How We Fight for the Future in 2025

Hi friends,

Fight for the Future just launched our annual report outlining our 2024 victories and our priorities for 2025. If you’ve followed Touch Grass and our work this year, you’ll be interested to read about some of our wins this year and what we’ll be up to in 2025. You might even recognize a campaign or an effort you contributed to.

The outcome of this year’s election in the US was devastating for all of us who care about human rights. We are dismayed, furious, grieving—but we’re not afraid. While the path may have shifted, we still know where we’re going, and we’ll be louder and more audacious than ever in our fight to ensure that technology is a force for liberation and empowerment rather than exploitation and authoritarian power.

This year, our community rallied and took action to help us win. Thanks to supporters like you, we:

• Fought off Congressional efforts to censor speech in the name of kids’ safety
• Demanded real privacy protections, not xenophobia
• Put a nail in the coffin of Amazon’s police partnerships
• Supported student activists and protestors fighting genocide
• Demanded a nationwide ban on facial recognition in schools
• Won back net neutrality!
• Drove 3,000 comments calling for a ban on AI tools in policing
• Stood up against anti-trans bigotry
• Pushed for a national opt-out registry to restore privacy for millions
• Created a flash point around abortion surveillance at SXSW

The reason we make these waves is because millions of everyday people participate in our campaigns: calling lawmakers, sharing our campaign pages, videos, and op-eds, showing up for in-person (and virtual) actions. Every person who joins us in the fight helps amplify our message and drives home to the government and corporations that we won’t be quiet or ignored—our rights and freedoms are worth fighting for.

Going into 2025, we know that a second Trump Administration poses unprecedented threats to basic human rights, and threatens to accelerate and exacerbate oppression and injustice around the world. As an organization focused on technology and the rules governing it, we see what’s coming: Trumpists in power will weaponize the U.S. surveillance apparatus––built on top of the profit-driven data harvesting of Big Tech––against immigrants, communities of color, journalists, dissidents, and anyone else they decide to target. Trump-led federal agencies will be overrun by hand-picked elites who will quickly abandon hard-won policies like net neutrality and AI regulation. They will attempt to censor the Internet, criminalize speech, and block access to knowledge. Their tech policies will not really be “tech policies” at all. Instead, Trumpists will use technology to enrich themselves, and to isolate and oppress immigrants, political dissidents, LGBTQ+ people, and anyone else they deem to be “other.” We said all of this right after the November elections. However, we still believe that grassroots social movements, led by the people most impacted, are our most powerful resistance to this oppressive system. We see our work––fighting at the intersection of technology and human rights––as part of a broader movement fighting for justice and liberation for all people. So, in 2025, we will:

• Launch a national campaign for surveillance-free sanctuary cities
• Fight harmful uses of artificial intelligence in healthcare, housing, & education
• Expand our anti-censorship coalition to protect life-saving access to online information
• Promote people-first privacy and community governance tools
• Build cross-movement campaigns that unequivocally support LGBTQ+, immigrant and other vulnerable communities

There is so much work to be done and we plan to hit the ground running in 2025. If you care about how tech impacts our basic rights or want to read more about how we will be taking action, browse our year-end page and share about our work with others.