leave the group and delete it.

10. Disappearing messages – Very useful for housekeeping. Ranging from 5 seconds to 1 week, Disappearing Messages can be set by selecting the stopwatch icon in the top bar of a conversation. Many people use a standard 1-week disappearing time on all messages, whether the conversation is sensitive or not. Select your expiration time based on your threat model. This also protects you somewhat if the person you are communicating with is using less-than-ideal phone security practices.

11. Verify safety numbers – This is your best protection against a man-in-the-middle attack. It’s quite simple to do and easiest in person – open your conversation with the person you want to verify with and navigate to Conversation Settings > View safety number and scan the QR code or compare numbers. Most respondents said “I should do this, but I don’t.” Take advantage of big gatherings to verify contacts. It’s OK to be a nerd!

12. Enable the Registration Lock – Enable this in Signal’s Privacy Settings, so if someone is ever able to hack your phone number used to register your account, they still have to get your PIN to hijack your identity. This is especially important for anonymous Signal accounts registered with burner numbers, since someone else will almost certainly use this number again.

13. Turn off message previews – Keep messages from appearing on your lock screen. On my device, I had to set this on my device settings (not Signal settings) under Lock Screen Preferences > Hide Sensitive Content.

14. Delete Old Messages – Either by enabling thread trimming or manually deleting completed conversations, don’t keep messages around that you don’t need anymore.

Conclusion

I embarked on this project to reflect and gather feedback on the impact Signal has had on anarchist networks in the U.S. and Canada, from the standpoint of both security and social organization. In doing so, I think I hit on some common frustrations people have, especially with large Signal groups, and gathered together a few proposals to circulate. I continue to insist that smartphones are doing more damage than good to our lives and struggles, because it’s important to me. We need to preserve and build other ways of organizing ourselves, especially offline, for both quality-of-life and movement security. Even if we stick with smartphones, it’s dangerous when our communications are centralized. If Signal’s servers went down tonight, or Riseup.net, or Protonmail, imagine how devastating that would be to our networks. If anarchists ever pose a major threat to the established order, they will come for us and our infrastructure without mercy, including suspending ‘legal protections’ we might be depending on. For better and for worse, I believe this scenario to be possible in our lifetime, and so we should plan for resilience.

The techies among us should continue to experiment with other protocols, software and operating systems,(9) sharing them if they prove useful. The holdouts should keep holding out, and find ways to thrive offline. For the rest of us, let’s minimize the degree to which we’re captured by smartphones. Along with a capacity to struggle, we should build lives worth living, with a quality of relationships that potential friends and co-conspirators find irresistibly compelling. It might be the only hope we’ve got.

Further Reading

This zine was published in May 2019. Signal periodically updates its features. For the most up-to-date information about technical stuff, go to signal.org, community.signalusers.org, and /r/signal on reddit.

Your Phone is a Cop
https://itsgoingdown.org/phone-cop-opsecinfosec-primer-dystopian-present/

Choosing the Proper Tool for the Task
https://crimethinc.com/2017/03/21/choosing-the-proper-tool-for-the-task-assessing-your-encryption-options

EFF Tool Guides for Surveillance Self-Defense (including Signal)
https://ssd.eff.org/en/module-categories/tool-guides

Towards a Collective Security Culture
https://crimethinc.com/2009/06/25/towards-a-collective-security-culture

Riseup Security Guide
https://riseup.net/security

Toronto G20 Main Conspiracy Group: The Charges And How They Came To Be
https://north-shore.info/archive/

Endnotes

1. Big thanks to everyone who submitted! I stole a lot of your ideas.

2. Internet-era modes of governance vary from place to place – more authoritarian states might prefer filtering and censorship, while democratic states produce a kind of ‘digital citizenship’ – but mass surveillance and cyber warfare are becoming the norm.

3. Ironically, the U.S. Government would later attempt to charge Zimmerman with freely publishing PGP source code, arguing that he was “exporting weapons.” So he published the source code in a hardcover book and mailed them around the world, the rationale being that the export of books is protected under the U.S. Constitution.

4. Court cases against the Red Brigades in Italy (2003) and child pornographers in the U.S. (2006) have shown that federal police agencies failed to break into PGP-secured devices and communications. Instead, agents have resorted to bugging devices, passing legislation requiring you to surrender passwords, and of course, informants and undercover infiltration.

5. Until very recently, PGP didn’t encrypt metadata (who is emailing who, on what servers, at what time), which was a huge problem. An NSA lawyer once said, “if you have enough metadata, you don’t really need content.”

6. Want to read something scary? Look up Google’s Sensorvault.

7. Plausible deniability, forward secrecy and secure data destruction are designed into some privacy tools to try and counter this threat or at least minimize its damage.

8. Fingerprints (and other biometric data) are not considered passwords in many jurisdictions, meaning fingerprint locks are not subject to the same legal protections.

9. On my phone, I recently replaced Android with LineageOS, which is a privacy-oriented, de-Googled operating system based on Android code. It’s great, but it’s only built for certain devices, you void your phone warranty, and there’s definitely a learning curve when it comes to setting it up, keeping it updated and switching to open-source software.

Contact the author at signalfails [at] riseup [dot] net

Anonymous submission to North Shore Counter-Info

Print version available here

A defense of anarchist subcultures and a proposal for one we could build

I’ve been thinking a lot about subculture the past two years, and had intended that this month (May, 2019) be a deadline for getting out a piece of writing about it. I didn’t do that, because writing gets harder and harder as years go by, because online projects felt more immediate, more urgent, more like a living conversation, because I just didn’t get to it. But since part of what I had wanted to propose was that we have more intentional conversations as an anarchist milieu/community/movement/culture, and that we return somewhat to writing and printing as a means of doing that, it felt wrong to not put something on paper. I would rather this were a finished document with punchy, certain proposals. I suspect I’d get more response if it was. But it’s not. Consider it more of a published draft.

If this reads like critique, which I’m not sure it does, know that I’m critiquing myself as much if not more than anybody else. If I had transcended these problems even a little bit on a personal level, this zine would be finished. Among other things.

*

I hate when anarchists get into their mid thirties and start talking like anarchism is dead, like we are nothing, like the “good old days” have passed and now we’re doing it all wrong. I wish those people would realize that often it’s them who have changed, that the scene is still vibrant and that action is usually still happening somewhere out there. I’m going to remind myself of this once per paragraph as I write this thing. Silently sometimes, but I’m going to repeat it in the text too because it’s really important. We are not dead. I am not dead. I am not old. The kids are alright. History is happening, things are always changing, but if you think that the whole world was at its best when you were 21 and feeling excited about your newly-minted adult life, you are not the only one, and you’re probably not right.

But something is always wrong, we can always do better, pendulums swing in various directions and we fuck up, often in the same ways over and over again. And in trying to correct those fuckups we end up recreating someone else’s fuckup from a generation or so ago. That’s ok because we’re also trying new things all the time – in the streets, in our relationships, in our long-term projects, in our attitudes towards the world. I really, really believe that. Sometimes we get worse, and sometimes we get better. Like all things.

*

The thing that I particularly feel wrong about right now is a bit hard to articulate. When I try to get it out it seems like it’s all already been said, and like I’m trying to synthesize a bunch of things that maybe other people don’t think of as the same problem. But here goes.

When I was a kid, it felt subversive to be political. I had a button when I was sixteen that said “I have an opinion.” Another one that said “Wake up sheep-le (baa).” Apathy seemed like a huge problem to combat, and somehow it seemed like combating apathy would also combat inactivity, like it would be better if people just thought something about the world, how it works, how it doesn’t, how it should. It seemed to me like people’s identities were being reduced by the dystopic march of late capitalism to a set of logos and aesthetic expressions, a Nike check shaved into a head, a mass-produced yellow smiley face keychain, a classroom full of identical Gap sweaters and corduroy pants.

2019, on the other hand, feels very ‘political’ to me. Self-directed expression of political views is a huge part of how we identify and define ourselves online, and an increasing proportion of our self-expression and identity formation happens in digital spaces. People are constantly staging positions, putting them out into the ‘world’ (or at least to the bubble the tech companies have given them to exist within). They write these ideas down themselves, they aren’t mass-produced, branded or identical. They aren’t apolitical or apathetic. They aren’t mindless or devoid of content.

It’s hard to tell how much of this is that I have aged and changed, that youth culture isn’t my culture anymore, but I don’t think that’s all it is. I also recognize that Facebook/Instagram is a corporation, so part of the No Logo critique still holds true, we’re being ruled by these corporations and we are opting into it at every step of the way, making it the means by which we express and construct our identities. Facebook’s relationship to our brand/identity is much harder to see than our corporate rulers of the past, and while both Nike and Facebook give us corporate rule packaged as individual self-expression, the illusion that Facebook sells is much more sophisticated. The individuality that people express through Facebook is not as simple as getting a Facebook tattoo and acting as if it means something unique or special about our self. Instead we perform and mediate our daily lives, express our our true beliefs and values, through a corporate platform. The content comes from within, it feels in many ways as real as the sharpie poetry I used to scrawl on bathroom walls as a way to rage against the machine.

It’s not that we didn’t know about this possibility and reference it in dark comedy of our own all along. The system will co-opt anything it can, and self-expression is a really easy target. They’ll take our ideas and sell them back to us. They’ll give us a nice bullpen in which to have out our fights like the gladiators for social justice that we always wanted to be.

Many real, committed, serious anarchists have embraced the social media version of politics in a way that they never embraced the circled-a hoodies at the mall in 2001. There are a bunch of important and valid reasons for this. Social media has permeated our daily lives to an extent that the brand wars never could. A lot of us had already rejected particular subcultures like punk that gave some of us an opt-out from the Niketown life as exclusionary, ineffective, or escapist. Many social and revolutionary anarchists have chosen social media because they’ve chosen a social life where they engage with regular, non-anarchist people and share their ideas, and they see that those people now do their politics online.

But I want to at least point out that if it was ever subversive to simply express a radical opinion, it certainly is not subversive in 2019. Everybody is doing it. I understand that a lot of us just want to give anarchism a bigger piece of that online opinion pie. I see how it can look like your news feed is just a 2019 version of some public square in the 1890s, where people with radically different positions are clamoring for supporters to build the world they want to build. Maybe some among us would burn that public square and Facebook too, but for the social anarchists who I see mainly participating in this kind of online activity, there should be a fundamental difference. The tech companies and the life they offer us are one of our rulers. They may be a relatively new kid on the block compared to the state and other corporations, but they are one of the biggest forces of domination and control in our world today. Bantering on Twitter as a way to oppose them is way more akin to running for office as a means to oppose the state, or to selling records on EMI to get an anti-capitalist message to a “wider audience” than to demonstrating in a public square or park that happens to also contain buildings and landscaping that were built by capitalists.

When we participate in political discourse on their platforms, we do so on their terms, because identity, communication and diverse opinions are what they trade in. And in this case having radical, controversial, seemingly new or subversive opinions is exactly what they need from us to increase their base of power. This is not the same as the tired bit about the hypocrisy of driving a car powered by fossil fuels to the protest against fossil fuels. Social media doesn’t just want your dollars or your labour, it wants as much of us as it can possibly get. And it doesn’t rely on traditional commodity chains, buy-in is all it has. If people didn’t want it anymore, it would cease to exist, and people would still be fed and clothed to the extent that they ever are under capitalism. There is only the sum of individuals who show their support for the platform by placing more and more of their self and life inside its scope, and expression is exactly what the platform wants, the source of its power and profit. Facebook is much newer than these other industries, so we can see the outside of it more clearly. It also hurts us and our relationships in particularly intimate ways.

But more importantly, I believe that our largely uncritical and unrestrained participation in these spaces is part of a broader buy-in on our part that is hurting our capacity to struggle, not enriching it. We are better, anarchism is better, if we live anarchist lives and show that another way of being is possible, rather than merely participating in the mainstream while arguing for anarchist principles. Social media might make it more possible for anarchism to join “the conversation” alongside a plethora of other ideologies, but it doesn’t make it more desireable. Living anarchist ways of life and forms of struggle visibly and openly is a better recruitment strategy than fitting in, looking and acting pretty much like everyone else, while simply articulating a more correct analysis of power. This has always been true for us, but it’s even more true right now when almost everyone is online shouting an opinion, often a radical or extreme one. If we just argue for and present anarchism, especially if we do it online, without offering something joinable – some kind of movement, community, scene, milieu, whatever term you prefer – we aren’t any better than the rest of today’s armchair warriors. It also helps if that joinable thing is refreshing in some way, if it feels subversive, different from what everybody else is doing.

*

2019 isn’t just extra political, it’s extra connected in general. Just like social media serves us a quantitative increase in political discourse but no increase in true engagement in social struggle, it serves us a huge increase in knowledge of and discussion with our real-life social networks, but no decrease in alienation. Simply knowing more about your friends, where they are, what they think and what they like doesn’t breed deeper or better relationships any more than more people knowing more about a wide range of political ideas breeds stronger, larger, better social movements. It’s been said elsewhere, but it’s worth repeating – we are so, so alienated, and it seems like the deeper into the sea of online “connection” we dive, the more impoverished our IRL relationships become.

Anarchists have spent a lot of time thinking about how we could be more for each other and treat each other better than an alienated, capitalist world expects. We aren’t perfect, and sometimes the allure of the idea of better relationships makes the sense of betrayal that comes with a failed one extra bitter. But many of us have spent lives trying really hard to learn our own ways to connect with each other, to honour our friends and comrades, to build new and better ways of relating to other humans and to the world around us. When we accept the social media life, we risk abandoning that as well, moving more and more of what could have been intangibly beautiful and fruitful face-to-face relations onto platforms that drain them of much of their content and meaning.

A lot of my friends seem to have somewhat given up on living differently together, and resigned themselves to more “normal” lives. They do this for a variety of reasons – pressures from capitalism, falling in love, feeling burnt by relationships past. But in 2019, people, including anarchists, need to find better ways of connecting to each other more than ever. It might feel hard to get back on the “rethinking relationships” horse, but the conversations we’ve been having for years about how to do better despite a context of capitalist alienation might make us better positioned than many others to take on the huge problem that Facebook and the desperate loneliness it creates have brought on.

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I want us to grow, and to be attractive to people who might join us. To do that, we need to have something to offer. For me, that something wasn’t just a different way of understanding power and the world, it was another way of life. It was a rejection of business as usual, of the “way things work,” in favour of radical community, prefigurative or even lifestylist politics, and a commitment to something other than and in opposition to the daily grind of work and obedience. In my particular case, it was dumpster diving and living cheap in a world that wanted us to work hard and spend big. It was sitting or heckling during the national anthem while others stood blindly. It was being good to each other and emphasizing friendship and community over romance, the couple form, and a future with 1.2 children in the suburbs. It was calling in sick to go to the protest every single time, because the action was more important, because now we had something bigger to live for. It felt dangerous, it felt different, it felt right. It also created a huge gulf between me and the “normal” world, served to alienate me from my family, communities and neighbours to an extent that I now question, and included many practices that I now think do little to further anarchist struggle, but if I hadn’t had some sense of anarchism as a way of life in opposition to the system I hate, I would definitely not have stuck around.

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Nothing is more emblematic of the 2019 version of control, alienation and domination than social media, and yet anarchists as a whole in my context do very little to differentiate ourselves from it, offer alternatives to the life it proposes, or fight it as an enemy force. Part of this is because it’s hard, because we’re addicted to it, because we’ve swallowed its poison. But another part, a more lucid part, is because of a widespread rejection of subculture and escapism that I think some of us have taken to mean that we should not try to build a different life together at all. To be clear, that rejection happened for a diverse range of valid and important reasons. I do not want to recreate a situation in which folks feel they can not “become” anarchists unless they are young, able-bodied white men who choose to spend their lives train-hopping from summit to summit and eating dumpstered bread. I know that situation pretty well, and it isn’t great. But when I look at anarchism now in my context, it also feels like something is missing. I think that something, that way of life, maybe we should even call it the “subculture,” is a huge part of what we as anarchists have to offer. It should always be changing, growing, rejecting what it has been before and becoming something new. It should also be plural, there should be various ways to exist within it and it should be possible to participate in anarchist activity without fully immersing oneself in anarchist subculture or fully rejecting other important personal ties such as home, family or community of origin. But we should live as anarchistically as we can while fighting for the world we want. We should differentiate ourselves from the system that we oppose so that we will be an attractive alternative to it.

Anarchist subcultures exist. Many of us participate in them. Critiques of “lifestylism” from years ago, the mass exodus among my friends from veganism, dumpster diving, and bicycle culture seems to have drained much of the content from that subculture, but it hasn’t eliminated the social networks. Many of us still socialize mainly with other anarchists, and when non-anarchists enter our social spaces I suspect they still feel that somthing is off or different, that we share cultural norms, inside jokes and reference points, even sometimes aesthetic similarity that they do not share. It seems like in some circles an attempt to reject “lifestyle” has led to an anarchism where we still live different lives from the norm, but we don’t talk as much about what those lives are or why, and those differences don’t have as much political or ideological content as they once did. I think some of us once believed that lifestyle could literally effect change on a broader scale, that if we rode bicycles and rejected cars it would inspire others to also ride bicycles and reject cars, and then so many people would ride bicycles and reject cars that the fossil fuel industry would simply collapse. I now think that line of thinking is absurd, but that culture with its bicycles did draw me to social struggle for a world without (among other things) fossil fuels. I don’t know if the argument that fossil fuels are bad and we should fight the corporations and governments that promote them on its own would have done the same. I think we can still build anarchist ways of life together, which I would call subculture, and that they don’t have to rely on lifestylism, which I define as the belief that individual choices, often consumer choices, can generalize to an extent that they will themselves be practices that change the world. We should continue to recognize that shifting our way of life without attacking power will do nothing to change the dominant culture or the world, but we shouldn’t try to reject subculture, or be normal. We need a cultural context from which to launch our struggles, and that context should have its own norms and ways of life. Those norms should be based on principle, and they should be things that clearly further our participation in important struggles, not detract from them. For those of us who opt into it, that subculture can provide both a social base in which to exist and thrive as individuals and a set of practices and experience that we can invite others to join.

To be clear, I don’t think subculture is the same as community, and in many ways I think subculture is easier to define and understand. Community is a whole other conversation, one that gets us into big questions about who owes what to whom, who counts as an anarchist, and what the quality of our relationships should be. Those are really important questions, and there are lots of texts out there about those questions. I think we should keep having conversations about who we should support and live alongside and how, but here I’m talking more about our choices to be or not be “weird,” “different” or “other” together, even if that together-ness is messy and ill-defined.

I don’t know exactly what this culture should look like, and I mostly want to start a conversation. A conversation about forms of life as anarchists, and about how we might offer a different way of being to those who we hope will join us in revolutionary struggle. I’m now going to offer some characteristics that my version of this subculture might have, but I’m offering them in the spirit of plurality and in hopes that others will join a debate about which of these should be broader cultural norms, which should be relegated to weird sub-groups, and which should be rejected outright as anarchist practice. So here goes.

1. Collective abstinence or near-abstinence from personal social media, and very limited use of social media platforms for promotion, with the explicit intent of drawing people offline while drawing them towards anarchist practice.

The detached, performative political and social identities that we project on facebook are producing and furthering our own alienation, and reducing us to hollow, simplified, symbolic versions of our collective selves. We have to untether ourselves from this, and the thing that we mostly have not seriously tried as a community is abstinence. This will make us seem less human, less present to regular people. They will find it hard to keep in touch with us and sometimes they will forget we exist. We will have to have each other’s backs in person, we will have to build healthy ways to communicate with each other and with people we haven’t met yet, and we will have to build a social force that can not be ignored, despite that barrier. Many of us already have these things and don’t need social media, but feel we can’t get off of it without withdrawing from social life, including withdrawing from the anarchist conversation. We will have to be brave, and we will have to collectively agree to move our conversations elsewhere. It might feel annoying at first, but the relationships we have on social media are so impoverished that I really believe it will be worth it. The more of us do it, the easier and better it will be. We will have to trust ourselves that we know a life without Instagram is a better life, is worth it, so that when someone asks us if they can add/like/whatever us we can proudly say that we don’t do that shit and offer the myriad other ways that we can be reached and found. Some people will not bother to find us that way, but the social media machine is so big and so scary that surely some will also be drawn in by the allure of joining us in a life that rejects that machine.

Not being on social media will differentiate us from the rest of politics and from normal life. Maybe that sounds like a problem, but I think it could be one of our greatest assets if we let it. We will get less likes and clicks, maybe we will even get less real engagement in a numerical sense, at least for a time. But I think that engagement will be more meaningful and lasting. I don’t propose doing this alone, or adopting a holier-than-thou approach that shames individual people, especially non-anarchists, for using social media platforms. I propose that we use the strong, supportive networks we already have as anarchists to make this possible for us, and to invite others to do it with us when they join us in anarchist struggle and community. In places where those networks don’t exist, we must build them.

We know that Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are horrible, for us and for the world, and inviting others to join us in living a life without them will make us a lot more inspiring than any number of politically correct tweets. The rapid and totalizing shift towards lives lived so entirely online is repugnant to a lot of people beyond our social circle, and the prospect of a community or network that relates and communicates in a radically different way from that might draw a lot of people in. That’s not to mention the substantial impacts on our mental health and relationships, and the obvious security concerns that come with continuting to participate in the forums that the social media giants are offering us.

2. A critical relationship with the couple form.

Being an anarchist places a lot of strain on our relationships with home and family, and how we each choose to navigate that with original homes and families is our own. When I made this choice, I felt like there was a lot of love and support, maybe even a new home and family, waiting for me on the other side. I’ve heard a lot of people speak as if they were promised a lot of connection and support in the anarchist milieu, but that promise was not kept for various reasons. I also see that a lot of people end up withdrawing from anarchist life as they age. I think we need to enmesh ourselves in each others lives by truly committing to radical friendship and comradeship so that we can not and do not want to live without each other, and so that our lives will seem to not go on if we withdraw from anarchist struggle. I do not think this would always be incompatible with romantic love, but I do think that coupled romance is the main reason for the breakdown of such relationships in my immediate community. Chosen family is how I plan to keep myself in anarchist struggle and community for the long haul. There are a lot of other ways that this could be accomplished, but I suspect that prioritizing one person and relationship above all others is unlikely to do it. That’s especially true when we consider how volatile romantic relationships tend to be. It also makes us unavailable to provide the kind of deep connection that friends and comrades who haven’t found or don’t want to find their ‘someone’ will certainly need if we want them to stay here with us too. Whenever we talk about circles of affinity, someone brings up the problem of people who don’t have people, who are alone. That will always be an ethical concern if we value free association, but I think it will be less of a widespread problem if we stop uncritically throwing ourselves into one other person at a time and start honouring and nurturing the relationships we have with our friends and comrades.

3. We should support each other economically and practically, building lives in which we are indispensable to each other. However, we should do this face to face, non-hierarchically and through relationships of trust and mutual struggle, not by creating separate classes of “doers” and “funders” as some people are doing on Patreon in the name of mutual aid. We should build our own system in which we can all work less, or ideally not at all. Patreon is the antithesis of this, relying on some people’s “wage work” to fund other people’s “activism.” We should collectively provide the things that we actually need for all of us to keep fighting.

4. A commitment to sharpening both analysis and praxis.

We should create intentional spaces where we debate ideas, change our minds, and find others who want to try out the same practices as we do. I think anarchist gatherings could serve part of this purpose, and in some contexts are close to doing so. We should keep writing, keep talking, keep arguing and start admitting when we have changed course more often. We should try new tactics and analyze new aspects of the world we inhabit. Some of this might still happen on the Internet but it should be about figuring out what to do, not asserting our identities. This means it probably can’t happen on Twitter or Facebook, where every statement is a fashion accessory attached to a personal brand. If we’re going to participate in a subculture, we have to make sure that it’s about something, that it serves to sharpen and build our sense of purpose, not pacify it.

5. Build anarchist rituals and social spaces.

We should have times and places where we get together to assert and revel in our collective existence. These things help us to feel whole and remind us of what we have, like holidays do for some people with their bio families. Some of them also make us findable and visible, and give opportunity for newer people to test out what it might feel like to join our world. In my context I think of May Day, which I spend every year at a demonstration alongside other revolutionaries, thinking of the many people in many different contexts who are doing the same. I also think of New Years Eve, when many of us yell, bang drums and shoot fireworks in front of prisons before having a party with our friends. Neither of these demonstrations serve a particular unified purpose that is accomplished during the action, but they are ours and that always feels important in the moment. I also remember fondly another city and another time where Food Not Bombs servings brought a lot of us together once a week to talk politics, share our positions with others who weren’t already like us, and eat (mediocre) food together. I am done eating undercooked lentils and I don’t believe in “service” per se, but I wonder if I could build something similarly regular, social and open into my daily or weekly anarchist life.

Basically, I think revolutionaries need both intimate friendships and broader cultures and communities. In some contexts, that broader context could be a neighbourhood, a sense of nation or a shared social position. For many anarchists, it’s probably none of those things. Given that, I propose that as we continue to live lives that are shaped by our participation in specifically anarchist struggle for a better, freer world, we build ourselves at least a subculture to do it from, and that we let that subculture look a little weird, but still inviting, to those outside of it. It doesn’t have to look like communities we’ve outgrown or rejected. It doesn’t have to totally alienate us from our neighbours, coworkers and families. But we have to have each others’ backs and build intentional practices together, in ways that mainstream urban North American culture does not encourage, and so we’re going to have to do something different.

email me – subculture at riseup dot net.