Eight years ago I stood on a stage in London and recited Shakespeare, without fluffing a single syllable (now there was a bucket list item), before proceeding to tell my audience about strategies for resistance in the face of authoritarianism. I wanted them to understand how, as coders and developers, they had more power they they realised.

I closed the talk by telling the story of René Carmille, the French census official who deliberately sabotaged his work to protect the people in the data. That story then became a Twitter thread which went viral for years. The thread even became a bit of a resource on similar stories of resistance:

This sculpture outside the Holocaust Centre in Oslo brought it home to me. It’s a punch card, and lights up with various items of personal data, making the point that seemingly innocuous data can be easily abused. pic.twitter.com/n7O0TiAUHD

— Mike Prior-Jones (@DrMikePJ) November 15, 2021

In my post-OSS life, one day I found myself in a committee room on the House of Lords side of the Palace of Westminster for yet another meeting, realising that I was looking up at a Victorian painting of the very scene from Shakespeare which I had recited on that conference stage. Only I could get a side wink from John of Gaunt.

And now here we are, in a very different world. If you had told me, eight years ago, that the things I talked about on that stage would be the difference between survival and extinction within a decade, I wouldn’t have believed you.* But we’ve got to paint with the colours we’ve got.

A couple of months ago, I got an email out of the blue from a young woman in America who had somehow come across the thread about Réne, in her professional research (!), and wanted to know more.

Once I picked myself up off the floor, I watched that old talk for the first time since 2017. It is, I have to say, outdated. The message was solid, but the resources I shared back then aren’t really fit for today’s needs.

So I had to come up with some better rabbit holes for her.

They included resources I’ve already shared, mostly in the reproductive health context, but which can be easily transferred to any situation grounded in the exploitation of personal data.

All of which are still critical for her and for everyone reading this, but –

none of those resources are grounded in an overarching strategy. They are tactical and defensive, to be sure (and I wrote a whole book about that), but if you do not have a strategy for what it is you actually wish to achieve, you are not actually making an impact.

Folks, we need to be doing more here than just deleting old data.

So how you develop a strategy that is as offensive as it is defensive?

Well. Normally I avoid recommending academic papers to my readers. They’re not written for the kind of people who read this blog, they’re obtuse and complex, they’re mostly kept behind academic shibboleth walls, and in policy, they tend to create far more problems than they solve.

I’m going to make an exception for this one, though. I previously recommended it in my 2024 reading roundup, but I want to draw attention to it again.

Unlike its cohorts, it is written in fairly plain and accessible English, it is open access, and it has something to say to anyone reading it. It also has a good rabbit hole in the footnotes.

The paper is called Resistance in the data-driven society and it sets forth six strategies to use in your theories of change:

1. Self-defence against data exploitation (personal OPSEC)
2. Subversion (destabilising the dynamics and structures of power – whistleblowing, leaking, sabotage, mutual aid)
3. Avoidance (rejecting participation where possible, being more self-sufficient)
4. Literacy (cultural and artistic resistance, community building, grassroots organising)
5. Counter-imagination (flipping the perspective, reversing the narrative)
6. Advocacy campaigning (rules, laws, documentation, archiving, direct and impact litigation)

You should read the full paper. I’m asking nicely, there, with my “should”. I’m not actually being nice here.

Whichever strategies you choose to deploy, wherever you choose to deploy them – and please do be strategic about everything you do going forward, folks – please centre this question:

what are the levers of power, and how can we move them.

I can’t tell you what to do, what strategies to create, or what tactics to use. I’m just giving you the colours to paint with. Tell me about what you painted, someday.

Not now. I don’t want to know. I don’t need to know.

Nobody else does.

*Nor would I have believed that the data abuses I was educating my project community about were well underway within the project itself, or that the project leadership would someday stand ready to enable authoritarianism. But this post isn’t the place for that.