Breaking Free: Why 21st Century Activism Can’t Just Meet People Where They Live
The framed comic on my wall, titled Trippy from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, sums up a frustrating paradox that I’ve seen in progressive activism over the last few decades. It shows a character telling comrades: “Imagine you can share information instantaneously with fellow travelers around the world but you can only organize activism by sending your information to a large multinational corporation in a way that makes them rich.” One comrade replies, “Whoaaa, trippy!”
It's a humorous yet bitter observation of how modern activism has become entangled with the very systems we aim to overthrow. In the real world, when my wife raised this very concern to a comrade in the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), they gave a standard reply: “You have to meet the people where they live.” This answer missed a vital point—the goal of any socialist movement is not just to meet people where they live but to help create a better, freer, and more equitable place for them to live.
Complicity with Surveillance Capitalism: A Self-Negating Trap
It’s hard to ignore the fact that progressive movements, despite their critical rhetoric, rely on the same capitalist and surveillance-driven platforms that actively subvert their goals. Platforms like Google, Facebook, The Communication Silo Formerly Named Twitter, and Instagram—behemoths of surveillance capitalism—become the very spaces where activism happens. These corporations profit from our clicks, likes, and shares, capturing our data and feeding it into systems of control that profit from inequality, exploitation, and surveillance.
This ongoing reliance on corporate-owned platforms represents a deep contradiction in our movements. By using these tools, we are feeding the beast—the tech giants profiting from our data, monetizing our activism, and undermining the very causes we fight for. In a real sense, we've become complicit in our own subjugation, ceding our autonomy, values, and privacy to the very corporations that reinforce the inequalities we seek to dismantle.
The comic is funny because it’s true. But the joke is on us—especially if we shrug off this reality as something we just have to accept.
“Meeting People Where They Live” vs. Offering a New Place to Live
The phrase “you have to meet people where they live” has been an all-too-convenient defense for this complicity. But this outlook only reinforces the status quo. Shouldn’t a genuinely radical movement—especially a socialist one—work toward building new spaces where people can live, organize, and act outside of these exploitative systems?
Socialist movements throughout history didn’t merely meet people in existing power structures—they created new models of organization, new forms of cooperation, and new spaces for living and working together. From cooperatives to unions, the goal has always been to build alternatives to the capitalist way of life. Why, then, should we treat digital space any differently?
The digital world has become a critical battleground, and by continuing to rely on capitalist platforms for our organizing, we risk undermining our goals before we even begin. The excuse that people are already on these platforms only feeds into the idea that we are powerless to change the conditions of where we live and organize. But this isn’t true—we can build new spaces.
Technofeudalism and the Trap of Corporate Platforms
Yannis Varoufakis, in his book TechnoFeudalism, describes how modern capitalism is giving way to a form of technofeudalism—a system where corporate digital platforms exercise feudal control over digital territories. We are the serfs, compelled to labor on these platforms, producing content (and data) that enriches our tech overlords. Activists, by organizing through Google, Facebook or Twitter, are trapped in this feudal relationship, where every action feeds into the extraction machine.
Corey Doctorow calls this process the “enshittification” of the internet, where platforms begin by serving users and then gradually pivot toward exploiting them as they consolidate power. Ben Tarnoff argues that the internet has been captured by private interests, and calls for public ownership of digital infrastructure—an internet for the people, rather than the corporations.
These critiques point to a central problem: relying on corporate platforms is not neutral. It perpetuates the very systems of inequality and control that we are fighting against. Every document, every post, every message, and every organizing effort that goes through these systems feeds the machine, cementing the power of the techno-feudal lords.
A New Vision: Building the Communitarium
What if, instead of capitulating to the logic of these platforms, we started to build new digital spaces rooted in the values of socialism, mutual aid, and collective ownership? What if our movements didn’t just aim to “meet people where they live” but actively created new, cooperative digital environments where we can live, work, and organize together?
This is where the concept of the Communitarium comes into play. We’ve been discussing the idea of building community-owned, federated online platforms that align with anti-capitalist values. These would be spaces where people can communicate, deliberate, celebrate, commemorate and act without feeding the data-extractive engines of tech giants. Instead of funneling our organizing efforts through Google, Facebook or Instagram, we could build open source, decentralized, user-owned platforms where privacy, transparency, and collective decision-making are built into the infrastructure.
Communitaria would allow for distributed, collective governance, transparency among communities, and peer-to-peer cooperation. These platforms would allow movements to organize outside the constraints of corporate control, and would focus on mutual aid, collective ownership and privacy—fundamental tenets of a socialist lifestyle. In effect, they could function as online prototypes of modes of organization which could then be extended (with effort) into the real world.
A 21st-Century Activism for a Post-Capitalist Future
To build an effective socialist movement for the 21st century, we need to stop relying on the tools of our oppressors. The vision of the Communitarium movement isn’t just about creating a new app or platform—it’s about building a new way of organizing, communicating, and living in the digital age. It’s about giving people a new place and new ways to live, in both a literal and digital sense.
We cannot keep organizing through the tools of surveillance capitalism if we want to build a post-capitalist future. We must take control of the infrastructure itself—through open-source, community-run platforms. This is not just about technical solutions, but about aligning our methods of organizing with our values and principles.
It’s time to stop meeting people where they live—and start building new places to live.
Conclusion: From Trippy Comics to Real Change
The cartoon on my wall is a reminder that the paradoxes of our current activism are more absurd than they should be. We are at a point where it’s possible to build new digital spaces, free from the corporate stranglehold of tech giants. The Communitarium movement is one such path forward—a way to resist the forces of technofeudalism and surveillance capitalism, while providing people with autonomous, self-governed spaces that reflect the values of solidarity, mutual aid, and collective ownership.
It’s time to confront the uncomfortable truth: as long as we rely on corporate platforms, our activism is compromised and limited. The future of our movements depends on creating new spaces for organizing, free from the exploitation of surveillance capitalism. It’s time to build the digital commons that our movements deserve.