Now I’m sounding like I’m fucking crazy, but hear me out. When I first started going to Gaza, I thought that I was going to see a place abandoned by capitalism. Then I got there and guess what? KFC was delivering chicken through the tunnels for free. I mean, you had to pay for the chicken, but the delivery was free. Why? I couldn’t understand it. It’s soggy by the time it arrives. It’s like KFC at the bus station. I’m a KFC addict and, like any KFC addict, I recognize that stuff is shit and it’s shit when it’s fresh. Four hours in, it’s really shit.

So why is KFC doing that? Why are they subsidizing free delivery? I also saw billboards everywhere for Coca-Cola and Pepsi, which weren’t readily available at the time. There were also billboards for products that people could never afford, like a BMW or a Mercedes. And they weren’t just in rich districts — they were everywhere.

That’s when I realized, “Oh shit, these guys understand that this thing is almost over too.” Coca-Cola opened a bottling plant there in 2016 that uses more water than all of Gaza has available to it each day. What are they thinking? They’re thinking there’s going to be a day when people can buy Coca-Cola. They’re thinking, “We want to be there first.”

[...] It’s common for people who travel and volunteer to imagine that they are giving and to minimize the amount they’re taking from the society they’re in. The reality is that without absorbing the resilience of the Palestinians, I would have never understood what resilience was. And so I took hope from them. I took from them the idea that when somebody builds a wall, you dig a tunnel.

Whether Tarek Loubani gets justice is irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. If we could get a couple million dollars to put solar panels on some hospitals, that would be a legacy I would be proud of. What’s the best case scenario if there’s an investigation? The absolute best case scenario is some fucking nineteen-year-old getting thrown in jail for a year for what he did to me. So they would destroy some nineteen-year-old’s life even though we all know it’s a systemic problem? No thank you. I would rather make it so that that nineteen-year-old is never in the position where his whole life depends on him shooting a doctor. I would rather make it so that Palestinians don’t have to go up to the fence with their hands up begging for their humanity.

Owen maintains the mining rigs as they search for whatever cryptocurrency earns them the most per watt, but it is his wife Cassie’s trading that really keeps the family afloat. When not homeschooling the kids, she is glued to her computer, hoping to multiply their earnings by trading the cryptocurrencies that the mining rigs bring in for others she hopes will grow in value. Now that she has a few years of experience, she knows how to spot a “scam coin” and which forums to trust. Most days, she earns a profit.

The children, who range from first grade to college, help with both sides of the business. The oldest daughter has been in charge of keeping the miners cool since she was fifteen. In exchange for fixing the fans, reapplying thermal paste, and maintaining airflow, she gets a cut of the profits. Other kids help with the trading. Those who aren’t legally old enough to have their own accounts use Cassie’s spreadsheets to simulate swapping crypto. Owen reads crypto articles aloud at the dinner table to stir up discussion, and even the seven-year old has an opinion on the family business. (She likes DigiByte, an obscure security-focused coin.) The Collins can keep everyone fed by mining and trading crypto, but only because everyone pitches in.

The Collins also tread carefully around the power companies. The family has moved around in search of cheap energy and landed in rural Washington, where electric rates are as low as one fifth the national average thanks to hydroelectric power from the Columbia and Snake Rivers. They weren’t the only itinerant crypto miners to move to the area, especially when the price of Bitcoin grew by over 1,700 percent in 2017. According to the Wall Street Journal, some small local utilities in Washington were receiving upward of twenty calls per week from miners looking to use more electricity. Without sufficient infrastructure to meet demand, power companies have recently clamped down on crypto miners by placing limits on energy usage, requiring hefty deposits, and turning off power to those who don’t comply.

The goal of Japanese telerobotics isn’t to provide better access to remote expertise in the form of higher-skilled workers, in other words, but to technologically recuperate lower-skilled workers who might otherwise be excluded from the workforce entirely. What is envisioned is nothing less than a digital platform for physical work, one that could utilize previously untapped labor reserves to power global networks of on-demand robot avatars.

This may open up potentially meaningful opportunities for those unable to physically travel to a work site. At the same time, it risks further isolating the already immobilized, enabling remote access to their physical labor while fixing barriers to their social mobility ever more firmly in place. While the stated promise of teleworker robots is one of freedom for those employed, in practice it is employers who are most liberated by the arrangement.

Although open publishing was key to the success of Indymedia, the technical aspects alone weren’t what attracted its user base. Just as important were the anti-capitalist and justice-centered values. I came to the Tennessee Indymedia Center’s website, tnimc.org, to write and read stories about how people in Nashville, my hometown, were dying because of cuts to state health care, about how coal extraction had decimated whole mountains and polluted local water supplies, about how police were increasing their presence in public schools.

Local corporate media at the time were either ignoring these issues or, if they were covering them, failed to consistently center the voices of the people and communities affected. Our thinking was that it would be awfully hard to change local policy if our neighbors didn’t know what was happening, and we couldn’t count on the mainstream media to make people understand enough to care. In this way, as grassroots journalists on Indymedia, our work was tactical. We were reporting with an agenda.

Other Indymedia organizers and activists I spoke to felt similarly. “Self-publishing is great. I’m into it,” an early organizer of Indybay told me, who asked to remain anonymous. “But I feel like the main strength of Indymedia was this idea about tactical media. There’s like a purpose to what you’re doing that’s not just about publishing your story.” If you hung around Indymedia types during the early 2000s, there’s a good chance you heard the term “tactical media” batted around. What differentiates tactical media from some imaginary idea of pure journalism is that tactical media is made in support of a political project.

To encourage competition, managers publicly post a ranking of employee productivity at the end of each day. In some warehouses, there’s a whiteboard; in others, a printed piece of paper or an electronic display. Ashleigh Strange, who worked at a warehouse in Breinigsville, Pennsylvania between 2013 and 2015, said this practice was also a “method of group shaming.” “If you were the worst person in the warehouse,” Ashleigh said, “you’re going to know it. And so will everyone else.” In some warehouses, bottom performers are automatically enrolled in remedial training — or written up.

Management also runs what employees called “power hours,” during which workers are incentivized by raffle tickets or Amazon “swag” to work as fast as humanly possible. “You get an unimportant reward for working as fast as you can,” said Charlie. “Everyone competes. This becomes the new baseline.”

Online Amazon worker forums are full of strategies for artificially boosting rates. One worker discovered that managers were basing his productivity numbers on how quickly he started work after a break. By leaving a count loaded in his scanner, he could trick the computer into thinking he had resumed work with a flurry of activity. Others boost their count by rapidly scanning several bins of small items.