Must-Reads and Some Thoughts on Moving Forward

Your weekly curated list of must-reads is here. But first, there’s a new episode of Movement Memos that I want to put on your radar. Ten years after the murder of Mike Brown and the uprisings that followed, I spoke with M4BL organizers M Adams and Montague Simmons about the last decade of Black-led organizing, the state of movements against police violence, and where prison and police abolitionists should go from here.

“This is a moment that is going to be looked back on 50 years from now, 100 years from now, and what is going to be said of us is how we came out of this moment,” M told me. This was a powerful conversation. If you need some perspective and some inspiration, be sure to check it out. You can subscribe to Movement Memos wherever you get your podcasts, and if you need a transcript, you can find that (along with audio and some show notes) here. 

Must-Reads

From janky AI newscasters to right-wing plans to prosecute prosecutors, here are some of the most important stories I’ve read this week.

Harsha Walia: Democratic Party Laid Groundwork for Anti-Migrant Border Policy by October Krausch. “‘What the lens of internationalism offers is that we’re not alone. We are in global struggle and I have to make sure that what I’m contributing to this movement is in service to all people as much as I can make sure that that is the case,’ [says Harsha Walia].”

Historic Newspaper Uses Janky AI Newscasters Instead of Human Journalists by Matthew Gault. “A company that owns several newspapers in Hawaii is using AI-generated newscasters to create video news segments against the wishes of its unionized journalists, who say the newspaper’s owners are replacing journalists with AI and described the practice as ‘digital colonialism.’”

Neither Elon Musk Nor Anybody Else Will Ever Colonize Mars by Albert Burneko. “In a saner society, a rich guy with Musk's well-known and unapologetically expounded views would sooner find himself under a guillotine than atop a space agency with the power to dragoon the world's resources into his k-hole John Galt cosplay. The certainty that he will never make another planet habitable is no comfort to the rest of us, when in the act of trying he may do the opposite to this one. The doomsday scenario is coming from inside the house.”

Project 2025 Holds a Plan to Make Prosecutors Do the Bidding of the Right by Joshua Davis. “While Trump’s statements suggest he might go after a broad range of officials, Project 2025’s immediate focus is on local prosecutors. This emphasis on DAs is widely viewed as an escalation of backlash to the ‘progressive prosecutor’ movement, which consists of reform-oriented prosecutors who seek to reduce the harmful effects of incarceration.”

Cooked in custody: Four Incarcerated People Describe Dangerous Conditions in Texas State Prisons by Kwaneta Harris, Xandan Gulley, Marissa Potts and Lanae Tipton. “A chorus of strained shouts and frustrated cries echoes down the vacant hallway outside of my cell door. A waterfall of sweat streams from my pores. We are all suffering under the unbearable heat, not only because of our extreme discomfort but also because of the silence with which our complaints are met.”

Stalker Allegedly Created AI Chatbot on NSFW Platform to Dox and Harass Woman by Jason Koebler. “If another user interacting with the chatbot asked the ‘Victim’ where she lived, the chatbot could provide the Victim’s true home address followed by ‘Why don’t you come over?’”

Google’s AI Will Help Decide Whether Unemployed Workers Get Benefits by Todd Feathers. “The system will be the first of its kind in the country and represents a significant experiment by state officials and Google in allowing generative AI to influence a high-stakes government decision—one that could put thousands of dollars in unemployed Nevadans’ pockets or take it away.”

‘Light in Any Room’: Friends Hail Aysenur Eygi, US Citizen Killed by Israel by Ali Harb. “Eygi was 26 years old. She had big dreams and wanted to attend graduate school to get a law degree. Her life was cut short when an Israeli soldier shot her in the head as she was attending a demonstration against an illegal settler outpost on September 6.”

How Memphis Became a Battleground Over Elon Musk’s xAI Supercomputer by Dara Kerr. “When the supercomputer gets to full capacity, the local utility says it’s going to need a million gallons of water per day and 150 megawatts of electricity — enough to power 100,000 homes per year.”

DPD Chief Says Gaza Activists Aren’t Being Tracked. Internal Documents Contradict That by Violet Ikonomova. “For at least the past four years, a specialized unit called the mobile field force has monitored the public social media accounts of demonstrators even if they’re not suspected of crimes, said Cole and two other officers familiar with the situation who requested anonymity because they did not have department authorization to comment.”

Final Thoughts

Today, I will be leading a workshop for some student organizers. I am grateful for the opportunity to support their work. During this time of rising repression, when colleges and universities are restricting speech, assembly, and mask-wearing, as cop cities are built around the country, I am deeply concerned for young people. To be honest, I am deeply concerned for us all. I had a conversation with a friend the other day about how fucked up things are and how none of us has all of the answers right now. It felt so necessary to name that out loud.

For anyone who’s paying attention, the landscape is bleak. As the churn of human disposability under racial capitalism continues, borders and prisons serve as chokepoints, manufacturing premature death for surplus populations. Mask bans, which mandate the spread of disease, are entrenching norms that not only harm disabled people, but also subject more people to debilitation, by way of long COVID. Students are being met with speech-crushing policies, protesters are being tracked digitally, and Cop Cities are being built around the country. Meanwhile, a genocide that people around the world have been protesting for almost a year rages on. It’s a discouraging time.

I was heartened to read Victoria Valenzuela’s recent piece, The Quiet Rollout of Cop Cities Across the US Meets a Growing Resistance, about how communities around the country are responding to the rise of Cop Cities. In describing the crisis, Valenzuela writes:

At least seven cities, including Chicago and Baltimore, have allocated over $100 million to their Cop Cities — and many are meant to host international police training programs like the Israeli occupation forces. Activists and scholars have said that Cop Cities are replicated after Israel’s own Cop City, ‘Little Gaza,’ where they ‘battle-test’ violence against Palestinians. This would be an expansion of already existing police training exchange programs that many U.S. states and cities have with Israel.

Valenzuela goes on to describe how residents in Atlanta, Nashville, Dallas, and other cities have responded to the emergence of these projects. It’s important to remember that people are fighting and that those of us who are hurting and worried have the power to support those fights. It’s easy to get overwhelmed in these times. That’s why it helps to zero in on what you can do. I am concerned about what’s happening on many fronts, but today, I am leading a workshop for some students. That’s what I can do to support people who are engaging in meaningful struggle. 

As Valenzuela’s piece indicates, all of these struggles are connected. The fight against Cop Cities is clearly connected to the struggle in Palestine, and the violence Palestinians are experiencing is not some isolated affair. Human disposability is a global issue, and the zones in which annihilatory violence is deemed acceptable are not fixed. Officials are building training grounds where police will prepare to treat us all as combatants and to suppress the dissent of people whose worlds are on fire. 

Under these conditions, we must have a clarity of purpose, and we must take and support meaningful action wherever we can. Those collective labors will take many shapes. This week, someone told me a story about someone being dismissive of their efforts to organize “another reading group,” as though we need less reading and more action. We need so much more reading and so much more shared thought-work and strategizing. People have been taking action in defense of Palestine for almost a year now. As we have seen, it is not enough. It is necessary, but it is not enough. Reading and discussion are not enough, but study is essential to building strategic, thoughtful movements. 

We need to gather ideas and insights right now. We need to examine what’s worked, what hasn’t, and what new avenues might exist. We need to learn from each other and support one another’s efforts. None of us has all of the answers, so we must cultivate ideas, build relationships, and think alongside one another as we attempt to chart a way forward. As our enemies scale up their death-making machinery, we must strengthen the fabric of our movements. Political transformations can occur suddenly. Breakthrough moments, when new waves of people pour into the streets, searching for a path into movement, or when particular tactics or approaches are enlivened on a mass scale, often occur unexpectedly. Right now, those of us laboring through this moment, while most of the US fixates on the electoral circus, must do the work of growing and building the infrastructure and ideas that people will grab onto in such moments. We must push through the dark hours, when our phones fill our heads with horrors, and keep our ecosystems of resistance alive. We must plant seeds and tend to the understory of our movements – the spaces where growth, decay, and renewal are always happening, regardless of how many people are marching in the streets or getting arrested for a cause. What does our work look like when the world isn’t paying much attention, and what work are we paying attention to as the media lays out endless distractions about what one candidate said to another? 

In a conversation with Bill Ayers this week, in which we were promoting Bill’s new book, When Freedom Is the Question, Abolition Is the Answer, we talked at one point about how powerless chattel slavery abolitionists might have felt 20 years before the Civil War. Even those who may have participated in covert activities, like helping enslaved people escape their captors, may have felt overwhelmed by the enormity of the violence they could not prevent. Nothing they were doing was enough to end slavery, and yet, it was all necessary. It was all essential to everything else that would happen. Sometimes, it takes courage to hold the line, wherever you are in time, with no idea how or when it will matter in the way that you hope. Some days, all we can do is orient ourselves toward that hoped-for horizon and move. What action, large or small, allows you to move in that direction?

Today, I am leading a workshop.

Much love,

Kelly