Welcome to the 10th Dispatch! In this issue we will discuss the relationship between technology and mass movements, what to do in the face of mass deportations, and what mutual aid really is (and why it's not charity) - all critical knowledge as we face right-wing takeovers all over the West.
Easy Actions to Take
Why: The fires in Los Angeles have been devastating–the worst in the city’s history–and was ultimately caused by lack of proper land management. In order to prevent future disasters, we must return control to those who stewarded the land for thousands of years before we set foot here. Led by Patrisse Cullors of The Center for Art & Abolition x Metabolic Studio x Anawakalmekak
Why: One of Biden’s final acts as President was to send even more weapons to Israel for their genocide. Despite a ceasefire taking place right now, Netanyahu has vowed to continue his genocide after the first phase, so we must all KEEP UP THE PRESSURE to stop the slaughter once and for all.
🗓 Save the Date | Boycott Chevron Weekend of Action January 31-February 2
Why: Boycotting is one of the best ways to combat the Israeli occupation and is led primarily by the Boycott Divest and Sanction Movement. Join them on these international days of action. This can take many forms, big or small, from making a phone call, talking to a gas station operator, or larger autonomous actions.
Little Wins for The People
Why It Matters: South Korean President Yoon attempted to place the country under martial law to bypass the will of the Assembly. Thousands of Koreans have continued to protest Yoon for his arrest and their sustained pressure finally created results.
Why it Matters: While Netanyahu has promised to continue the Gaza genocide after the first phase of the ceasefire deal, this is still a huge moment of victory for the Palestinian resistance who have denied Israel the achievement of nearly all its goals. The combined efforts of local resistance and international solidarity has had huge effects on the Israeli economy and society which paved the way for this moment. While the fight is not over, we should celebrate these victories too.
America’s Record of Mass Deportations
Revealing History
President Trump has promised to begin mass deportation raids on the second day of his presidency (Tuesday, Jan 21, 2025). Unfortunately, this isn’t new to the country. The U.S. has led several targeted campaigns for the deportation or detention of specific ethnic groups throughout its history. The target has changed throughout time depending on the political winds, whether that’s the Irish in 1798, Native Americans in 1830, the Chinese in 1882, union organizers in 1917, Japanese-Americans in the 1940s, Mexican-Americans in 1954, Communists throughout the Cold War, or Muslims (aka any Arab) since 2001. In all cases, normal everyday Americans were forced to leave the country simply because of their identity.
While these campaigns happened, there was also resistance to them. The working class and immigrants have a long history of resisting mass deportation through union organizing and mass mobilization. We’ve been here before, so the question becomes, “What will you do?”
Please see below for more resources on immigrant rights and how to best protect undocumented community members if you or your neighbor encounter ICE or FBI officials. Remember: We take care of us.
📗 Learn More
Some Immigrant Fun Facts:
- Nearly half of agricultural workers in the U.S. are undocumented immigrants, as reported by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
- The agricultural sector in the U.S. heavily relies on foreign workers. 86% of agricultural workers in the U.S. are foreign-born and 45% of all U.S. agricultural workers are undocumented.
- Seasonal and agricultural labor demands have more than doubled from 2010 to 2019, with significant requests for the H-2A Temporary Agricultural Worker Program, which brings immigrants from abroad for periods of up to 8 months to meet agricultural workforce needs.
- The American Immigration Council predicts that the one-time mass removal policy could cost the U.S. at least $315 billion.
- Farm industry trade groups warn that deporting undocumented workers could disrupt essential farm operations, significantly impacting food production.
Social Media &
The Battle for Our Minds
Connecting the Dots
During US President Biden’s farewell address, he warned the American people about the “tech-industrial complex” that was creating an “oligarchy” in the United States. When we look at the news recently, we can see it forming before our eyes:
- The Supreme Court has upheld the bill to ban TikTok as TikTokers flee to 小红书 (xiao hong shu, aka Little Red Book) in protest.
- Elon Musk, the richest man on Earth, is set to get his own office in Trump’s White House and his own government agency.
- Meta has removed fact-checking and changed their content moderation rules to allow hate-speech, particularly against immigrants, setting the stage for Trump’s deportation plans.
The relationship between Silicon Valley billionaires and the federal government is a necessity (to the ruling class at least) in order for the State to regain control of the flow of information, particularly on social media. The information we consume about the world shapes our reality, and limiting the types of information available is a great way for any country to shape the perceived reality of its citizens. In this context, the question becomes: who gets to shape your reality? The State, the enemies of the State, or you?
The internet, and social media in particular, is the latest frontier of this battle for our minds but there have been many others. The advance of information technology has gone hand in hand with popular revolution.
- The invention of the printing press in 1440 allowed for the dissemination of ideas on an unprecedented level, ushering in the European Renaissance and Enlightenment. The ideas born during that time would lay the groundwork for the French Revolution 300 years after the printing press was invented.
- The invention of photography in the 1820s supercharged the spread of ideas through visceral images that needed no translation to understand, whether that’s images of shellshocked WW2 soldiers, monks self-immolating for a free Tibet, or a Vietnamese girl running from napalm.
- Broadcast television brought the horrors of the Vietnam War directly into the homes of Westerners, inspiring a global anti-War movement of the 1960s.
Today, social media (particularly TikTok) live-streamed the horrors of the Gaza genocide directly to our phones, catalyzing the Free Palestine movement into a global cry for change and undoing decades of Israeli-American propaganda to the point that Zionist lobbyists admitted they had a “TikTok” problem. This level of disruption to the mainstream narrative is, of course, unacceptable to the ruling elite.
Their solution is tried & true - make a deal with the capitalists of New Media to protect them from competition or regulation in return for greater control over the flow of information. In the 1980s, deregulation of the broadcast media industry allowed for the control of 90% of media in America to be consolidated into the hands of 6 mega-corporations, all who serve the same interests of capital, while truly independent journalism is strangled. Even trusted legacy outlets like the New York Times or the BBC have been caught many times distorting their reporting to serve the interests of the State. The result was a narrowing of the range of discourse and ideas available in the West. The goal for social media is the same as broadcast media: consolidate control into the hands of a few (✅), remove competition (✅), and once again limit the range of discourse to be more right-leaning, pro-American, or at least “apolitical” (✅). This is what happened to India after they banned TikTok in 2020, as this Indian creator describes. The difference though is that these platforms are used by people all over the world, and in this way become a tool of the US Empire to maintain cultural hegemony.
Capitalists like Mark Zuckerberg obviously benefit greatly from the removal of competition, which explains why they spent millions to lobby Congress to pass the TikTok ban. We should view Meta’s recent changes to content moderation laws – allowing hate-speech like “Mexican immigrants are trash” and “trans people are immoral” while censoring anti-Zionist or pro-Palestinian speech – as the billionaire-class upholding their end of the bargain. Analysts from 404Media have even pointed out these changes could be laying the narrative foundation for Trump’s mass deportation plans. We know how bad things can get without proper content moderation on social media; the 2017 Rohingya genocide in Myanmar was fueled by anti-Muslim misinformation disseminated primarily on Facebook.
Ironically, America’s efforts to ban TikTok has given China their biggest propaganda opportunity in decades. Millions of American users have flocked to Chinese social media app 小红书 (LittleRedBook) ahead of TikTok’s ban and they are interacting directly with Chinese netizens and realizing that they share a lot more in common than the US has led them to believe. It’s no wonder that US State officials are now walking back the TikTok ban, while Chinese State officials are celebrating this new development. To be clear though - China is just as engaged in this battle for control and influence over the information sphere as the US is. The app’s name, Little Red Book, is a reference to Mao’s book of Communist quotes and was created after China built the “Great Firewall” that cut off Chinese internet users from Western influence. The content on 小红书 (LittleRedBook) is highly curated and the range of discourse is limited in its own way.
There is, however, a beauty to the Chinese and American netizens meeting for the first time. Regardless of what either superpower nation says about the other, people online are still finding ways to reach past the barriers put between them to find their shared humanity. It illustrates the biggest problem that the ruling class have with regular people - we love to talk. And when we do, many walls begin to crack and crumble. The free exchange of ideas is a threat to the ruling class of any nation, and the goal has always been to limit the range of available ideas in order to create a complacent population.
In terms of building mass movements, social media has already demonstrated its power. The landscape will certainly be changing, especially if you live in the West, and organizers and activists will have to use platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Threads a lot more strategically until we adapt by finding new platforms, building our own systems (like this one!), or through more unconventional means. The challenge for the people has always been spreading the ideas the State doesn’t like, but ideas always find ways to spread when the time is right. This is part of the struggle for organizers, educators, and you. Rulers on all sides want to be able to shape reality for you, but as a community we must start to shape our own.
“…The average citizen of Oceania never sets eyes on a citizen of either Eurasia or Eastasia, and he is forbidden the knowledge of foreign languages. If he were allowed contact with foreigners he would discover that they are creatures similar to himself and that most of what he has been told about them is lies.”
-George Orwell, from his book “1984”
The People's Dictionary: Mutual Aid
Mutual aid is the frontline work of neighbors helping neighbors, typically in the form of hyper-local projects led by volunteers, and is based on the premise that everybody has something to contribute. Mutual Aid is preferable to charity through non-profit organizations because it addresses needs directly at the root and deconstructs the power imbalance of a donation based relationship, thereby resolving issues from the bottom up, not from the top down.
📗 Learn More
"Solidarity not Charity: Why Choose Mutual Aid" by Eloise Dayrat
Artists Confronting Inequalities
Creative work for Kotti & Co, Berlin grassroots tenant initiative
Sandy Kaltenborn is a Berlin-based communications designer exploring design as an instrument to challenge power structures & inspire change. Actively engaging with society across arts, culture, academia, and civil contexts, Sandy has supported (and founded) post-migrant interventions, social movements like Kein Mensch ist illegal, and tenant initiatives such as Kotti & Co. He also runs a design studio, Image-Shift, and works as a lecturer and speaker, curating festivals and exhibitions that reinterpret design as a tool for catalyzing social transformation.
In his creative work for Kotti & Co, a local tenant initiative in the Berlin neighborhood, Kottbusser Tor (aka Kotti), Sandy designed a wide range of guerilla art and protest material to help bring together a diverse group of locals that normally wouldn’t connect with each other to resist growing gentrification in the area. Since 2010, the struggle has achieved significant victories, such as a rent stop for all Berlin social housing flats, the re-municipalization of the privatized social housing flats in Kreuzberg and beyond, a Berlin-wide referendum to democratize communal housing companies, and has even inspired tenant movements abroad.
Through his life and work, Sandy reminds us all of the power visual communication has to connect people across cultures and around the world, ultimately strengthening our global unity.
📗 Learn More
Resources & Tools
Please share these links with anyone that might find them helpful:
- How U.S. Citizens Can Protect the Immigrant Community From the Deportation Force | Learn how to be an ally and support the immigrant community if you witness a raid by Trump’s Deportation Force.
- Rapid Support Hotlines for ICE Detainees & Families | by ACLU
- Know Your U.S. Rights: Immigrants' Rights | by ACLU
- Know Your U.S. Rights: Stopped by Police | by ACLU
- Learn How to Spot an Invalid Warrant | Educate yourself and others with this guide by CA Immigrant Youth (available in English & Español)
- The Deportation Defense Manual | A downloadable comprehensive manual by Make the Road NY providing information, resources and a guide to create an action plan to protect communities against law enforcement / ICE. We have the power to protect one another even when immigration laws and agents do not respect our communities. (available in English & Español)
- Don't Call the Police | A directory of local U.S. resources available as alternatives for calling the police or 911 when in a situation that requires de-escalation and/or intervention, and is best managed by a community-based crisis response provider. (Bookmark this if you live in or plan to visit the US!)
- Tactics & Techniques for Countering Police Assaults | A downloadable PDF on how to best protect targeted communities from the police
by Warrior Publications
For more resources, View the Full Directory
Submit a Resource | Request a Resource
Elisa & Ray
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About Little Wins
Little Wins is a Los Angeles-based creative studio using the power of visual design & storytelling to raise our collective consciousness, connect communities across cultures and classes, and motivate others to improve our world. We do this because we want to see a more engaged, liberated, and regenerative world where all people have access to the knowledge and tools needed to thrive.
