Twelve years ago, Aaron Swartz was driven to suicide after being harassed by the state for making scientific knowledge accessible to all, and devoting his life to the cause of internet freedom from corporate domination. Although we hadn’t met in person, he was one of my peers, and we worked together on the Open Web. As a programmer, he helped develop the web feed format RSS, the open standard for cross-platform sharing, and the technical architecture for Creative Commons, an organization dedicated to creating copyright licenses for which I was a designer and educator for. His passing was during a time of major cultural shift where the promise of an open culture was being increasingly privatized and repressed; sharing information online and making it accessible felt like a revolutionary act. Since all revolutions stem from the very act of making information accessible, this collective act made it feel like things could be different.

Designers, engineers, founders and coders all aligned on the goal to keep the internet free, open, and accessible to all. What we are witnessing today with Zuckerberg and Musk not only privatizing public knowledge but building an algorithm of oppression and censorship that promotes false information, racism and hatefulness, that works in tandem with the newly elected fascist in government is fucking dangerous. In the early 2000’s a bunch of hackers got together and pulled all of us in to make sure we never reached this point, yet the financial interests of a few altered the chances we had at a revolution and preserving our basic freedoms locally and globally.

We are now witnessing what fabricated consent for war looks like: fabricated consent for genocide aided by legacy media and VC-backed platforms like Meta and X. Remaining engaged with these platforms can feel like a form of cultural resistance, though many people refuse to engage with these harmful platforms on principle. Slow Factory’s resistance to this fascist hegemony is expanding to a new platform and community, called Everything is Political.

While the open web movement fought to keep internet access and service free, that was co-opted by VCs privatizing these services, keeping them in an illusion being cost-free while people pay with their personal data to access them. The true hidden cost is paying with our democracy and eroding our collective rights. What we suggest is to break the illusion of it being cost-free, to collectively invest in a public service that doesn’t sell data and whose mission is to preserve our collective freedoms and rights.

This platform and community is based on a membership model — any amount gives you access to digital content including articles, Open Edu classes, member events, and more— while $40 or more gets you access to all this and a physical newspaper mailed to your home, and first access to other events and retreats. This model allows us to be truly independent from any corrupt influence seeking greed and destruction, climate collapse and ongoing wars and genocide. We know that the role of knowledge sharing is vital in building power globally; we have a reach of 40 million through Meta despite ongoing censorship and McCarthyism. We prevailed and continue to write our own stories. We aren’t the only ones— we’re part of a huge movement that has reached international attention as the majority of the world becomes more and more aware of the root cause of all the intersecting catastrophes we face.

In a few days Trump is going into office which will begin to accelerate all the injustices we have been documenting. Trump, Musk and Zuck are forming a solid alliance to isolate the public—banning Tiktok for instance— and divide the movement. Just recently, another $100 Million was dispatched by AIPAC to continue smear campaigns, and spread misinformation about folks like us who have broken the algorithm and reached audiences outside their bubbles.

We must continue this work but we must do it differently:

• We must teach each other how to design and build solidarity across our movements.
• We must invest in each other’s work and fund independent media.
• We must remember that our collective action leads us out of despair.

We are surrounded by people who have put their money where their values are, and those people are actively dismantling, designing, and building new systems. They are refusing not to replicate the old broken models that purposefully oppress their peers, but courageously and radically doing things differently.

We know at times the state of the world can be excruciatingly difficult to cope with, but we are here and we will continue to be here, holding our community and investing in the arts, media and design work that is the center of revolutionary work. We invite you all to join us by becoming a monthly member. Join us so that we can continue building community outside of Meta through independent media, an Open Edu semester led by our fellows, book clubs, discussions, workshops, and community care events. Fund our next fellowship program which makes a difference by shifting culture and choosing the voices that actually represent us. You can also hire us by commissioning us to make public art work, host community-led programming, and co-design new systems. We are here and ready for this major transformation we are witnessing. We welcome you to do things differently together with us!