Facebook’s Rough Start To The Week
In this episode of By Any Means Necessary, hosts Sean Blackmon and Jacquie Luqman are joined by technologist Chris Garaffa, the editor of TechforthePeople.org to discuss the Facebook outage and its widespread impacts, the impact of the revelations concerning human trafficking and eating disorders revealed by whistleblower Frances Haugen, the reliance of society on social media and the need for community control over Facebook, and Google complying with dragnet police data requests for accounts that search names, addresses, or telephone numbers.
In the second segment, Sean and Jacquie are joined by Afeni, an organizer with Freedom Fighters DC to discuss the clearing out of a homeless encampment in Washington, DC, the absurd obstacles that perpetuate the problem of homelessness and the failure of the District government to implement its pilot housing program, and the rapidly intensifying crisis of gentrification in DC.
In the third segment, Sean and Jacquie are joined by Mikaela Nhondo Erskog, an educator and researcher for the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, also a part of the secretariat of Pan Africanism Today and a coordinating committee member for No Cold War to discuss a strike of engineering workers in South Africa, the severe exploitation of engineers in the country, and the significance of this challenge in putting the ideas of a living wage, benefits, and organizing into public consciousness.
Later in the show, Sean and Jacquie are joined by Kamau Franklin, Founder and Board President of Community Movement Builders in Atlanta and Co-host of the Renegade Culture podcast to discuss Facebook’s outage and how it highlights the broader issue of monopoly capitalism, Netflix’s representation of Malcolm X in the film “Blood Brothers” and the sanitization and cooptation of revolutionaries, the importance of arts and culture in organizing, and the proliferation of and misunderstandings about important political terms like decolonization.