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"How does capitalism so quickly destroy what took billions of years to evolve?" 

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"How does capitalism so quickly destroy what took billions of years to evolve?" 

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Chapter 1: Listen

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Capitalism and species extinction • International Socialism

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Life on earth is arguably the most extraordinary phenomenon in the perceivable universe. And, among living things, 21st century humans are uniquely possessed with the means to appreciate this remarkable occurrence. Scientifically, for example, we can consider the sheer number… Continue Reading →

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"How can we organize ourselves intentionally to combat the imbedded isolation of late capitalism?"

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"How can we organize ourselves intentionally to combat the imbedded isolation of late capitalism?"

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Chapter 5: Collaborate

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The epidemic of loneliness is spreading rapidly in our hyper-connected world of social media. Studies by the World Health Organization suggest that “20-34% of

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"Marketable captives for capitalism. “Loved.”"

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"Marketable captives for capitalism. “Loved.”"

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Chapter 8: Be Fierce

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Thinking about animals as a class, with common interests and common suffering, enables us to see suffering and exploitation as results of a larger system, not particular acts of cruelty.

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"rest is resistance and sleep is political"

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"rest is resistance and sleep is political"

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Chapter 10: Honor Your Boundaries

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Parasomnia (2019), a site-specific participatory performance by Patrícia Portela (PT/BE), addresses sleep in its biological and cultural meanings while retrieving its historicity. Sleep is one of the last resistance gestures against capitalised lives, opening a gap for social change through the aesthetic dimension as an extension of arts in politics. Parasomnia raises awareness for empathy and unproductiveness by inviting spectators to take a massage and eating delicacies. Bodily senses are therefore a way to activate potentials and becomings. Often understood as weaknesses and vulnerabilities, the actions elicited—contemplating, caring, and resting—bring up a strength and a capacity to arouse the imagination and fabulation as political acts. It is also argued that dimensions such as fantasmatic, cyclicity, and subjectivity are key social outputs of Parasomnia. Allowing for a pause in a continuous stream of goals, of connectivity and consumption, and without commodification purposes, sleep may return us to a sense of our own interiority made of several layers: like a fall into the sleep that enables alterity to emerge inside the self.

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"Who benefited from the conspiracy to teach us that we were not beautiful?" 

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"Who benefited from the conspiracy to teach us that we were not beautiful?" 

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Chapter 11: Respect Your Hair

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Beauty Standards and Capitalism - We Need To Talk

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The standard of beauty is produced by patriarchy and capitalism. The more difficult it is to reach this standard, the better for these two, because then we feel insecure with our appearance, we develop low self-esteem, submitting ourselves to aesthetic procedures as well as excessive and unnecessary consumption of a series of products. A conclusion that is practically instantaneous would be the description of the aesthetic qualities currently understood and extolled as beautiful, explained by the physical attributes of individuals considered beautiful by society in general, constantly conveyed by the media.

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 "if whales returned to their pre-commercial whaling numbers, their gigantic breathing would store as much carbon as 110,000 hectares of forest."

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 "if whales returned to their pre-commercial whaling numbers, their gigantic breathing would store as much carbon as 110,000 hectares of forest."

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Chapter 2: Breathe

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Despite an international ban on commercial whaling since 1986, the animals are still being hunted and killed across the world’s oceans, with devastating impacts on global populations.

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 "In the US, the state shackles prisoners giving birth, and takes children away from prisoners almost immediately."

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 "In the US, the state shackles prisoners giving birth, and takes children away from prisoners almost immediately."

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Chapter 3: Remember

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Motherhood in prison - Revista Periferias

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This article emerges from community action performed by the collective Pájarx entre Púas, which is made up of women and people of dissident genders who are currently incarcerated, were previously incarcerated, activists and artists. Inspired by feminist art-ivism and action based investigations, we united to question the structures of (in)justice and punishment in this society, […]

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"folks with endometriosis or who walk with canes or who live with other chronic shapes of tilt and pain... I kayaked for a week... I thought about how between each vertebra there is a story pinched and breathing."

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"folks with endometriosis or who walk with canes or who live with other chronic shapes of tilt and pain... I kayaked for a week... I thought about how between each vertebra there is a story pinched and breathing."

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Chapter 4: Practice

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Bloody capitalism and the cash flow of the menstrual cycle

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Once they thrived on taboos and shame. Now period-product manufacturers are finding new ways to flourish in this era of period activism – but products aren’t the end of the story.

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 "Like that move where you leap out of your situation, arch your body fantastically, then splash down where you were, more aware of your roundness."

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 "Like that move where you leap out of your situation, arch your body fantastically, then splash down where you were, more aware of your roundness."

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Chapter 7: Be Present

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By emerald faith
Alexis De Veaux's JesusDevil is exemplary of Black queer feminist literary work oriented toward Black freedom - nestled in the beauty and complexity of Black queer being.

Alexis De Veaux was born and raised in Harlem, the product of two merging streams of Black history in New York City -immigrants from the Caribbean on her mother's side and migrants from North Carolina on her father's side -who settled in Harlem in the early decades of the 20th century. The second of eight children, that history was embedded in her mother's view of life: "You got three strikes against you. You poor, you black, and you female." But Alexis was drawn to the world of words and books, and literature soon became the means by which she re-imagined the world her mother understood.

The social movements of the 1960s, and the Black writers associated with them, had a determining impact. Alexis began to envision the possibilities of living as a writer. In the early 1970s, she joined the writer's workshop of the Frederick Douglass Creative Arts Center in Harlem. The workshop was run by the late writer Fred Hudson. Under his guidance she won first place in a national Black fiction writers' contest (1972); published her first children's book, (1973); and the fictionalized memoir, (1973). By the end of the 1970s, Alexis's reputation as a writer bridged multiple genres: fiction, children's literature, playwriting and poetry.

In the ensuing decades, the tensions between the Black Arts Movement, an emerging Black feminist movement, and, later, the Third World Gay and Lesbian Liberation Movement, were the backdrop for Alexis's writing. Her work began to be defined by two critical concerns: making the racial and sexual experiences of Black female characters central to her work, and disrupting boundaries between forms. In 1980 she published , an award-winning biography of jazz great Billie Holiday, written as a prose poem. As a freelance writer and contributing editor for Essence Magazine in the 1980s, Alexis penned several socially relevant articles, traveling on behalf of the magazine to Zimbabwe, Kenya, and Egypt. Alexis published a second award-winning children's book, An Enchanted Hair Tale (1987) before moving to Buffalo, where she finished graduate school, earning a doctorate in American Studies in 1992. A project nearly ten years in the making, her biography of Audre Lorde, (2004) has been the recipient of several awards, including the Gustavus Meyers Outstanding Book Award (2004), the Lambda Literary Award for Biography (2004), the Hurston/Wright Foundation Legacy Award, Nonfiction (2005). She is also the author of (2014), which according to Jewelle Gomez "...speaks in a powerful and insistent cadence about things we may have forgotten: death, desire, magic and the drum beat of resilience."Her work is available in English, Spanish, Dutch, Japanese and Serbo-Croatian.

Today, Alexis is a celebrated writer and activist recognized for her lifelong contributions to a number of women's and literary organizations. She has collaborated with the visual artist Valerie Maynard and poet Kathy Engel on the digital project, "Are You Now or Have You Ever Been Terrorized?"(available on YouTube); and co-founded with Kathy Engel, Lyrical Democracies , a cultural partnership aimed at communities interested in working with poets to enhance existing social projects.
Please note: This interview has been condensed/edited for readability. emerald faith (ef): "to live in states of being not yet in existence" - from the Preface to JesusDevil While you incorporate the above phrase as a definition of 'parable' or 'to parable,' I also read it (and other included phrases like "to suture or disembogue") as a constellation of phrases that attempt to uncover or wrestle with the queerness of Black gender. Across your writing, I'm drawn to the ways that you foreground a refusal of a kind of gender normativity or coherence through your main characters and spirit figures. This orientation in your writing feels quite distinct, particularly for writers coming out of the 70s, 80s, and 90s. Could you talk about how you came to center those particular perspectives and dis/embodiments in your writing?
Alexis De Veaux (ADV): That's a wonderful and complicated question. Let me start by saying, I have had the honor of having some longevity in my life, so I've had time to think about questions of gender in my own life and witness humans evolve around questions of gender and sexuality. I think that these are critical issues for Black people, especially for Black queer people because, for us, these are life and death questions. And, we are not only framing the questions, but modeling the answers in the lives that we live. So, I think it's imperative that when we think about this question, we also interrogate what it means to be Black and "human" because those of us in "Black skin" have not been considered human because we were owned through chattel slavery, stereotyped as animals - it goes on and on. We've never had the distinction of being human vis-à-vis whiteness. It's important for those of us occupying these spaces of Black and queer to nuance and interrogate these notions [of gender and sexuality] and also dispel notions of Blackness as being this or that - to also move away from the idea of monolithic Blackness and look toward Blackness as occupying multiple realities and spaces.

As my work has evolved and matured, I am looking at myself, but I'm also looking at all of us who wear the mantles of Blackness, and thinking about how we are evolving, how it is now different from, as you've identified, the 1970s and the importance of radicalizing blackness. We're not in the 1970s, we're not in the 1960s, and yet we stand on those shoulders, and we stand on those ideas, but it is our responsibility to push them, to push them toward freedom, which is something we don't yet have. When I talk about living in a state that's not yet in existence, I want to imagine freedom. We've had these legislative moments, for example, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Act, et cetera. But obviously those have not ushered forth freedom. Black people are not free. And I'm not saying that some things haven't changed, I'm just saying we're not free.

ef: That's helpful - when I was reading for my preliminary exams, yours and Sharon Bridgforth's, as well as Randall Kenan's work really struck me. came out in 2004 I think, but y'all were participating in and/or coming out of the 70s/80s/90s and complicating Black gender in your writing. And that feels important, I think, to insist on unsettling and messifying Black gender in our literature, and I believe our texts will be all the richer because of it. Kenan's work in ef: I hear you saying that, in doing the work, that means expanding on what might have been seeds or limitations in order to account for our current conditions and the different kinds of experiences and positionalities that have emerged in their wake. Part of my question was informed by the various discourses that surround Black lesbian feminism of the 70s/80s/90s - I think your work and Sharon Bridgforth's work, among others, are emblematic of how our elders can and do grow with us in thought. I don't believe that the people whom I consider Black, queer, literary, or otherwise, elders are not growing with me. was a bit different, but similar in some ways as he was interrogating the human/animal distinction.
ADV: I love that you raised him up. He was such a light for us. He came like a comet, he came, he fled - he left relatively early in life when we think about life spans today. And yet he left us things to think about. They always leave us with something to think about - when people are quoting Audre Lorde, James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, whomever they are quoting, they are quoting what that person left us to think about and left us to do the work of.

ADV: And this is what we mean by inhabiting another world, just essentially inhabiting another way of being. Everything is possible, and we must understand what we mean by possible. If you can imagine, it can happen. To use a cliché, white people imagined being on the moon, therefore they got there. You know what I'm saying? Cause' they imagined that possibility, and they made that possibility happen. In our own racialized histories - Harriet Tubman imagined her freedom, and that's how she got there. And then she imagined that she could free other people. So, she went back into those unfree spaces multiple times, risking capture, but she imagined that she could bring people to freedom. So, I imagined that Black bodies can exist in ways beyond enslavement, in ways beyond ownership, in ways that are beyond binaries. I imagine that that is possible. So I'm writing towards those possibilities. I'm writing towards those other worlds. I'm writing towards the ways in which Blackness can exist beyond white supremacist notions of Blackness.

ef: "tenderness of cosmic poetry" - from JesusDevil
Across your writing (thinking specifically about your interview with Claudia Tate in , your short story "The Sisters" in , your discussion with Judy Scales-Trent called "Conversations", also in) this notion of inheritance in a broader sense or cross-generational connection is significant. In a literary sense, to whom do you consider yourself an heir? Who do you draw on or engage in cross-generational and/or ancestral communion, and why are they critical to your Black lesbian feminist literary lineage?

ADV: I know that this sounds cliché, but I really do believe that I am an heir of the first writings that came out of Black people in the so-called New World. I'm thinking of people like Phyllis Wheatley, for example, Frances Harper. That whole line of Black women who were writing in the 19th century during and after slavery. Am I writing the way they were writing? No, but I'm writing in that lineage. I am Black and female-identified. I am coming out of very specific socio-historical realities. I understand the position of Black females in this culture, and I understand the things that we have worked towards, both in terms of politics of respectability and in terms of more radical visions of who we can be. I also understand that I am not the first queer person - that this generation of Black and queer people are not the first, that we also extend and are heirs of those who came before us and who also were probably enslaved. I am famous for sharing a conversation that speaks to this point. I was having a conversation with my spouse, Sokari Ekine, who is a Nigerian visual artist. And I said something about my ancestors not being queer, and she looked at me and said, "how do you know?"

And with that question, I had to open up - I had to realize that I don't know. But the possibility was there. That's what excited me - I more than likely have in my particular family lineage, going back to the period of enslavement, same gender loving people, however they identified themselves, however they costumed themselves, however they presented themselves publicly. I am an heir of all of that. I also come from the people that I draw on. In terms of engaging in cross-generational or ancestral communion - people like June Jordan, Toni Cade Bambara , and Toni Morrison . These were people that I knew, and they had an impact on me. People like James Baldwin , whom I only met once in life, but when I met him, he turned me around. People like the visual artist, Valerie Maynard , who passed away last year, who was 85. She was an amazing artist. She actually raised me as a younger artist. She taught me to see - not just to look - but to see. And the difference between looking and seeing, being that one is passive looking. Whereas seeing means that you go into - put yourself in. And there are scores of Black women - Ntozake Shange is among them. There are Black women writers who came out of the 1970s who are no longer on this planet who raised me up, and therefore I am descended from them. I also have contemporary people that I feel descended from. I feel descended from Alexis Pauline Gumbs , for example. I feel descended from people like Briona Simone Jones , who is the editor of the anthology .

These are writers who are coming up behind me, but who are also raising me by sharing their work with me - showing and teaching me about how they understand their lives as Black queer people. I feel blessed. I'm blessed that I live in a way that I do have a cross-generational or intergenerational reality that I don't want to be simply with people who are my age. I want to be with people who are going to help me grow. And growth is difficult, but it can also be a place of tremendous affirmation, tremendous, again, possibility.

These are people who have, in different ways, planted the bricks of themselves in me and have helped me to shape what I would call any kind of Black queer feminist literary reality. Octavia Butler, whom I have also met in life, Audre Lorde, Nelson Mandela. These are people whose names we know, but there are many people whose names we don't know. My grandmother, Ruby Moore Hill, who taught me to read the Bible as poetry. In her way, she was an influence, and she taught me to think about the stories of the spiritual - to think the spiritual engages in stories and that's how you learn from them.

ef: Your mention of Valerie Maynard and her teaching you to see is reminding me of your interview in Black Women Writers at Work when you said writers are given the responsibility of sight. It feels as though that raises the stakes when we think about writing in the context of responsibility and not simply as a skill.
ADV: Shortly after I met Baldwin, I read this quote of his, and it has always stayed with me. He said, "The role of the artist is exactly that of the lover. If I love you, I have to show you the things you do not see." And that is engaged with this notion of sight. And in fact, Baldwin and Valerie Maynard were very close friends. They grew up in the same Harlem. Their families were known to each other when they were kids. They were young people. So, it's not surprising to me then to learn that he would say this and that Valerie would teach me that.

ef: "hope is a distraction" - from JesusDevil In the introduction to JesusDevil, through a critical engagement with Kaur Aria, you write, "In other words, we can speak a language that constructs the difference between being legally freed by the state and imagining what Black freedom looks, feels, smells, tastes like every day." In what feels like an extension of this, Phil (or the narrator) says in the beginning of the book, "hope is a distraction." Do you consider hope to be an affective dimension or frame for your work? And if not, what other than hope orients your work?
ADV: In , one of the things I'm saying is that the hope project has been not only a distraction, but it has been a prevention. For example, in the 1984 Presidential Democratic campaign, Jesse Jackson's slogan was 'keep hope alive.' Hope, I have come to understand, has created a kind of passivity in Black people that I no longer find politically useful. Hope wants to supplant our rage - hope wants to arrest anger. And these are the things - anger, rage - these are the things that have driven our people to seek freedom, to run away. And hope, as I have come to understand it now, is a very interesting tool of structures of dominance. I would rather see us engage in the emotions of anger, rage, and outrage that created the rebellion in 2020 after the murder of George Floyd - that rebellion was not built on hope.

I was just listening earlier to Nina Simone singing Mississippi Goddamn , and she, in her way, addresses this question of hope. They told us to just go slow. They told us to just wash the floors and pick the cotton, and hope was engaged by those activities. But at the end of the song, she bangs the piano keys, and she says, that's it. And it's clear that she's gone through this whole historical scenario to come to a point of saying "this, and no more." So, I try very hard not to use the word hope in a contemporary sense. But again, to go to those emotions, that means that we will be pushed to be more aggressive about Black freedom. I mean, we've been struggling for Black freedom in America for over 400 years. I mean, it's just tiring just to say that sentence over 400 years. When people talk about Black Lives Matter, I'm like, think about the first African that went overboard because they thought their life mattered. They would rather live underwater - what we call deaths. They would rather live underwater than be taken. That's the beginning of this thing we call Black Lives Matter.

As I say in JesusDevil, Black lives don't matter. Black lives do not matter in this culture. Look at what has been happening more and more recently. We just don't matter because we are not human.

ef: At the end of the first parable - "Girl Negro," there's a conversation happening amongst Phil's ancestors. You write, "she never said she wanted to die. An ancestor noted, but what does she want? They queried each other. Until after tossing that question about the abundant dark matter, they all finally agreed their descendant wanted to transition, not because she wanted to die, because she wanted to be differently alive." This feels resonant with what you're saying - in thinking about this notion of refusal born from a desire for our spirits to exist otherwise than despair. Your earlier mention of Nina Simone and this conversation around rage and refusal has me thinking about what it feels like to watch Nina Simone's live performance videos - it is such a visceral and weighty externalization of absolute rage - absolute despair. It feels difficult, for me, to turn to hope from that. And this is helping me think about interrogating hope more intentionally - to consider the ways hope has been conjured and wielded against and through Black people for the sake of regulation.
ADV: And that's exactly what hope has done. It has regulated us. And I love the way you understand this work too, emerald, because I think there are several parables that deal with refusal. And I think the whole of JesusDevil can exist in a conversation about reparations not simply as what we want someone to give us. People, y'all know, y'all owe us. This is not news to y'all. Your wealth is built on our backs. And y'all know this because y'all didn't do the work. We were forced to do the work that created the wealth of this country. Y'all know, this is not news. So this whole discourse around reparations, I think it's an important one. But it should not only be done in one way, in one realm, on one plane.

We should, as Black people, Black diasporic people ask ourselves, what do we mean by reparations? How do we get reparations? Not just, again, in terms of what is due to us by this government, which this government can pay us. It's bullshit for them to be telling us they don't know how to do it, and there's no money. Come on. There are billions of dollars going to Ukraine every day. I'm not saying that the Ukrainian people don't have a just cause. That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that the United States government has priorities, and we are not one of those priorities. They owe it to us, and they owe it to Indigenous people. They created both of those moments at the same time. The slaughter of Indigenous peoples and the Transatlantic Slave Trade, both of those things were crucial to the invention of capitalism. So yes, we need to have that larger political and policy conversation around reparations, but we also need to have this every day, one-on-one, two to three, five to five, however many, or the one with the self, asking, "what do I mean by reparations? What do I mean by refusal?"

ef: "ecology of touch" - from JesusDevil Thank you so much for that. This next question is interested in writing as a multi-sensory endeavor and has two parts: If you were curating a soundtrack to JesusDevil, who would be on it and why? What other kind of sensorial experiences contributed to the writing process of JesusDevil? Whether you went on a walk, caught a sunset, and something came to you, or you were cooking something that smelled a particular way, and that conjured something in your mind.
ADV: Wonderful question because I'm building the playlist upon which JesusDevil exists for me right now. So, it would include Nina Simone's "Mississippi Goddamn," Jay-Z and Alicia Keys' "Empire State of Mind," Rihanna's "Bitch Better Have my Money," Bill Withers' "Grandma's Hands." It would include John Coltrane's "A Love Supreme," Miles Davis' "Kind of Blue," Bob Marley's "Could you be Loved?" and "Get Up, Stand Up." It would include 90s House music - the whole thing, not any one person, just the whole thing. Oh, my girl Lauryn Hill's "Everything is Everything." This is music that lives in my body, is always in my head. When I think about JesusDevil, these musics are languages and surround the writing process for the book. Whether I was listening to them as I was writing, which I generally don't do, except if it's Miles Davis or John Coltrane, because I can't listen to words If I'm also listening for words. This is music that I would be surrounded by, if not playing, then certainly again would be living in me and did live in me. "Mississippi Goddamn" can never not live in me. "Empire State of Mind" can never not live in me.

Also, I love to cook because I love to eat, so food is always present for me. I also have to take naps - resting my body is part of writing, and I understand that I'm always writing whether I actually have the pen in my hand or not. I only write with pen and paper. I don't write on the computer. That's too, in some ways, disembodied for me. I have a wonderful collection of fountain pens. I write with pen and ink. I love seeing the ink on my fingers at the end of the day. So, the ink itself, paper and ink are critical too, they are critical sensorial [tools] for me. Of course, being sexual, making love is something that is an enhancement for the work. One of the definitions of 'to parable' has to do with this notion of what my spouse calls pussying yourself, going somewhere and having an erotic experience with yourself. And that's also what writing is about. Let me see if I can find the quote...
ef: ...You write, "To tell oneself an erogenous story while engaging in acts of self-pleasure and pleasing the self as in, 'what were you doing up there in your room, pussying yourself?'"
ADV: Right, right, and that's the erotic writing pleasure. And in this work, I was more aware because I had someone commenting on it, "well, you've been up in that room a long time. What were you doing up in there?" Because I also have the door closed, and we have a practice at home when one is in their own room, that's the sacred space, and you don't just open the door and bring yourself in. You have to knock and be invited in. Otherwise it's respected that something sacred is going on, and that is not to be taken lightly. So there's a sense of the sacred as part of one's every day that I was also aware of. And seeing both the writing and the sexing and the cooking and walking with the canine in the morning, all of that, having a good glass of wine, having a good cocktail, all of that being part of the work of bringing this forward.
ef: Thank you so much for this - it's also making me think about the role of intimacy and pleasure within JesusDevil and in the Black lesbian literary archive more broadly, especially of the late 20th century.
ADV: We couldn't take it for granted. And we were growing up and had grown up during a period in which Black bodies were so maligned. We didn't have the language and the political spaces, the political movements to address our own bodies until we became, and so it's crucial for us to talk about fucking, to talk about pussy, to talk about dick, to talk about our sexual realities in ways that we could define - not in ways too often defined for us. And prior to us, I'm not saying there were never people who did, but the general realities were such that Black people who were writing had to adhere to a kind of politics of respectability that meant that they could not, or they found very ambiguous ways to talk about their bodies. I just finished reading Richard Bruce Nugent's book, Gentleman Jigger, and it's so interesting. Even as the main character talks about loving men, at any of the points in which those scenes happen or sex is alluded to, you don't see that sexual experience. And it might be that we've been obsessed with it. Speaking for myself, I am obsessed with the Black body as an intimate reality.

People like Essex Hemphill, Assotto Saint, Audre Lorde, Cheryl Clarke, Barbara Smith, Donna Woods, Bradley Johnson, Pat Parker, we had to, because that was the thing that was denied us, our own Black bodies, so we had to look at desire. There was no way we could take desire for granted because we were told, one, we didn't have it. And two, when we did have it, it was abnormal.

I just saw this documentary on Little Richard called "I Am Everything." In this documentary, we see how Little Richard who grew up gay, he understood himself as a gay boy, moves into show business, and he makes space for all kinds of people, including you and me. Before there was Sylvester, there was Little Richard. We see the tension between his sexuality and his religious experiences was such that towards the end of his life, he denounced himself as a gay person. Now, that's the tragedy of a life that was really a pioneering life.

That's the real tragedy. Imagine if Little Richard had had access to being positioned in such a way that he did not have to deny himself at the end of his life, that he could have looked at his religious convictions in a different way. One that wasn't either/or - either you love men or you love Jesus, but one that was both/and. We grow and build on Little Richard's experience. You have this whole group of us, Sharon Bridgforth, Cheryl Clarke, myself, and others included, who make a point of not just outing our sexual realities, but of expressing them. This is what I call Black expressive sexualities, which are not in tension with some other condition of being that we are living.

ef: "miracoilicious marvelific magicals" - JesusDevil My next question was inspired by the above quote and the other ways you conjure language in the text. JesusDevil has a fascinating relationship with language. Throughout the text, you incorporate words that you have created and defined. This brings me to a broader question about method. If 'afiction' might be used to capture the genre of JesusDevil or the form, could you talk more about your method in constructing the text as well as how you wield language within it?
ADV: I think it's both - I think I'm pointing to a different genre and a different form. When we look at the parables, we see that they're pretty much written like poems. It's line by line pretty much not in every instance, but in 99.99% of the text, it's written in a sort of prose poetic style. There is no table of contents. When we were doing the mockup for the book, the copy editor stuck in a table of contents, and I immediately had a visceral response. I was like, "oh, no, take that out, not this. Take that out." The reader discovers each parable, we don't set them up. So I think it is both pointing toward, if not a new, but certainly a different type of fiction. It's a fiction that's driven by a different set of values, clearly.

When I think about my work, the life of my work, and over the course of my life, I've always been interested in playing with forms. I've always been interested in something that might be called experimental. I don't call it experimental, but my work has been identified as such, because I'm always thinking about, even when it looks like I'm working within the form, I'm also doing something else - always. That's just my creativity, that's just my imagination. The thing with language in JesusDevil that I was particularly forwarding is that we can name it ourselves. Preach Queen [a character in the text] says this in one of the parables. When we want to, we just make some shit up. We just make up a new word. And when you look at American culture, and in some ways, global culture, you see that what comes out of Black people's mouths becomes the new language. When we get tired of it, we come up with something else. So it's an important way that we express ourselves, that we take this language that is called English, and we bend it out of shape from time to time, and that language is what we agree on.

It's not something that we simply have to swallow. It's what we agree on. So if we agree on a word like miraculicious, then it is. So, I think that's an important, very, very important intervention here in JesusDevil, is to speak to language and to speak to Black people's abilities to invent and refresh language. As Preach Queen says, we prefer the dynamic to the fixed.

ef: Thank you for that. My last question goes back to . You wrote about the difficulty you sometimes experienced getting your writing placed in Black publications. Could you share a bit about your experience as a writer and contributing editor for Essence Magazine? What, if anything, was unique about Essence as a Black cultural platform that made it possible for you to write for them in the 80s?
ADV: It was a defining moment for me working at Essence Magazine. I worked there from 1978 to 1991, I think it was. The piece on Nelson Mandela when he was released from prison in 1990 may have been the last piece. For one, it was a period of great growth for me as an emerging writer, 1978 to 1990, 1991. And two, there were two factors of Essence Magazine that made my presence as the first poetry editor and then contributing writer and then contributing editor there possible. One was Susan Taylor, who was the Editor in Chief of the magazine, and two was Cheryll Green . Cheryl Green was my direct editor. Cheryll was just an amazing human being. Very generous, very, very Black, very political in her thinking, and understood that there were uses for a Black women's beauty magazine that went beyond what color lipstick to wear and how to please your man.
ef: Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me Alexis, I can't wait for JesusDevil to make its way into the world!
Susan Taylor, I think, trusted us as a team. She was a supporter of my work at large, and she trusted Cheryl and I as a team. Whenever the magazine wanted to do something that had to do with the social or political, I would be assigned that because they saw in me someone who could handle those things. Cheryl and I used to tease each other that we were sort of the underground, we were the hidden guerilla workers. We were like this army of two. There were maybe a dozen essays that I wrote over that time that gave the magazine a kind of legitimacy beyond what color lipstick to please your man? What's the best thing to cook for dinner? That gave the magazine and us as Black women, a broader landscape on which to think about who we were. And too, Essence Magazine had an incredible readership, like a couple million people a month, 2 to 3 million people. I had this amazing platform on which I wrote about coming out, or Haitian refugees, or going South or HIV/Aids. And I would be being read essentially by this enormous market of Black women readers who also, I learned this in years later, would save and pass those issues on to their daughters. I met young women who would say, "oh, my mother gave me your article on such and such and such." It was an intergenerational readership of the ideas that Cheryl Green, Susan Taylor, and I were forwarding. For me as a writer, it was an incredible platform. I was never once second guessed or doubted about why writing for "women's magazine" was a legitimate platform through which to articulate these ideas about Blackness.

To pre-order JesusDevil, please visit:
To learn more about the work of Alexis De Veaux, please visit:
About the author: emerald faith (they/them) is an English PhD Candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where they also received their master's degrees in English and Afro-American studies. Their research interests include 20th century African American literature, Black queer literatures, Black queer theory, and Black feminisms. They are currently an editorial fellow at JSTOR Daily. You can follow them on Twitter at @emeraldfaith. You can follow them on Twitter at @emeraldfaith.

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Galactic Black: Dreaming in Tongues and the Black Otherwhere - An Interview with Alexis De Veaux - Black Women Radicals

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Alexis De Veaux's JesusDevil is exemplary of Black queer feminist literary work oriented toward Black freedom - nestled in the beauty and complexity of Black queer being.

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"Is it possible to untangle the consequences of centuries of rapacious greed?"

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"Is it possible to untangle the consequences of centuries of rapacious greed?"

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Chapter 12: End Capitalism

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Animal Equality | International Animal Protection Organization

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The deaths of fish are so great that they are measured by the ton

Watch Video

Most of the fish eaten today are raised inland or on ocean-based aquafarms, spending their entire lives confined in tightly packed environments. In the factory farm industry, fish suffer for up to two years in water that has high levels of ammonia and nitrates.

It is common that groups of fish will become infested with parasites which feed on the gills, organs, and blood of fish. Bacterial infections also run rampant.

Commercial fishing is cruelty to animals on a colossal scale, killing nearly a trillion animals worldwide every year. Ships the size of football fields use techniques such as longlining and gill nets.

In longlining, ships unreel up to 50 miles of line, each with hundreds of thousands of baited hooks. Gill nets, which range from 300 feet to seven miles in length, create large walls of nets that fish are unable to see. They inadvertently swim into them and many will suffocate or bleed to death.

In the United States, fish are not covered by the Humane Slaughter Act. This results in a wide variety of cruel slaughter methods dependent on industry, company, and species.

Fish are usually removed from the water and left to suffocate and die. They desperately attempt to escape as their gills collapse preventing them from being able to breathe. Larger animals, such as tuna and swordfish, are usually clubbed to death. This often leads to an animal being injured but regaining consciousness and the process having to be repeated several times.

farm raised fish in US

Industrial fishing and aqua farming both have environmental impacts. Factory farming of fish can lead to toxic water conditions. Ammonia, nitrates, and parasites all have severe consequences.

Industrial-scale fishing operations have similarly devastating effects on the environment. Commercial fishing operations often use giant trawlers which scrape up fish - and everything else - off the ocean floor. This results in as much as 40 percent of the global catch is discarded overboard as bycatch.

Consuming fish and other sea animals can pose serious health risks. Many fish, including tuna, swordfish, shark, and mackerel, are consistently high in mercury, which can harm the nervous system of a fetus or young child. Contaminants sometimes found in fish, such as dioxins and PCBs, have been linked to cancers and reproductive problems.

Those who consume fish ingest up to 11,000 tiny pieces of plastic every year, according to a study at Plymouth University. Though the long-term health effects of this are not yet known, researchers think this could be leading to various health issues, including inflammation and muscular degeneration.

Italy

In June 2012, Animal Equality went underwater to document the cruel and bloody slaughter of tuna in Italy.

Our investigators went underwater and spent several days on boats off the island of San Pietro managing to film and photograph the natural behavior of tuna fish underwater, as well as their grievous plight: Bluefin tuna are brutally torn from the ocean and pulled on to boats to then be violently struck with harpoons. They struggle, choke and bleed to death.

Animal Equality's footage appeared on Spanish and Italian media, including a piece on Italian national paper "La Repubblica." The footage was also featured in the awarded documentary Cowspiracy.

Join forces with Animal Equality as a volunteer in your area. Whether online or at events, you can help spread awareness of the harsh reality fish face in the cruel fishing industry. Distribute leaflets, research, write texts or participate in our events in your area today!

Participate as volunteer

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The Fish Industry: Cruelty on a Massive Scale

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Watch Video Most of the fish eaten today are raised inland or on ocean-based aquafarms, spending their entire lives confined in tightly packed environments. In the factory farm industry, fish suffer for up to two years in water that has high levels of ammonia and nitrates.

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 "I wonder if the toxicity of the slave trade and its impact on the ocean have been under-reported?"

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 "I wonder if the toxicity of the slave trade and its impact on the ocean have been under-reported?"

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Chapter 13: Refuse

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SEA Education Association campus, Woods Hole, MA Sunny, 70˚ F
I'm so grateful to be a part of this experience, and it's been an amazing journey so far but it's been hard to shake the images and words of our Mystic Seaport Visit. I'm in school thinking about the future of Earth, and The Mystic Seaport Museum seems to be stuck in the past in the worst way possible. If I may,

I'd like to share my thoughts with you.
"The Mystic Seaport Museum: A Dark Symbol of Settler Colonialism"
As a citizen of Cherokee Nation, I understand the legacy of America all too well. Many would rather not confront the country's history of colonialism, suffering, mass displacement, and the genocide of Native Americans. Yet, many of us have been at the forefront, calling for Americans to face this painful truth. Today, African Americans, Native Americans, and other ethnic minorities, along with our allies, have stood against symbols of the past, like Confederate statues. Others, however, argue that preserving such artifacts is crucial for future generations to remember and avoid repeating past atrocities. Institutions like museums play a key role in this effort to "preserve history." Yet, there is often a troubling loss of focus on the true meaning behind this preservation. What part of American history are we really holding onto? Upon closer inspection, it becomes clear that many prefer to selectively remember history. They look back with rose-colored glasses, ignoring the harsh realities of past injustices. A recent visit to a museum revealed that many of these establishments, which claim to be beacons of cultural preservation, still obscure the darker sides of American history.
The Museum Unveiled: A Dark Symbol
I recently visited the Mystic Seaport Maritime Museum, a renowned institution located in the picturesque coastal town of Mystic, Connecticut. The museum is celebrated for its vast collection of historic ships, artifacts, and exhibits that highlight America's maritime prowess. For many, walking through the museum evokes a sense of nostalgia, celebrating the country's proud maritime heritage.

But for someone like me, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, the romanticized veneer scarcely conceals the darker truths behind this grandeur. Each year, countless visitors pass through the museum, unaware of the troubling legacy it represents. While some view this era as one of bold exploration, trade, and economic prosperity under challenging conditions, I see it as a monument to a far more sinister history-a history marked by settler colonialism, the transatlantic slave trade, predatory capitalism, exploitation, the massacre of Native Americans, and the hunting to near extinction of entire ocean species.
The "Hidden" Legacy
The Mystic Seaport Museum claims to preserve American maritime history, but it also represents a broader, often concealed, legacy. Many people celebrate seafaring as a vital step toward human progress, trade, and the founding of America. But would they feel the same pride if they truly understood that it also paved the way for the colonization of North America and the widespread displacement of Indigenous peoples? When European settlers arrived, they claimed lands through violence, displacing the Native tribes who already lived there. Often, they relied on superior weaponry and deception, pretending to be explorers while their real intent was conquest.

It's deeply unsettling to me that the ships, maps, and artifacts so highly regarded at the Mystic Seaport Museum were instruments of colonial expansion. These vessels were not merely tools for exploration but symbols of conquest, used to map new territories and justify the violent displacement of Indigenous communities under the guise of concepts like manifest destiny. For example, the museum's exhibit on the Amistad, a ship tied to the slave trade, highlights just how these vessels were part of a larger system of oppression. Yet many visitors look upon them with admiration, ignoring their darker legacy, which is deeply troubling because this reality is rarely acknowledged.

During my visit, I felt a sense of exclusion, as though my perspective-as a descendant of people who lived on this land for thousands of years-was unwelcome. The museum, with all the resources invested in it, failed to adequately address the true history. Despite its emphasis on sea vessels and maritime accomplishments, there was a glaring absence of the broader, more painful truth. The only acknowledgment of this history, the "Entwined" exhibit, was tucked away in a small, dark, windowless building. To me, this placement spoke volumes about how the museum regards African American and Native American histories-as if they should remain hidden, out of sight, to avoid confronting the harsh realities of the past.
The Slave Trade
The displacement and killing of Indigenous peoples in America is often regarded as one of the most deplorable aspects of the country's history, but slavery stands alongside it in its cruelty. The maritime industry played a central role in the Transatlantic Slave Trade, with ships-many of which are now admired in museums-being the very vessels that transported Native Africans from Africa to a life of suffering and death in America.

It is deeply troubling that museums promoting themselves as centers for shipbuilding, whaling, and maritime exploration often neglect to address this grim history. By focusing on maritime accomplishments, they overlook the fact that many of these ships were integral to a brutal trade where Black people were treated as commodities, condemned to lives of enslavement or worse. Many museum visitors remain unwilling to confront the uncomfortable truths about the role of these vessels in America's shameful past.

Equally disappointing is the lack of culturally sensitive voices to provide proper context regarding the intersection of seafaring and slavery. Even at the museum's Amistad replica, the guide failed to give a tour or adequately discuss the ship's connection to the slave trade, as if trying to gloss over its dark historical significance.
Misguided Capitalism
As someone studying with an organization dedicated to environmental preservation, I can't help but view the legacy this museum represents as extending beyond historical exploitation to environmental degradation, a clear consequence of unchecked capitalism. The museum's most popular exhibit, focused on whaling and seafaring vessels, particularly troubled me. As a Native American and environmentalist, I was aghast as I witnessed the celebration of whaling-a practice that was devastating to ocean ecosystems and had far-reaching consequences. These whaling ships were built using timber from old-growth forests, trees that were never replaced. The ships then set out to hunt magnificent whales, driving some species to the brink of extinction. In an era where we are well aware of the environmental costs, how can the museum be so out of touch?

I find it appalling that whaling is framed as a "success story" without acknowledging the environmental cost, which often remains an afterthought. The economic drive for whale oil fueled a relentless pursuit of profit, pushing various whale species toward extinction. The impact of whaling rippled through ocean ecosystems-some of which took decades to recover, while others still struggle as endangered species. The museum glorifies activities like whaling as examples of human ingenuity and perseverance, but this does not excuse the devastation inflicted on marine life and ecosystems.

The issues of exploitation extend beyond whaling and its environmental consequences. Indentured servitude was common practice, and while merchants and shipowners made vast fortunes, those doing the labor suffered. Yet the museum celebrates seafaring as an integral part of American history, glossing over the harsh realities of exploitation.

During the tour, I was struck by the tone-deaf attitude of the museum. For example, the museum wanted to maintain the Sabino as a coal-powered ferry. We were told they were searching for an engineer to maintain its coal-powered state for the sake of "historical accuracy." As an environmental scientist, I was baffled-how could they think demonstrating a coal-fired engine was a good idea in the present day? We would have been far more unimpressed if they had told us the ship's steam engine had been retrofitted with an electric one and that the museum, in an effort to reach net zero, had installed a windmill and solar panels.

We never heard a detailed history of the First Nation, Mashantucket Pequot. It left me wondering-why couldn't the museum have a member of the Mashantucket Pequot tribe share the history of their own people?

Additionally, no one from the museum mentioned the 10,000-year-old wetland that was destroyed when Mystic was first settled. We only learned about this ancient wetland from a marine biologist, while sitting in a parking lot across the street from the museum.
Responsibility and Conclusion
I understand the importance of remembering history, and that's why museums play such a crucial role-they have the power to shape how people perceive the past and, ultimately, create a better future. That's why my recent visit to the Mystic Seaport Museum left me unimpressed. The museum failed to acknowledge the darker chapters of history, choosing instead to focus solely on the positives. Their narrow emphasis on the "glorious days" of sailing glosses over the harmful impacts of that era.

In hindsight, confronting the destruction and exploitation tied to the artifacts on display-rather than ignoring it-would benefit the museum far more. It could attract an audience that's willing to engage with the uncomfortable truths of history, leading to a deeper, more meaningful understanding of the past. By understanding the past as a whole, we not only prevent its repetition but also offer later generations hope for a more just and sustainable future.

ᏙᏓᏓᎦᎾᎵᎢᎦ (Dodadaganeli'i). We're still here.

Jeff Becko, Columbia University

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A Dark Symbol of Settler Colonialism - Sea Education Association

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"But hundreds of years ago whiteness turned against them, when humans gave whiteness another meaning. Operationalized that whiteness for money and coats." 

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"But hundreds of years ago whiteness turned against them, when humans gave whiteness another meaning. Operationalized that whiteness for money and coats." 

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Chapter 16: Stay Black

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"That same military that at best stands by amidst assassinations of the activists, especially Black and Indigenous, activists and visionaries who oppose the corporate harm of the local environment and the exploitation of their people."

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"That same military that at best stands by amidst assassinations of the activists, especially Black and Indigenous, activists and visionaries who oppose the corporate harm of the local environment and the exploitation of their people."

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Chapter 17: Slow Down

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As wildfires and extreme temperatures rage across the planet, sea temperature records tumble and polar glaciers disappear, the scale and speed of the climate crisis is impossible to ignore. Scientific experts are unanimous that there needs to be an urgent clampdown on fossil fuel production, a major boost in renewable energy and support for communities to rapidly move towards a fairer, healthier and sustainable low-carbon future.

Many governments, however, seem to have different priorities. According to climate experts, senior figures at the UN and grassroots advocates contacted by the Guardian, some political leaders and law enforcement agencies around the world are instead launching a fierce crackdown on people trying to peacefully raise the alarm.

"These defenders are basically trying to save the planet, and in doing so save humanity," said Mary Lawlor, the UN special rapporteur on human rights defenders. "These are people we should be protecting, but are seen by governments and corporations as a threat to be neutralised. In the end it's about power and economics."

Climate and environmental justice groups report a significant increase in draconian, and often arbitrary, charges for peaceful protesters as part of what they claim is a playbook of tactics to vilify, discredit, intimidate and silence activists.

The Guardian has also found striking similarities in the way governments from Canada and the US to Guatemala and Chile, from India and Tanzania to the UK, Europe and Australia, are cracking down on activists trying to protect the planet.

The legal contexts vary, but the charges - such as subversion, illicit association, terrorism and tax evasion - are often vague and time-consuming to disprove, while a growing number of countries, including the US and UK, have passed controversial anti-protest laws ostensibly intended to protect national security or so-called critical infrastructure such as fossil fuel pipelines.

The systematic criminalisation of environmental defenders is not new. Natural resources on Indigenous land have long been exploited, driving big profits for some but also fuelling violence and inequality.

Experts say the Marlin mine in Guatemala was one of the earliest documented cases of a transnational corporation - and its state allies - weaponising the legal system against environmental defenders. Since then, the Inter American Commission on Human Rights has repeatedly condemned what it describes as the alarming rise in the misuse of criminal justice systems against environmental, land and other human rights defenders across Latin America.

"Criminalising defenders encourages collective stigma and sends off an intimidating message," the IACHR said last year.

According to Lawlor, this criminalisation of environmental protestors has since become a global phenomenon, and is now the most common tactic used to silence and discredit defenders.

"At its core it's about maintaining the power structures in place. This is true regardless of whether it's a dictatorship, democracy or a corrupt narco state, and regardless of the state's professed commitment to human rights, protecting the environment and combating climate change," she said.

"Smearing defenders as lawbreakers or anti-development distracts from the cause and changes the narrative ... What's clear is that states learn from each other."

'Really terrifying'

Climate activism is well and truly back. Paolo Gerbaudo, an academic at King's College London who studies social movements, said that before the 2008 financial crash, the climate emergency felt like "the challenge of our time". But it "largely slipped off the social and political agenda" as activists such as Occupy turned their attention to opposing austerity policies and pushing for global economic reforms.

As scientific warnings grew ever more dire during the 2010s, there was a deepening feeling that traditional environmental campaigning was failing, and that politicians were not delivering - with potentially catastrophic consequences.

It was into this context that more direct action, and more radical environmental protest groups emerged. Over the past five years, the UK has been not only at the forefront of these new forms of non-violent activism, but also novel means of silencing it.

In 2019, Extinction Rebellion paralysed London traffic for days with an unprecedented carnival of climate protest, then the following year turned their attention on the press with blockades of newspaper printing sites. In 2021, as Covid pandemic restrictions lifted, Insulate Britain pioneered the tactic of disruptive roadblocks with small groups, polarising the public but forcing home insulation on to the political agenda. Just Stop Oil expanded those tactics last year, turning them on to the UK's oil infrastructure, and widening their targets to a series of headline-grabbing protests at sporting and cultural events.

New groups have since sprung up in Canada, Australia, the US, Italy and Germany - such as the Sunrise Movement, Climate Defiance, Fridays for Future, Last Generation and the Tyre Extinguishers - which imitate the non-violent but disruptive tactics of Insulate Britain, picking a single demand and protesting until it is met or the activists are jailed. The focus and methods vary, from disrupting shareholder meetings, sit-ins and roadblocks to damaging artwork and SUVs, and confronting politicians and academics with fossil fuel ties at their homes and workplaces.

There are also examples of grassroots opposition to fossil fuel pipelines, mines, petrochemical plants and other polluting projects ballooning into global movements, such as the 2016 Dakota Access pipeline protests on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in South Dakota. Protests against multinational banks financing the East African crude oil pipeline (EACOP), which threatens to pollute vital water sources and displace thousands of families and farmers in Uganda and Tanzania, have taken place in around 20 countries.

But as such protests have become more direct, organised and disruptive - which activists say reflects the urgency of the situation - states have responded increasingly aggressively.

Gerbaudo said repression against climate activists was growing: "Punishment for collective actions is becoming ever more draconian, as a means to discourage them and criminalise them ...... This is a testament to the way in which the political class, while having few practical responses in store to the demands of social movements, all too often resorts to simply repressing these very demands and the groups and individuals voicing them."

In Australia, Human Rights Watch has found that the authorities "are disproportionately punishing climate protesters in violation of their basic rights to peaceful protest". Several states, including Tasmania, New South Wales and Victoria, have passed or are trying to pass laws that can punish peaceful environmental protesters with hefty fines and jail time. The laws are accompanied by an expansion in the discretionary powers available to police such as on-the-spot fines and onerous bail conditions.

In the US, 21 states have passed critical infrastructure protection laws since the Standing Rock protests, and dozens of activists have been arrested and/or charged in the past five years. Many of the states' legislation shares language drafted by the American Legislative Exchange Council (Alec), a rightwing group funded by fossil fuel companies.

In the UK, after the surge in protests in 2019, rightwing opinion formers were aghast at the perceived breakdown in public order and the Conservative government responded with a plethora of new police powers to tackle what it called the "guerrilla protest tactics" of the new climate movement.

The 300-page Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 significantly increased the power of the state to regulate protest and activism. Police were given extensive new powers to ban non-violent protests considered too noisy or disruptive - with the definition of disruption left up to the government to decide. Penalties for obstructing the highway - a key tactic of XR and its offshoots - were increased to potentially unlimited fines and six-month prison sentences, even if police had already closed the road.

A new statutory offence of causing a public nuisance was also created - replacing its old common law equivalent and specifically targetting protests - with offenders facing potential 10-year jail sentences.

The legislation followed a report by the rightwing thinktank Policy Exchange entitled Extremism Rebellion. It claimed that non-violent environmental campaigners and campaigns could stray into terrorism, and called for new laws to curtail them. The government adopted its proposals in the new act. Investigative journalists later reported that Policy Exchange had previously received funding from energy interests including ExxonMobil, Drax and Energy UK.

Amnesty described the passage of the "deeply authoritarian" act as a "dark day for civil liberties in the UK", but the ink had barely dried on the statute books when the government followed it up with a second anti-protest law. The Public Order Act, passed by parliament earlier this year, includes orders that can ban named individuals from joining protests, and an expansion of police powers to stop and search people on the grounds they might be planning to commit a protest-related offence - including many newly created by the bill - as well as powers for "suspicionless" searches.

It also created new offences of "locking on", where protesters chain or glue themselves to immovable objects or each other, going to protests equipped to lock on, obstructing major transport works, interfering with national infrastructure and tunnelling - all tactics used by climate activists.

Restrictions have been placed on defendants in a series of trials that prevented them from mentioning the climate crisis, insulation, fuel poverty or their motivations as part of their defence.

David Armiak, the research director at the Center for Media and Democracy, said the new UK and US legislation was "part of a last-ditch, industry-backed effort to protect its profit model in the face of public demands to turn to renewables and divest from fossil fuels as the climate emergency intensifies".

"It is likely not a coincidence that Policy Exchange and Alec have both been members of the Atlas Network, a global network of rightwing non-profits successfully pushing an anti-regulation, pro-corporate policy agenda worldwide that is fuelled with cash from Charles Koch, Exxon and dark money conduits."

Michel Forst, the UN special rapporteur on environmental defenders, said: "What is happening in the UK is really terrifying. What can people do against these new laws that have been introduced? What are they supposed to do?

"You can see some countries are looking at the UK examples with a view to passing similar laws in their own countries, which will have a devastating effect for Europe."

He said there seemed to be coordinated state action from Germany to Italy and from Spain to Denmark to penalise and crack down on protesters, and that he had seen growing anxiety and stress among young climate activists and lawyers across the continent first hand.

"It has clearly had a chilling effect ... My concern is that there is no clear response from the international community on what's happening in our countries," he said.

Lawlor said: "Criminalisation is the most common tactic used against human rights defenders, because it's so easy and has such a big impact."

Europe follows UK's lead

Authorities in Germany launched an organised crime investigation into Letze Generation or Last Generation, part of the same transnational A22 climate activist network as Just Stop Oil, after months of disruptive protests by the group. They responded to the group's repeated roadblocks and direct action by launching dawn raids on its members' homes and wiretapping their phones and shutting down its website.

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Italy also used anti-mafia laws to target its own A22 affiliate, Ultima Generazione, also Last Generation, mobilising its Digos counter-terrorism unit to investigate the group. After a string of actions around the country's ancient cultural icons, the government passed a law in July bringing in fines of up to €40,000 (£35,000) for protesters who deface or damage monuments.

Police in the Netherlands detained nearly 3,000 climate protesters in a single weekend this summer after they blocked the A12 highway through The Hague. Police turned water cannon on the 10,000 who joined the protest, some of them in swimwear in expectation of the tactic. It was a repeat of a similar episode in May, when 1,500 people were arrested in a single day for blocking the same road. In August, seven supporters were convicted of sedition for calling on people to join a protest on the A12 in March.

Similarly heavy charges have been levelled against Sweden's A22 affiliate, Återställ Våtmarker, or Restore Wetlands. The group said members had been held in prison for five weeks after their first week of action last year. As many as 25 have since been convicted of sabotage for taking part in roadblock protests in Stockholm. "There are 14 people in jail at the moment for putting a little bit of peat in a ditch," the group's spokesperson said in early August.

But it is France, a country with longstanding tensions between the state and civil society, where some of the harshest measures have been taken against environmental protests. In June, the country's interior minister, Gérald Darmanin, took the radical step of using a law drafted to tackle extremist groups to outlaw one of the country's most popular environmental protest groups, Les Soul èvements de la Terre, or Earth's Uprisings. The group had emerged as a significant and novel force in environmental campaigning, but its use of tactics including sabotage put it on a collision course with the French state. Darmanin has denounced its supporters as "ecoterrorists".

Overall, governments have claimed that new laws and harsher penalties are necessary to protect energy infrastructure and deter increasingly disruptive protests.

A spokesperson for the UK Home Office said: "The right to protest is a fundamental part of our democracy but we must also protect the law-abiding majority's right to go about their daily lives.

"The Public Order Act brings in new criminal offences and proper penalties for selfish, guerrilla protest tactics."

The French interior ministry said local officials had the right to ban demonstrations that posed a serious risk of disturbing public order. "These one-off bans, of which there are very few in absolute terms, are not imposed because of the reason for the demonstration," a spokesperson said.

The Italian interior ministry referred to a statement from the culture minister, Gennaro Sangiuliano, in April, when he said attacks on monuments caused economic damage to the community that were expensive to clean up. "Those who cause damage must pay personally," he said.

The German interior ministry declined to comment. The Bavarian interior ministry referred the Guardian to the public prosecutor's office in Munich, which provided a statement from June in which it confirmed it had authorised the tapping of phones for six of seven Last Generation members under criminal investigation.

The Swedish interior ministry declined to comment. The Dutch ministry of justice did not respond to requests for comment.

A global phenomenon

Criminalisation does not happen in isolation. Experts say that deploying the legal system is part of a spectrum or playbook of escalating tactics deployed by corporations and their allies to divide communities, distract leaders and weaken social movements. The tactics reported by activists include online attacks, defamation, police surveillance, security deployments and violence.

In the southern US state of Georgia, the environmental activist Manuel Esteban Páez Terán was shot dead by Atlanta police during the state's crackdown on protesters opposing the construction of a sprawling police and fire training centre that will partially destroy a city forest. No officers have been charged in relation to the killing, but dozens of activists face domestic terrorism charges with bond conditions banning communication between them.

In India, environmental and other human rights defenders have faced increasingly hostile and dangerous conditions under the Hindu fundamentalist government of Narendra Modi. In the state of Tamil Nadu, police have been accused of excessive force and instigating violence against protesters opposing the expansion of a vast copper smelting plant, which in 2018 resulted in 13 deaths. Activists and NGOs in India also face arbitrary criminal charges, surveillance and frozen bank accounts, creating a "chilling effect on civil society", according to Global Witness.

A crackdown on environmental, land and climate activists - and journalists - has been documented in African countries including Mozambique, Cameroon and Egypt, as the so-called western "dash for African gas" has intensified in the wake of Russia's war on Ukraine. There are also reports of arrests, land grabs and violence against community leaders and NGOs campaigning againstthe 900-mile EACOP, which scientists say will generate 379m tons of climate-heating emissions.

Lawlor said land, environment and Indigenous rights defenders accounted for about 70% of killings of human rights activists every year.

"They are a priority for me," she said. "Most countries are talking out of both sides of their mouth. On the one hand, they say they support the fight against climate change, and they want to bring down emissions and they want to protect the environment. And on the other hand, they're just allowing companies to come in and give them licences, even though the rights that these people are trying to defend are protected in international law.

"What we're seeing is a lack of determination by states to treat climate change like a crisis. There's a total disconnect and it's all very murky."

Latin America is the deadliest region for environmental and land defenders, according to a decade of data collated by Global Witness. In Brazil, the Indigenous rights expert Bruno Pereira and the Guardian journalist Dom Phillips were murdered last year while investigating illegal fishing and mining in the Amazon.

A Guardian investigation also found that at least two dozen environmental defenders had been murdered, disappeared or jailed in Mexico and Central America in the first three months of 2023, with governments in the region widely condemned for indirect violence by licensing extractive projects without consulting communities and failing to prosecute perpetrators.

Shin Imai from the Justice and Corporate Accountability Project (JCAP) - an Ontario-based legal clinic that helps communities affected by natural resource extraction hold Canadian corporations and states to account - said the criminalisation of environmental activists was particularly chilling because it exposed the symbiotic relationship between polluting corporations and governments.

"There is very clearly an international pattern to criminalise communities in which the nexus between corporations and governments is very important ... mining and fossil fuel companies need the [host] state to criminalise defenders, and also often rely on their own government to use diplomatic influence to pressure the host state to deploy troops, pass laws, arrest activists and deny bail," said Imai, an emeritus professor at the Osgoode Hall law school in Toronto.

In other words, Shin said, acts of violence, online attacks, threats and other intimidatory tactics could be carried out against activists without state involvement, but criminalisation required lawmakers, prosecutors, police and courts to be involved - the same people and agencies we need to tackle the climate crisis and biodiversity loss.

"Across the world, the legal goal posts are being changed to make criminalising climate and environmental defenders easier in a way that violates fundamental rights and the spirit of the rule of law," he said.

'A dangerous moment'

No major fossil fuel executive is known to have been detained for their role in the climate emergency, but UN experts, lawyers and activists have documented hundreds of environmental activists being arrested and charged for peacefully protesting to save the planet.

And their time is running out. That was the stark conclusion in this year's landmark IPCC report: "There is a rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all."

It is clear that communities on the frontline of the climate crisis know this, because they are the ones dying and losing their homes and livelihoods as a result of sea-level rise, erratic rainfall patterns and scorching temperatures. It is why campaign groups and activists across the world say they are taking direct action against extractive projects by targeting fossil fuel, mining and petrochemical companies and their enablers such as banks, private equity funds and politicians through direct and sometimes disruptive action, despite the risk to their freedom and their lives.

As the UN secretary general, António Guterres, said in April: "Climate activists are sometimes depicted as dangerous radicals. But the truly dangerous radicals are the countries that are increasing the production of fossil fuels. Investing in new fossil fuels infrastructure is moral and economic madness."

The climate crisis is exposing and aggravating economic, political and racial inequalities, but eventually the hotter planet will affect everyone, everywhere. Environmental and climate activists are trying to force governments and corporations to put humanity before profits and power, which is why Lawlor and Forst say arresting Indigenous land defenders in Canada, Greta Thunberg in Sweden, clean energy advocates in Vietnam and water protectors in Guatemala and Honduras are all connected, part of the same fossil fuel playbook to block and delay meaningful action.

This is a dangerous moment globally, says Jorge Santos, the director of a Guatemala-based watchdog that monitors attacks against human rights defenders. "If we don't stop the endless extraction of natural resources, the environmental and climate destruction will continue, and we'll see more and more authoritarianism because criminalisation and violence is in the DNA of this economic model."

Over the course of the next few months, the Guardian will be reporting on the criminalisation of climate and environmental activists globally.

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How criminalisation is being used to silence climate activists across the world

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Guardian investigation finds growing number of countries passing anti-protest laws as part of playbook of tactics to intimidate people peacefully raising the alarm

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"This section argues the urgency of rest, the necessity of regeneration, and the depth rest reveals and allows."

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"This section argues the urgency of rest, the necessity of regeneration, and the depth rest reveals and allows."

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Chapter 18: Rest

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"Being overworked, exhausted and busy should not be worn as a badge of pride. Rest is integral to your own political and creative freedom"

Seasons of Spending

Capitalist society views humanity as a lump of coal; something that, if enough pressure is applied, will crystallise into a perfectly productive version of ourselves. This process of consumer-solidification - which advertising, social media and the other malicious arms of materialism present to us - is stoked in our everyday lives.

The new year kicks off, as per tradition, with an endless cycle of articles telling you to take up yoga, pledge your allegiance to Veganuary, or to go dry. It is the time of year when you look back on last year's you, scorning them for having not been productive enough to post a catalogue of your monthly 2018 achievements on Instagram.

As the year rolls on to spring, the drive to sculpt a buff bod (and a house to match) intensifies, our internal organs gearing up for the annual pre-summer purge. Once the weather heats up, another pressure rears its ugly head: the fear of missing out. Someone in your feed is undoubtedly having nicer drinks and reading better must-reads than you are. You're stuck at the desk, or sweating over someone else's perfect summer drink as you serve them in your badly air-conditioned service job. Now, as we approach autumn and winter, the uniquely curated pressures of Christmas begin to rear their heads.

24/7 Capitalism

The pressure to be continuously productive is at the very core of capitalism. The hyper-connected nature of our world has created a never-ending call to productivity, with your smartphone preventing you from ever really being off the clock. Hardt & Negri argue that "the capture of value tends to extend to all the time of life. We produce and consume in a global system that never sleeps."

The capture of value has even extended itself to self-care. Instagram feeds are filled not only with people presenting their productivity with pride, but also staged images of those 'practicing' self-care. @traitspourtraits presents a coffee pot which reassures its audience that: Your worth is not measured by your productivity. Next on the artist's page is an image of the same illustration, transplanted in sticker form onto a notebook with a pencil resting on top, with a caption linking you to the merch site. An obtusely unironic call to produce, to consume.

A Woman's Work

Second-wave feminism has long been situated in women's ability and desire to work. While women's working rights are undoubtedly important, this focus on career has been co-opted by the corporate world, which now posits feminism as the glamorous working woman on discussion panels. They wear 'sensible' heels, striking the perfect balance of smart/casual in their suit jackets and culottes. The panel is promoted on pink backdrops and gold italicised headings. They go to the gym; they eat fresh salad boxes every day; their freelancing professions leave inordinate amounts of time for luxurious "self-care" rituals. They have broken through the glass ceiling and reinforced it with rose gold.

For those women who aren't the successful twenty somethings they're supposed to be now, these corporate 'feminists' send back waves of self-doubt. The feeling that you must simultaneously be productive, whilst taking time for self-care, is enforced in every glamour magazine, Hollywood drama and cosmetics commercial.

Big business may have monopolised women's goals, prioritising a desire to be on equal playing fields in the public realm. But not all feminist thinking stems from a consistent need to inhabit social spaces. For example, bell hooks outlined the importance for African-American women to create safe home spaces. Enduring racial prejudice, and having often held positions of servitude in their public working lives, hooks sees homemaking as a significant necessity: 'historically, black women have resisted white supremacist domination by working to establish homeplace'. These women fashion sites of resistance in which its occupants are 'not the subject of dehumanizing scorning'.

Fannie Sosa and niv Acosta also recognise rest as resistance. Whilst many have noted the capitalist-driven epidemic of sleep deprivation, the pair highlighted a racial sleep gap also at play.

was a two-month installation at Madrid Pride last year aimed at reclaiming rest. There manifesto reads:
A state of constant fatigue is still used to break our will. This "sleep gap" shows that there are front lines in our bedrooms as well as the streets: deficit of sleep and lack of free time for some is the building block of the "free world". After learning who benefits most from restful sleep and down time, we are creating interactive surfaces for a playful approach to investigate and practice deliberate energetic repair.

As Afro Latinx artists, we believe that reparation must come from the institution under many shapes, one of them being the redistribution of rest, relaxation, and down times.

The Need to be Busy

Facemasks and indulgent bubble baths have been rebranded as self-care. As if these small acts are what we need to make up for the lack of affordable therapy. Self-care's radical potential as an act of political warfare, highlighted by Audre Lorde, has been largely erased. But an exhausted radical is, typically, a defeated one.

Our exhaustion is created by the pressure to be constantly productive: the need to be busy. As Lafargue writes in his most powerful essays The Right to be Lazy, this furious drive for work is the 'cause of all intellectual degeneracy'. Over-productivity feeds into the capitalist growth of consumption, creating an unsatisfying circle of over-production and over-consumption that is destroying the natural world.

In her debut book, Being Numerous: Essays on Non-Fascist Life, Natasha Lennard promotes a refusal to involve oneself in the micro-fascism of Capitalist society, such as the 'authoritarian tendency of careerism'. Dismissing our status as beings of productivity, amongst other refusals, can be seen as a daily act of anti-fascist resistance.

This isn't an attempt to argue that you should go full-Marie Kondo, lock yourself in your room and sleep all day as a resistance to capitalism. Being an inconsiderate dickhead isn't going to win you any postmodern brownie points. But whilst self-care and homemaking have become tied to materialistic values, creating space and valuing rest over your productivity value is necessary. For yourself, especially as a marginalised member of society, to have a safe space to retreat when needed is essential.

Rest is integral to your own political and creative freedom. Most of us are too worn out to create in today's 24/7 society, or involve ourselves in the politics and passions we hold dear. Being overworked, exhausted and busy should not be worn as a badge of pride. Post-luxury automated communism is not around the corner, so the next time you feel as if you're lacking in motivation to produce, remember that you have the right to be lazy.
This is an updated version of an article that appeared in Goldsmith's University student magazine. The original piece can be found here: http://www.smithsmagazine.co.uk/2019/02/27/rest-as-resistance/

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Rest as Resistance: A Guidebook to 24/7 Capitalism

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"Being overworked, exhausted and busy should not be worn as a badge of pride. Rest is integral to your own political and creative freedom" Capitalist society views humanity as a lump of coal; something that, if enough pressure is applied, will crystallise into a perfectly productive version of ourselves.

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"To need ice as a barrier between you and a species of people, a segment of which would create something that destroys families, seeks to eradicate sanctuary, violates privacy and home, and call it ICE."

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"To need ice as a barrier between you and a species of people, a segment of which would create something that destroys families, seeks to eradicate sanctuary, violates privacy and home, and call it ICE."

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Chapter 19: Take Care of Your Blessings

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Aided by electronic monitoring and data mining companies that extract, aggregate, and sell personal information from tens of thousands of private and public digital databases without the consent of individuals, the Biden administration is expanding the surveillance of immigrants to unprecedented levels-stifling dissent and political organizing and sowing fear among non-citizens and civil rights advocates.

At the core of the spreading surveillance lies LexisNexis Risk Solutions, whose Accurint tool produces comprehensive dossiers with identifying information, court data, and details of relatives, associates, and social media usage of practically all U.S. residents, citizens and non-citizens alike. It also incorporates license plate reader data, which can determine where a person was at various times, and real-time information on county jails' bookings, which allows Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to apprehend people upon release.

Though the Biden administration requested an approximately $100 million cut from the fiscal year 2023 to the fiscal year 2024 budget for ICE, an agency denounced for using private contractors to abuse immigrants, both the House and the Senate proposed significant budget increases. If approved, ICE will have its largest budget, at least $9.1 billion, partly to broaden what is already the most extensive surveillance apparatus in U.S. history.

"This mass surveillance program of ICE instills fear and chills organizing political activity," said Laura Rivera, a senior staff attorney at Just Futures Law, one of the grassroots organizations at the forefront of uncovering ICE's surveillance network. "It has repercussions in all areas of life from workplaces to religious institutions to schools and homes."

Other companies have paved the way for LexisNexis Risk Solutions and the taking over of immigration enforcement by surveillance capitalism-or the mining of data to repackage and exploit it for profit without the consent of individuals, shaping their behavior as consumers and, in this case, as non-citizens.

The Canadian information conglomerate Thomson Reuters' CLEAR tool also aggregates information about practically all U.S. residents-more than 400 million names and records. Though CLEAR contracted with ICE from 2015 to 2021, Thomson Reuters has a current five-year contract with the Department of Homeland Security, which houses ICE, for more than $22 million, although allegedly not for CLEAR. The data collected by CLEAR led to " further human rights abuses," according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and after years of activists' pressure, Thomson Reuters signed the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights in 2022.

Similar concerns have not persuaded LexisNexis Risk Solutions and other data aggregators to cancel their contracts with ICE, despite its documented human rights violations. LexisNexis is selling individuals' reports to the agency based on information extracted from 10,000 different databases through a five-year contract potentially worth $22.1 million until 2026. Another corporation has been central to ICE's surveillance apparatus: Palantir, which, since 2011, provides ICE with artificial intelligence tools to create surveillance reports and has a current five-year contract for almost $96 million.

Between 2008 and 2021, ICE has spent almost $2.8 billion on data collection and data-sharing initiatives, building a domestic surveillance apparatus that rivals that of the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI), according to the Center on Privacy & Technology of Georgetown Law. In the last few years, this surveillance has expanded and decentralized.

Surveillance used to be primarily conducted by ICE's National Criminal Analysis and Targeting Center (NCATC) and by the Pacific Enforcement Response Center (PERC)-though not anymore. Similar to Thomson Reuters' CLEAR, LexisNexis Risk Solutions allows ICE field agents to obtain immediate encyclopedic information on 276 million consumers in the U.S. Court documents show that ICE's LexisNexis tools were consulted more than 1.2 million times and produced more than 300,000 reports in only seven months in 2021.

ICE agents operate in a legal gray area using the tools of a vastly unregulated industry. Immigrant communities, however, have not stopped organizing and responding, said Rivera. Just Futures Law represents three advocates and two grassroots organizations-Mijente and Organized Communities Against Deportations-in a lawsuit filed in August 2022 against LexisNexis Risk Solutions for collecting their data without consent.

"Each day that LexisNexis is allowed to continue its illegal activities, plaintiffs suffer immediate and irreparable injuries," claims the lawsuit, "including the chilling of their core constitutional rights of freedom of association and freedom of speech, violations of their rights to privacy, deprivations of the economic value of their own personal data, and injuries to their peace of mind and well-being."

Breaking immigrants' systems of support

Surveillance capitalism has contributed to creating an environment of fear among immigrants-an uncertainty about who will be targeted for detention and deportation and why, which restricts their access to essential services and their willingness to denounce abuse, say advocates.

Claudia Marchan, an immigrant rights advocate in Chicago, "felt scared" when she learned of the extent of the information that LexisNexis was collecting about her to sell it to ICE and others. As the executive director of Northern Illinois Justice for Our Neighbors and a member of the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, Marchan was also concerned for the scores of undocumented immigrants she dealt with daily.

"I felt really scared for my family members who could be at risk of being deported," she told Prism. Marchan, who emigrated from Mexico as a 4-year-old, encourages fellow immigrants to overcome their misgivings about sharing information with government officials to access public services. However, after learning that her LexisNexis report included even her full social security number without redactions, "I understand their fear," she said.

For Marchan, a plaintiff in the lawsuit against LexisNexis Risk Solutions, one of the purposes of ICE's surveillance is to paralyze immigrant communities. "How do they break down the systems of support and the organizing we have in place?" she said. "How do they make people scared? I think that is very, very intentional." Marchan and her co-plaintiffs dread that LexisNexis reports on them will make them "targets for retaliation" for their work advocating for immigrant rights, according to the complaint, and that ICE will use the "information to deport them."

ICE has a record of retaliating against immigrants who denounce mistreatment, often ending in their deportation. Aided by private contractors, ICE has used prolonged solitary confinement, medical neglect, forceful transfers, and threats of removal to silence immigrants, as Prism reported. The agency's spokespersons did not respond to a request for comment.

ICE field agents have also used database searches, such as Thomson Reuters' CLEAR, to arrest immigrants simply because they can. A bilingual teacher aide in Oregon who "matched none of the agency's stated enforcement priorities, even under [the administration of] Trump," was detained after a data aggregator yielded his personal information, according to a 2019 investigative report. Thomson Reuters did respond to a request for comment.

That power, available to field agents, is especially threatening to immigrant rights activists. Every interaction of a non-citizen with a government agency, a utility company, or a social media platform, or even their mere presence in a public space, could be used to identify them and, eventually, to detain and deport them.

"One of the horrible consequences of the system of surveillance is that the more people engage in the basic social structures that we have in this country, the more legible they become ... and thus [they] create more data points that can be used to identify, profile, find, and target them," said Alli Finn, the senior organizer and researcher at Surveillance Resistance Lab.

While LexisNexis perpetuates fear in immigrant communities, its parent company, the British multinational RELX Group, headquartered in London, announced an 9% increase in revenues in 2022. The price paid by society has been steep.

These tools, said Finn, are "deeply influencing the way that people live their lives," not only as consumers, but also as members of a democratic society. Surveillance capitalism, they said, is driving "the suppression and repression of free speech, protests, and the ability to speak out against abuses."

Skirting laws for profit

LexisNexis' contracts with ICE are budgeted through Fugitive Operations, a program created in 2003 allegedly to locate and apprehend dangerous individuals with removal orders. In an emailed response to Prism's queries, Paul Eckloff, LexisNexis Special Services' senior director of public relations, stated that the company complies with current federal policies, which "emphasize a respect for human rights, and focus on threats to national security, public safety, and security at the border." Eckloff added, "the Department of Homeland Security must use our services in compliance with these principles."

However, the vast majority of the program's apprehensions quickly became "low-priority noncriminal fugitive aliens," not "threats," showed the Migration Policy Institute in 2009. Fugitive Operations' own handbook states that its agents can detain individuals for "reasonable suspicion" they are "unlawfully present in the United States." As of Dec. 31, 66.8% of individuals held in ICE detention had no criminal record, while many more had only minor offenses, including traffic violations. Despite the data, ICE's Fugitive Operations program displays a quote on its website: "We remove criminals from our communities." Under this overblown risk, surveillance capitalism is thriving with ICE's support.

"Corporations and the state use fear very deliberately to get what they want, whether that's profit or the criminalization of marginalized groups," said Rumsha Sajid, the national field organizer on policing and surveillance at MediaJustice, a grassroots organization advocating for social justice in the digital landscape. "Surveillance is not just a threat in and of itself, it's criminalization, when every move is under a microscope and when people are surveilled more because of immigrant status or because of their race."

The Department of Homeland Security lists two additional companies as top Fugitive Operations contractors: Thomson Reuters Special Services and ThunderCat, an information technology reseller that offers to solve its "customer problems in and around the data center." A major U.S. government contractor, ThunderCat is nearing the end of a 12-year contract worth up to $6.3 billion with the Department of Homeland Security and at least two active contracts with ICE for an additional $13 million. ThunderCat's partners are LexisNexis and Thomson Reuters, Google, and Amazon, among dozens of other companies.

Data aggregators-also called data brokers-have become the backbone of immigration enforcement in the U.S. interior, even though they cross legal and ethical lines, say advocates.

LexisNexis accesses and sells information that ICE would be unable to obtain without a subpoena, court order, or other legal process, according to the Center on Privacy & Technology. "ICE's reliance on data brokers evades public scrutiny and helps the agency circumvent statutory and constitutional privacy protections," it stated in a 2022 report.

According to the Electronic Privacy Information Center, while ICE's investigators cannot directly intercept oral, wire, or electronic communication, they face no explicit restrictions for using commercially available data, which can be as invasive if not more.

In 2022, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) denounced data aggregators Venntel and Babel Street, the latter of which has a five-year contract with ICE for up to $6.5 million, for "sidestepping our Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable government searches and seizures by buying access to, and using, huge volumes of people's cell phone location information quietly extracted from smartphone apps."

The efforts by local jurisdictions to rein in ICE enforcement operations by declaring themselves sanctuaries-limiting cooperation with immigration authorities-have been circumvented by data aggregators. A 2022 report from the Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition, titled " Sabotaging Sanctuary," stated that ICE contracted data aggregator Appriss Solutions, a subsidiary of LexisNexis, the previous year for "the express purpose of getting around sanctuary laws," which means skirting ordinances, regulations, resolutions, and policies approved by more than 200 jurisdictions across the U.S.

Although 12 states in the U.S. offer some protection against data collection, Congress' attempts to regulate data aggregators have failed in the face of deep-pocketed opponents.

RELX Group-LexisNexis' parent company-spent more than $5 million in 2022 and 2023 in lobbying Congress, according to Open Secrets. The conglomerate focused significantly on the American Data Privacy and Protection Act of 2022 and the Data Privacy Act of 2023, which would have restricted the ability of private and public entities to collect and sell information and would have provided individuals the right to opt out of data collection. For its lobbying, RELX extensively used the so-called revolving door-when a former official or Congress staffer lobbies for the industry they oversaw, offering privileged knowledge and access. In 2023, 35 of the company's 50 lobbyists were "revolvers," Open Secrets' documents show.

Since at least 2014, the executive branch has attempted to regulate the data broker industry, which operates virtually without federal oversight. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) launched a " rulemaking proceeding" in 2022 that could eventually produce a national standard, while the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) announced in August its plans to develop guidelines to prevent misuse and abuse by data aggregators.

"There needs to be a reining in of data brokers who have long functioned with impunity," said Sajid. "We need federal agencies like the FTC and the CFPB to create rules to hold these corporations accountable."

Tracking immigrants' every move

Data aggregators are not the only tools ICE uses to bolster its surveillance apparatus-electronic monitoring, or, according to its official moniker, alternatives to detention (ATDs), has expanded rapidly during the Biden administration. Immigrants are electronically monitored with GPS ankle monitors or shackles and, more often, with a phone app called SmartLink, which requires non-detained individuals in immigration proceedings to check in with ICE through geolocation and voice or facial recognition. Since April, ICE launched another ATD as part of a pilot program: a wrist monitor.

As of December 2023, more than 190,000 individuals were subjected to electronic monitoring, also known as digital prison or e-carceration, more than double the figure at the end of the Trump administration. The prevalence of electronic monitoring has not meant fewer detainees, as more than 37,000 individuals in immigration proceedings remain in ICE jails. One corporation has been the primary beneficiary of ICE's expansion of electronic monitoring: GEO Group, one of the largest private prison companies in the U.S. and one of ICE's top contractors, with ongoing contracts worth up to $1.9 billion.

GEO Group is also the parent company of BI, Inc., which holds a five-year contract worth up to $2.2 billion. BI is ICE's sole provider of both ankle monitors and SmartLink, through which immigrants have to check in weekly or biweekly, causing them "immense anxiety," according to a 2023 report by the African Bureau of Immigrants and Social Affairs based on more than 180 interviews with monitored individuals.

"We are always afraid," said Juan, who is using a pseudonym to avoid affecting his asylum case. Juan is a 28-year-old immigrant from Honduras who requested asylum with his wife and their daughter in 2019 and who, after wearing an ankle monitor for almost two years, now checks in through SmartLink. Juan has lost three jobs because ICE agents "frequently change the rules." The check-in days can be switched with short notice, he told Prism, while the time of the check-in calls varies widely-from early mornings to late afternoons.

Juan said that he has received ICE calls when he had to leave his apartment during check-in days to tend to emergencies. So, he is certain that SmartLink tracks his every move, even though ICE has publicly assured that the app is "not capable of persistent tracking when loaded on a participant provided device."

Juan said he was falsely accused by ICE officers of failing to comply with the check-ins, for which he was detained for hours and threatened with deportation. "That has deeply affected me mentally because if I get deported, who will take care of my family?" he said. SmartLink's geolocation could also jeopardize immigrants with whom Juan interacts-which adds to his anxiety.

Tracking data provided by BI has also led to mass detentions. In 2018, BI employees in Manassas, Virginia, allegedly provided precise geolocation data to ICE that led to the arrest of 40 individuals, according to documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.

As BI extended the surveillance apparatus, its parent company, GEO Group, spent almost $1.9 million in lobbying Congress on issues, including "alternatives to detention," through the work of 13 lobbyists, 12 of whom were "revolvers." Moreover, the former government official in charge of " all agency contracting" at ICE went to work directly for GEO Group in 2018, while one of GEO Group's leading corporate attorneys was appointed to federal law enforcement immediately after leaving the company.

Corporations offering surveillance "solutions" collaborate closely with the federal government, benefitting "from a broader political climate of scapegoating immigrants and this toxic conversation around the border," said Setareh Ghandehari, advocacy director at Detention Watch Network, a nonprofit advocating to abolish immigrant detention. "We're in a political climate where there's a give and take between politicians and private prison corporations. They're really feeding into each other."

That collaboration could mean an exponential increase in immigrants' surveillance shortly. In August, the Department of Homeland Security requested proposals for a program dubbed Release and Reporting Management, which could potentially mean that the 5.7 million individuals in immigration proceedings would be electronically monitored-almost 30 times more than today. The program has not been funded for the fiscal year 2024, but according to reported investors' calls, private prison corporations are eager to profit from a significant expansion of immigrants' e-carceration.

"People's lives are being shaped by the relationship between corporations and a government whose orientation toward immigration is enforcement, deterrence, and punishment," said Ghandehari. They "create an environment of oppression not just for migrants, but for all of us."

Despite the growing influence of surveillance capitalism in immigration enforcement, advocates have scored victories against the apparatus. As of December 2023, several bills offering some protection against data collection are being considered in state legislatures and may soon join privacy laws in a dozen states. In Congress, the Dignity Act, a bill with bipartisan support, would grant legal status to undocumented immigrants already living in the U.S., among other benefits, while the BREATHE Act aims at dismantling the punitive state, including abolishing ICE and investing in community-based approaches to public safety.

Courts have also been avenues of resistance. The lawsuit in which Marchan is a plaintiff has moved to the Circuit Court of Cook County, Illinois, a federal court, where plaintiffs are demanding compensation from LexisNexis Risk Solutions for collecting, aggregating, and selling their data without consent. The trial is expected to begin this fall.

The state, with the help of corporations with vested interests in the expansion of surveillance, "will try to control the lives and autonomy of Black, brown, and immigrant people," said Rivera from Just Futures Law. "But Black, brown, and immigrant people are always in resistance and organizing to denounce this and to create safety in our communities."

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Surveillance capitalism has taken over immigration enforcement

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Federal agencies skirt local jurisdictions by purchasing comprehensive identifying data and information technology from private companies

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"And what if, with every bark or bite, we thought about the blubbered tons behind our every movement?"

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"And what if, with every bark or bite, we thought about the blubbered tons behind our every movement?"

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Chapter 6: Be Vulnerable

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Drawing on the cognitive science of psychedelics to show how capitalism is a psychedelic system that sculpts consciousness

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"They shift, recalibrate, and let it go in fifteen seconds or less. Could we get there?"

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"They shift, recalibrate, and let it go in fifteen seconds or less. Could we get there?"

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Chapter 9: Learn From Conflict

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Why Capitalism Needs You Stressed & Angry

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"Praisesong for the menopausal planet who knows herself well enough to see your nonsense for what it is."

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"Praisesong for the menopausal planet who knows herself well enough to see your nonsense for what it is."

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Chapter 14: Surrender

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As the hottest summer on record draws to a close, how do we make sense of the images of a climate in crisis?

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"How do we stay deep when distracting distractions distract us (like racists being racist for racist reasons)?"

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"How do we stay deep when distracting distractions distract us (like racists being racist for racist reasons)?"

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Chapter 15: Go Deep

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A systemic approach to the psychology of racial bias within individuals and society

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Historically, the field of psychology has focused on racial biases at an individual level, considering the effects of various stimuli on individual racial attitudes and biases. This approach has provided valuable information, but not enough focus…

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"At least one of the refusals in this book can fit on a protest sign or a graphic t-shirt. Make it so."

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"At least one of the refusals in this book can fit on a protest sign or a graphic t-shirt. Make it so."

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Chapter 20: Activities

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Mass Protest Is Rising — Can It Confront Global Capitalism?

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Capitalism is pushing to expand on the backs of working masses who can tolerate no more hardship and deprivation.