WE’RE CAUGHT IN A LOSE-LOSE SITUATION IN THE MODERN MEDIA WORLD: REFUSAL LESSENS OUR REACH, ENGAGING SETS US UP AS TARGETS ~ Rob Ray ~ A couple of friends of mine, hailing from an end of the anarchist scene where skipping and shoplifting are more common, were telling me about their experiences from this venerable part of the rebel lifestyle recently. It’s a time-honoured part of hunting dinner in the bowels of big supermarkets that the greatest flaw in even the best security systems has always been bored minimum-wage night staff whose class consciousness extends, at the very least, to not giving a single solitary wossit about some snacks and a tinny galloping out the door. The theatrically rolled eye, or a muttered “at least wait until my back’s turned” has been the saviour of many a struggling person. As with so much of our daily lives now, however, the rollout of not just CCTV but facial recognition technology is making itself known. Usually using the excuse of a “devastating wave of shoplifting” that’s “driving supermarkets out of the area.” This unpitying, inhuman eye does not roll, it simply reports directly up the chain, to someone whose actual class (worker) is blurred by their designation (manager). An unpaid, ever-vigilant quisling following the poor round the store. We’re filmed through almost every aspect of our public lives now, with both the State and private business rapidly converting the results into databases which, as the recent unpopular move towards a centralised ID system suggests, are only a stone’s throw from being amalgamated. For law and order purposes, naturally. As a result of this techno-stool pigeon’s spread, my friends were finding, a ban from one major store had become more easily enforced across all related properties. They were automatically flagged. Another few pounds saved for the bottom-line profit of the billionaire class. Later, away in another wing of the movement, I was reminded of this observation while listening to a talk by reps of Campaign Against Police Surveillance (COPS) and Police Spies Out of Lives. They were explaining their experiences dealing with spycops who had infiltrated so many of the left’s political movements throughout the 20th and early 21st century. For anarchists, particularly those active in the environmental movement of the 1990s and 2000s, the officers who infiltrated their communities were a particular horror. They started relationships with women and even had kids with them purely as cover for forms of petty snooping which, as the inquiry has revealed, amounted to little more than coppers pathetically cosplaying the spy game. Infamously, while the inquiry ground on over the years, legislation was brought in not to restrain, but to enable, similar behaviour in future. After seven years of slowly leaking revelations and a mountain of evidence that it couldn’t be trusted to follow even the most basic ethical standards, the Met was gifted the Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Act 2021. It allows any police force, security service branch and every other major agency up to and including the Food Standards Authority to break laws if it brings in “intelligence.” What this should tell any reasonably-minded person is that the State is not a responsible body. It does not care about the safety of the public, but instead is quite happy to endanger it for the sake of knowing what non-violent dissenters are up to. And the irony? They may not even need it, for the most part. Because similar to skipping and shoplifting, it is technology, rather than sex-offending liars, which now provides their primary method of surveillance. Handing spycops total impunity to exploit the families of the bereaved, like Stephen Lawrence, is a bastard’s bonanza enacted just on the off-chance, in case they ever feel the need to rape their way to some extra data. In-person spying is in many ways less powerful and a lot more expensive than getting yourself added to a messaging group and just feeding the whole thing into a database for later sorting. You can discover networks of support for a given organisation simply by filtering through their social media followers. Cameras and mics no longer need to be laboriously installed in likely places, they’re everywhere, being sorted and catalogued by increasingly clever large language models (marketed as AI). Which isn’t to say it won’t happen, especially if dealing with a savvy group, but technology has made watching us, every step and finger swipe, every day, in many ways trivial. What’s remarkable is how weak opposition to it really is. NGOs do the usual liberal thing, lefties have been quite slow on the uptake outside of the everyday grind of protest, and of course, no parliamentary party has shown any interest in making the law less onerous. In fact the grouping which has been most vocal about civil liberties in the media is probably the far-right, which, for all its huffing and puffing about free speech, has little to no quarrel with the core functionality of government intrusion. What victory is it to secure Graham Linehan’s right to be an obsessive, self-destructive bully without let or hindrance when the State is busily drawing to itself all the apparatus of a surveillance state in the sort of granular detail Orwell could never have foreseen? They have had nothing to say about – or have been joyously in favour of – the extension of repressive legislation and policy against left-wing targets. Most notable is Palestine Action, but prior laws and policing priorities aiming to take out the non-violent climate actionists of Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil met with a similar shrug/jeer response. It’s only when their own are threatened, or in service of a rhetorical bete noir (universities), that they suddenly discover their freedom-loving backbone. The truth of where Reform and its fellow travellers are going with this can be seen in the US, where it has taken a matter of months for the far-right to utilise all that power to purge the public sector, academia, and media of perceived enemies. The social media presences of everyone from judges to teachers to generals has been pored over for years by the MAGA grassroots, more efficiently by the likes of the Heritage Foundation and its allies, and in bulk by tech barons such as Zuckerberg, Musk and Thiel, as they sucked in endless data across various platforms. And now, with Trump at the helm, these once relatively latent forces, easily augmented by the powerful tools of the State, have been used as, effectively, a giant shopping list of people to be hounded out of key roles and replaced with loyalists to the cause. Visitors and students who show solidarity with Palestine are not just censured, but jailed and deported. Migrants are tracked and deported. Where supermarkets and activist surveillance go today in Britain, so broad civil society goes tomorrow via the landslide-in-the-making of Reform UK, or perhaps slightly more slowly through the grinding decay of technocrats. We have several difficulties dealing with this situation, especially in the event that the far-right gain power and feel emboldened enough to volte face completely on their “principles.” To start, much of the damage is already done. Few of us are entirely without footprint giving our opinions on social media – and indeed if we were we’d be caught the other way. Because despite all their carping, the far-right have very few real barriers to saying exactly what they want any more – egregious racists are actively welcomed in serious positions in the major parties – and we already have problems countering their reach. A wholesale abandonment of social media would be an abandonment of its hostage public to algorithmic pipelines leading straight to Andrew Tate or, worse, Robert Jenrick. But in presenting our own cases in the era of Tiktok and Instagram, we are expected to show faces, in public. To record our voices. To not do so by wearing masks or Anon-styled faceless screens usually restricts the audience, largely, to fellow-travellers and topics where masking up is considered logical. Which rather defeats the purpose of outreach, except as a recruitment tool for the already-interested – one that is in the hands of the very people we’re supposed to be resisting. So we’re caught in a lose-lose situation in the modern media world. Refusal lessens our reach, engaging sets us up as targets. What is to be done? What strategies can we work with? If engagement is necessary, how do we protect ourselves? Present ourselves? There is AI which can very effectively throw a realistic virtual mask over recorded videos – providing the expected friendly face. Deepfaking behind a VPN on a throwaway account? Grim, but plausible. And then the task of building our own media is always there, more important than ever as a means of locking identities away from the snoopers. Freedom is just one of several online media projects which are all understaffed and constantly in need of help – not just the odd bit here or there, but joining up with an understanding that the project is going to be long and difficult, and will be fighting to get heard over the noise. Finally there is the offline. Away from facial recognition cameras. The communities we live in. The analogue way may be the most important of all, the only one they won’t have access to, the hardest to infiltrate. The future of resistance, using the oldest methods. Much of the resilience we need to build has to happen in short order. If Trump’s ascension is any sort of guide to the ambitions of Reform, we will not simply be needing a better, more joined-up form of prisoner support but mechanisms to fight purges of progressive voices from every walk of life, or at least to help such Official Cancellations with support, and an entryway into effective resistance. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This article was originally published in the Winter 2025-26 issue of Freedom anarchist journal. Public domain image by VideoGirl The post A wall of electronic eyes replacing human feeling appeared first on Freedom News.

EDITORIAL FROM OUR NEW JOURNAL ISSUE ON SURVEILLANCE EXPLORING STATES’ AMBITIONS TO CONSTRAIN AND REFUSE OUR FREEDOM – AND WAYS TO FIGHT BACK Anarchism in its essence is a lived philosophy of freedom. It is also a recognition that freedom, as Mikhail Bakunin knew, depends on equality. Only when we are equal can we be truly free from domination; free not just in mind but in body, to realise all the possibilities of life in a society forged through mutual aid and solidarity. But in a capitalist society guaranteed by the power of the state, we anarchists are engaged in an everyday war to preserve, protect, and expand freedom. If, as Freedom’s own Colin Ward claimed, anarchism remains a seed beneath the snow, ready to blossom if the conditions are right, then the fight to secure those conditions has seldom been more desperate. In this issue, we explore the challenges and possibilities of anarchist freedom in a time when supposedly ‘democratic’ states – aided and abetted by digital firepower – are seeking to constrain and refuse freedom in ways that would make some authoritarian regimes blush. In Ukraine, war itself is the testing ground for the technologies that seek to reduce freedom to a memory, with AI targeting systems demonstrating in the sharpest relief the power concentrated in the hands of right-wing tech barons such as Peter Thiel. These technologies fuel killing on the battlefield and the analysis of health data here in the UK, with the desperate Labour government also betting big on the magic beans of AI to somehow deliver ‘growth’, at any cost. How to fight in a situation where the implications of totalitarian technologies are – to paraphrase one of our writers in this issue – simply ignored with a shrug is a critical question for we anarchists. A return to more traditional forms of communication and the resurrection of zines and hardcopy media represents a partial way out, but it requires us to fundamentally reorient our audience – addicted as they are to the instant hits of easily-surveilled social media platforms. Also in the UK, the ongoing Spycops inquiry – in which Freedom is a core participant – is a constant reminder that the state’s ambitions to constrain and refuse freedom are in its very nature. The state’s aims today are unchanged from the era in which police officers lied to women and fathered children with them; indeed as our author notes, what is being investigated by the inquiry has actually been made legal for future state agents. But there remains cause for hope. From the Twin Cities in Minnesota where abolitionist initiatives are contesting the authority of the Trump regime, to Greece where anarchist groups are mobilising actively around the cause of prisoners arrested for protest, battles are being won. The German police’s lack of appetite for scrutiny comes up too, but while the police may not be comfortable with being watched, the security apparatus is perfectly delighted to watch us. So much so that we at Freedom recently learned that two separate US Department of Homeland Security accounts were subscribed to our newsletter. Meanwhile, despite civil liberties being up for grabs on a daily basis in the form of a Labour government who thinks an eternal right-wing drift is the cheat code for success, the popular response to the government’s heavy-handed attacks on those protesting genocide implies very strongly that Reform voters are not, nor should they be, the centre of gravity for UK politics. The veteran Spanish anarchist Jose Peirats once said ‘the state is a virus, it can exist in all of us’. The key question in the coming weeks and months will be how can an anarchist immune system effectively fight it? Some of the ideas are in these pages. The rest are in our communities. Together we have everything we need. The post Freedom winter 2025-6: Watched, databased, yet to be controlled appeared first on Freedom News.