What are we fighting for?

What are the consequences for our futures, if our imaginations are captured by others? 

This is what I was asking myself a couple of weeks ago, as I attended the Global Gathering in Estoril, Portugal, for the first time. It’s a gathering of hundreds of people from in and around the digital rights ecosystem that has gone through various iterations – first as the Circumvention Tech Festival, then the Internet Freedom Festival, and now, stewarded by Team CommUNITY, the Global Gathering. 

Friends who had attended previous years told me there were fewer people there than before. Somewhat unsurprising, given the financial pressures that we’re all facing, and that I believe will get worse before they get better. 

At a time of multiple, intersecting crises on so many levels – from the environmental, to the geopolitical, the personal and the social – technology has become a particular site of concentrated power, one where the harms are numerous and multifaceted. There’s so much important work to do in not just documenting those harms, but exploring the social consequences thereof, and trying as hard as we can to mitigate those. 

But at the same time as recognising that mitigation is so extremely necessary, I couldn’t help but ask: what are we fighting for, not against? I heard comrades and colleagues explain the biggest barriers they’re up against, the particularly bitter structural issues they’re seeing, the urgent problems they’re grappling with. And in each session I attended, I asked: and what would you want to see, in a world where you could decide? 

Nobody could answer. I don’t mean that they didn’t have the answer somewhere inside them, because I fully believe that given the space and time to explore, they absolutely do; I mean that people were physically unable to answer the question. 

Some began “I would... try and regulate the private sector.” Others: “I would increase the number of content moderators and improve their working conditions.” – which still assumes the same systems, the same tools available to us, as in the current reality we’re in. Others talked about reducing the level of violence online, or mitigating harms in different ways by reigning in the power of Big Tech or of increasingly authoritarian governments. 

But very few people had a clearly articulated vision for the futures that they actively wanted.

This, I feel, is one of the biggest dangers to our movement: a crisis of imagination. If we can’t articulate what we want, if we don’t even let ourselves imagine a future where we get what we want, where we thrive, where we dance and laugh and cry together – we’re letting them win.

Those in power on the far right have demonstrated time and time again how strong their visions are. From Trump’s Project 2025; to the international, multi-year plans of the anti-rights movement; to the multilayered violence enacted by Netanyahu’s government on Gaza right now, and all the steps that led up to this ongoing genocide. So much of their visions was, at some point in the not-too-distant past, described as totally unthinkable – and yet here we are. 

Nothing about the way that technology works within society right now is inevitable. What we have right now is the result of people – a remarkably homogeneous set of people – sitting down and imagining what they think should happen in order for them to profit and to amass power. They let their imaginations take them to places we would’ve considered to be utterly absurd, and then they made those visions a reality.

If they can bring their ‘unthinkable’ visions into reality, why can’t we? 

Admittedly, it takes a lot to get to that place – a place where you have the space and time to let your imagination run wild, where you’re able to step out of the crisis moments that we’re in right now, where you’re thinking not just about surviving but about thriving. It’s an utter privilege to be able to do that imagination work, one which many do not have because of their proximity to those crises and the fundamental fight for survival that they are in. And at the same time, it’s a privilege that I believe those with access to, should not and must not give up.

At the same time as putting the fires out and figuring out how to survive in this world that is not built with so many of us in mind: those of us who can must keep on dreaming and planning and cultivating the conditions for the worlds that we do want to live in. Indeed – that dreaming and planning is part of survival in many ways for many people.

Those who profit from the “imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” (bell hooks) are trying their hardest to take away our ability to dream by keeping us trapped fighting for survival, or otherwise distracted. We cannot let it.

So, a question for us all: what would winning look like, for the issue you work on? Not just mitigating harm, but actively winning?