John,

Lia at Fight for the Future here. I’ve been pretty quiet on the email front lately because I’ve been focusing on a whole new sphere of work at Fight for the Future—baking human rights values into the next generation of the web.

I’m pretty jazzed on this work. Honestly, it’s the most hopeful I’ve felt in a while. Sometimes it feels like Congress just holds hearings and introduces bills that are half-measures or worse, and so many people are caught up in debating who should be censored and how.

It’s exhausting to watch the shortsightedness and bickering. For me, what it comes down to is that we need a better digital world, one that people, not corporations, control and govern, with data portability, decentralization, consent, and privacy baked-in—and that there are new tools we must take advantage of to build it ourselves, including blockchains and digital tokens like cryptocurrencies.

If you agree, support this work and help build this world by becoming a monthly donor.

It’s so wonderful to have support we can count on month-to-month. In terms of our peers, Fight is a very small org with much less funding, doing our darndest to pack an outsized punch with the resources available. I’m taking time to email you about what I’m doing because individual monthly donations really make a difference.

Here’s what we know in terms of building a better web—it’s gotta be a team effort, and it’s gonna be a battle. The hyper surveillance capitalist dystopian hellscape we’re in now is the product of privileged people only listening to and creating for each other. We’ve got to ensure that from the start, human rights experts across the spectrum of humanity are engaged with new tech as well as the challenges and concerns it brings.

Here’s what I’m asking you to be a part of:

Building a coalition of human rights organizations so that we can learn and act together around new technologies and ensure that the most necessary voices are heard.
Ramping up for what might be our biggest engagement with legislators ever—to ensure that technologies that hold great promise for human rights don’t get smothered by bad laws.
Engaging in this emerging technology space itself, bringing our knowledge and expertise to conversations with like-minded creators and developers directly.
Holding bad choices from big projects to account right away, just like we do with Big Tech now.

Sound like the foundation the next generation of the web should be built upon? We think so. If you agree, please do support us with a monthly donation. If you can’t swing the money, no worries! Just show us love however you can and turn more folks onto the work our lean, mean, surveillance-crushing machine is doing.

Wishing you a really delicious slice of pie,

Lia & the team at ❤️Fight

Fight for the Future works to protect your rights in the digital age.