Technology can be used to automate fascism or to revolt against it. Fight for the Future is ready for the battle ahead.

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Fight for the Future is a fiercely nonpartisan organization. We unapologetically hold politicians to account and fight oppressive policies no matter which party they emerge from.

But we’re also not fools. And we’re not afraid to speak the truth: Donald Trump is a wannabe fascist. 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.”

And most Big Tech, crypto, and AI leaders will cheer them on. Even before Trump won, people like Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerburg, Peter Thiel, and Elon Musk cozied up to the Trump campaign. Now they will become even more complicit in its authoritarian aspirations, hoping to be rewarded with government contracts, legal protection, and the preservation of their monopoly status. “Crony capitalism” will be an understatement.

For the many people already struggling under the weight of deeply unjust systems, this crisis is not new. The U.S. government has encouraged and fueled mass surveillance, incarcerated more people than anywhere else on Earth, propped up genocidal regimes, and failed to meet the basic needs of marginalized communities and the working class for decades, under both Democratic and Republican administrations. 

At Fight for the Future, we 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. 

It is our future, and the future of our families and communities at stake. At every turn, we’re hellbent on throwing sand in the gears of a machine built to destroy human freedom and dignity. So this is what we’re going to do:

• We will fight online censorship tooth and nail.
• We will champion the right to safely access diverse knowledge, truth, and art.
• We will do everything we can to beat back expansions of surveillance and push for surveillance-free sanctuary cities.
• We will campaign to end collusion between tech giants and authoritarian governments. 
• We will fight harmful uses of artificial intelligence and work toward local and state bans on biometric surveillance technologies like facial recognition.
• We will defend encrypted communications and push to expand end to end encryption across communication systems. 
• And we will fight to protect and expand the use of open-source, decentralized, and community-owned technologies that can be tools for liberatory organizing, online community building, and the sharing of creativity and knowledge.

We will leverage our expertise in technology to help identify the most important and urgent threats and opportunities. And more—this is an all-hands-on-deck moment, so we will share our tech tools and organizing chops with other justice-focused organizations, helping support the collective, intersectional work of resistance movements. In particular, we recognize that local, frontline efforts led by those most impacted are the most effective to drive resistance, resilience, and change. 

Donald Trump wants to be a fascist. But that doesn’t mean he will succeed in imposing fascism. 

Communities are already coming together to defend themselves. And  Fight for the Future will be doing our part: fighting to ensure that technology is a tool of resistance, and not a weapon of tyranny. 

Between now and January 20, the Biden administration, its agencies, and the current Congress should take swift and direct action to reduce the reach and efficacy of state and corporate surveillance apparatuses. They spent the past four years infighting and pearl-clutching over our human right to privacy, and this has left us all in an extraordinarily precarious position as we stare down the barrel of authoritarianism. They should now engage in an all-out war against the surveillance systems they previously upheld—from demanding information from industries and institutions engaged in dangerous but hidden surveillance practices, including libraries and streaming platforms, to “accidentally” setting the NSA servers on fire. 

Hey, we can dream—right? But in all seriousness, starting now, these are the priorities and assumptions we will use to move forward in our resistance:

Focus where we have power

We assume that a Trump administration will be hostile to tech justice priorities like protections from AI discrimination, limits on warrantless surveillance, and breaking up tech monopolies. Instead, it will quickly undo most of the (fairly limited) positive things done by the Biden/Harris administration and engage in transactional policymaking to benefit Trump allies and punish his critics. 

What this means for our work is that federal agencies will cease to be tactically useful pressure points. In response, we will pivot away from proactive Federal agency work (i.e. FTC commercial surveillance rulemaking) and focus on local and state efforts. Elected officials in progressive areas will be looking for ways to show they are resisting the Trump admin, but won’t be bold without grassroots pressure. We’ll build power to demand the bold tech justice policies they slept on during Biden: banning facial recognition, limiting local law enforcement surveillance, taxing and regulating Big Tech companies, defending free expression and the right to assembly, and defending libraries and the right to information. There are many levers local and state governments can pull to shield their most vulnerable communities from MAGA’s myriad threats. But due to the US’s lack of data privacy protections, lawmakers must start by resisting surveillance at its foundation or else their efforts may be in vain.

We will not waste precious energy on reacting to every federal threat, because we know that only playing defense fails to lead to substantive change. Instead, we will use the biggest oversteps to build public consensus against harmful policies like the weaponization of the FCC for censorship or the use of law enforcement surveillance to target journalists, immigrants, and political dissent. We will provide an alternative to budding broligarch narratives in technology spaces, pushing the envelope on a positive vision for our tech future that’s worth believing in and fighting for.

Surveillance

We assume that the incoming admin will leverage every aspect of the surveillance state, including corporate and individual surveillance, to target immigrant communities and facilitate deportations—as well as to persecute LGBTQ+ communities, abortion seekers, and protesters. 

In response we will launch a nationwide campaign for blue states and progressive municipalities to become “surveillance sanctuaries.” Building from the “sanctuary city” movement, we will seed a narrative among progressive mayors, city councilors, governors, and state legislators that limiting state surveillance and data collection is essential for protecting vulnerable populations from a rogue federal government. We respond in real time as stories of harm and surveillance overreach surface to highlight the dangers of surveillance tech and inoculate a generation against pro-surveillance copaganda by forever linking surveillance and data collection with its use to persecute pregnant people and marginalized communities.

On the corporate surveillance side, we will ruthlessly target the companies and industries that facilitate mass surveillance and data collection—whether it’s Uber outing abortion patients to vigilantes, the Libby app providing a list of parents who read about gender-affirming care to a state attorney general, web companies that force people to turn off their VPNs and be surveilled, or pharmacies and grocery stores running facial recognition and data-mining customer records. Already, tech giants are actively complicit in ethnic cleansing and the suppression of reproductive rights, as are the corporate partners and customers that feed their awful surveillance machines. Unless concrete changes are made to data collection and retention practices, companies should brace for a world of hurt from the human rights community—led by us.

Censorship

We assume that the Trump admin will leverage Federal agencies like the FCC, the FTC, and the DOJ to attempt politically motivated censorship targeting LGBTQ+ and racial justice content, pornography and sexual expression, abortion-related content, left wing or anti-fascist content, and content critical of Trump. 

In response, we will build public consensus against these overreaches and reclaim free expression and access to knowledge as a progressive value. We will name and shame companies that proactively censor or over-censor to appease Trump admin, as well as those that have, from greed or laziness, built systems that directly facilitate censorship.

We also assume that Democrats and center-left civil society institutions, including the media, will continue to double-down on authoritarian impulses as a misguided reaction to Trump. They’ll call for more censorship of hate speech and disinformation, more surveillance and law enforcement as a reaction to Trumpist political violence, and more military might and neo-colonial imperialism as a reaction to Trumpist isolationism.

In response we will directly confront center-left authoritarianism and push forward the truth: that its supporters are complicit with Trump’s harms. We will grow our coalition of groups directly impacted by censorship and surveillance to defeat and shame such misguided policy. And we will work towards undermining the narrative of the right as the sole defenders of free expression.

Decentralized Tech

Among other benefits like censorship resistance and authenticity verification, decentralized tech offers an increasing number of tools to people under financial surveillance—surveillance that will now be increasingly directed at abortion funds, mutual aid groups, and oppositional political groups. 

We assume that Trump’s cryptocurrency policy will be focused on enriching himself and his allies, not creating a meaningful regulatory framework necessary to ensure consumers are protected from grift and scams. We also anticipate that Trump’s public support for cryptocurrency will lead to misguided Democratic backlash against privacy-preserving financial tools. 

Practically, we will focus on exposing financial surveillance by the Trump administration and sympathetic agencies, particularly surveillance that targets undocumented people as well as people seeking abortions and gender-affirming care. We will push for Democrats to be the “adults in the room” on the issue and work toward real regulation focused on human rights and consumer protection so that activists and politically targeted groups have the option of using decentralized and private cryptocurrencies for protection. As we have done, we will continue to stand for the right to code privacy-preserving and open-source alternatives to Trump’s goon squad of Big Tech sycophants—and for the importance of community-owned and -governed alternatives to the same.

We will also fight against any Trump family crypto schemes that seek to put their thumb on the scale for projects that will enrich themselves and their cronies at the expense of everyday people.