"Don’t outsource the movement! "
"Don’t outsource the movement! "
How to take down the Billionaires
Chapter 6
The organizations that support the movement to take back control of governance from corporations and corrupt government must be internally strong and must be controlled by people who are dedicated to the movement and to moral principles. It is critical to avoid depending on money given by the rich, and outsourcing functions to for-profit firms that have other motivations than revolution--and are most likely subject to pressure from the super-rich to undermine and to weaken our efforts.
The concentration of wealth, and the emergence class society in the United States, means that most movements and NGOs are dependent on the funding, seen and unseen, from the wealthy who are indifferent to, or even hostile to, the needs and interests of ordinary people. It is critical that we avoid the trap of dependency on class enemies from the start as we build a robust and serious movement.
Do not outsource anything to anyone. It is better to have regular meetings in person, to exchange document written by hand by post than it is to have corporate operatives undermining our efforts at every turn. And that includes criminal operations with a human face like Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Twitter.
Every time you use Facebook, Gmail, Twitter, Google or YouTube, you are allowing a multinational corporation not only to know what you are doing, but also to determine who can see what you produce, who you can reach, and, in many cases, what actions you can, or cannot, take.
Your smart phone, for that matter, does not belong to you. Corporations are capable not only of accessing all the information in your smartphone, but also of changing the programs used by it, altering what you find in searches through it, and determining whom you can communicate with easily. We will need to make sure that all of these processes are controlled, eventually, by a transparent constitution of information. For the moment, we need to control as much of our activities, of our message, and of ourselves internally.
Our goal is not to beg the criminal syndicates that run YouTube and Facebook to be more fair, to let us reach more “customers.” Our goal is to destroy these privately-owned means of communication and education which have become monopolies by using criminal methods to block out all their opposition; we will replace them with cooperatives that are transparent, accountable and run by the people. That shift in the management of technology must start within our own tight-knit organizations first.
In this process, however, it is critical that citizens first realize just how corrupt, just how broken and just how dangerous the current system is. Google and Facebook spend billions of dollars to convince us that everything is fine as the offer their role as propaganda platforms to serve multinational corporations and the super-rich. They use secret law and other illegal means to force us to depend on their monopolies and to block anyone who tries to replace them with transparent, user-owned cooperatives. These obvious alternatives to multinational social media and information systems are blocked out of the media by these criminal syndicates.
We may be forced to use their services at the start, but we must be clear with ourselves that eliminating them, and ending all outsourcing, is out primary mission. Social media, search engines and other services run by multinational corporations can never work for the interests of local communities.