Okay, harsh fact: the fact that so many of us are crowd funding our survival is putting a significant strain on solidarity in our online communities.
The main reason being that we mostly crowdsource in our own circles where most people do not have a lot of money. And with so many people who need to crowd fund expensive things like health care bills, rent and legal fees, there simply isn’t enough readily available money to go around within these mostly marganilized communities. So inevitably a lot of people aren’t going to get what they need this way.
This creates tension in our communities where the Tumblr famous, the white, the skinny, the young, the pretty, inevitably are more succesful at surviving their crowd funding than those who are not. Counter responses often call on individual responsibility, focusing on supporting POC people, not conventionally beautiful people etc, but calling for individual responsibility doesn’t work when systematic privilege defines who has enough audience to make a succesful crowdfunding post. Result: anger, pain, bitterness, in-fighting.
When people are literally dying from poverty (and people are), a failed crowd funding campaign can feel like the community allowed someone to die. Even though what killed them is the state and what stopped the community from helping them is the fact that they were overwhelmed by millions of similar emergencies.
And crowd-funding isn’t like offline mutual aid. You can’t share your last sandwich through crowd funding, or let someone use your shower. You can’t build the interpersonal physical connections that result in the kind of long term systematic support that helps people survive. Instead of having a few friends that support you and that you will support no matter what, with crowd funding you have a crowd of thousands that you feel should help you survive but that will inevitably consistently let you down because they do not have money either and because algorithms of what gets views and what doesn’t are unpredictable.
Then there’s the fact that crowd funding campaigns are easy to fake, the fact that crowd funding forces people to put on displays of their suffering,the fact that when being liked means surviving, our communities become coercive.
crowd funding also exposes people to groups that want to harm them, etc. I could go on. Crowd funding our survival poses great challenge to community building.
This isn’t the fault of people who feel the need to crowdfund their survival but it is still a fact we have to deal with as a community.
And if Trump, the Tories and all the other fuckers that are ruining our countries right now are getting their way, the number of us that feel forced to crowd fund our survival will get much much bigger while the means we have to help them will get less. People are dying because governments deny them to means to live, that is only going to get worse. We need an answer to this fast because it could potentially destroy what online communities we have.
I’ve been thinking about this again lately because people were expressing hopefullness at how actively people are giving each other money within marganilized communities online. And like, I get it, it’s inspiring to see that people continue to be kind in hard times. I find that inspiring too.
But we really should be donating to and setting up collective funds that give help to anyone who needs it, instead of individualizing funding campaigns to that survival becomes a matter of popularity and publically advertising your suffering.
And on a side note: this popularity contest also suppresses any opinions that could make someone unpopular in their online community, coercing people into not questioning shit that actually needs changing. The more normalized it becomes for every popular blog to have a funding account, the more all the blogs will be constantly giving the same mediocre hot takes that please the widest majority of readers. We’re killing the ability of our movements to improve.
gremlinlord: So then perhaps we could begin by setting up a voluntary online location database with contact info in order to build actually geographically viable communities and ties allowing for more tangible mutual aid efforts? Security issues abound…
Or you could, ya know, set up a monthly or weekly ‘mutual aid meeting’ at some accessible local location, starting with simple things like a repair skill-sharing, clothing swaps, free shop and a ‘bring what you can – everyone eats’ brunch. You could announce this online to reach a wide audience, but there is no need to create online lists of participants. You’ll see who is near by who actually shows up.
Once you have a stable group of ‘regulars’ that have some of the same basic ideas about justice (no need for ideological purity, just some basics) you could combine that with conversations about setting up solidarity networks to do stuff like an emergency fund for uninsured health care costs, legal costs, etc. as well as material support against eviction etc.
From there you could work on whatever fits your group, from unionizing to squating to forming a militant resistance to evictions to starting a community garden. Depending on your collective needs and attitude towards creating change.
Basically:
- Temporary spaces with some form of basic helping each other
- Regular contact between people who value this
- A sense of community
- Organized community and permanent resources
- Permanent community space
- … WHATEVER YOU WANT
QueerAnarchism 