Hello! This is Mehran at Subvrt, a newsletter on effective organising, and I’ve been quiet for a few weeks, focusing on a piece for Waging Nonviolence that I’ll send to you as soon as it’s live. While that’s in process, two things:

First: I did a talk last Friday with Hasan Piker and Yanis Varoufakis, which was live-streamed on DiEM25’s YouTube channel and to Hasan’s stream on Twitch. The two of them have a lot in common, but now even more something in common: governments have banned them from entire countries for criticising Israel. Germany barred Yanis two years ago, and last week the UK barred Hasan, who was due to give a run of talks there.

So we talked free speech, antisemitism, Zionism and the sorry state of liberal democracy. Btw, coverage of Hasan’s ban was wall-to-wall, The Economist included. I don’t have stats, but I imagine a lot of people in Europe came across his work for the first time this way. Thanks, Keir Starmer and Barbara Streisand. Keep it up!

I was really impressed with Hasan’s analysis, eloquence, and the zero fucks he gives to the establishment’s attempts to bring him down. We need more of this — especially in Europe.

OK, second: a reading list. I’ve been saving these up, so this one’s a bumper edition.

Good luck with your projects, and see you in the next one – Mehran

Things worth reading

• Ritti Singh on How to Build a Narrative Machine. Singh ran communications for the New York tenant campaign that helped put Mamdani in office. She makes the case that we should treat our members as distributed infrastructure, not audience. (Related: Antonia Scatton on word-of-mouth as the most effective persuasion tool.)
• Rashid Khalidi on anger and purity. This interview, from a leading intellectual voice in the pro-Palestine movement, received a lot of pushback online from activists. I might phrase his arguments differently, but the spine I agree with, hard: change comes from years of patient, unsexy work. Not from being right out loud. Worth a listen.
• Scott Alexander on using AI to decide who to vote for. Scott fed an AI his entire local ballot, asked it to research every race, tested it against his own research… and learned it was better than any voter guide he’d used. Scott and I have different politics, but the tactic is the point. On the upside, electoral research is now trivial. Downside: AIs could be nudging us towards candidates that are better for AIs...
• Sam Kahn on Martin Gurri’s Revolt of the Public. Kahn argues the public’s revolt is over: everyone’s already online, there are no new users to recruit, and the establishment has clawed power back through algorithms and AI. I don’t buy the conclusion, though: the tools that let the public organise haven’t gone anywhere — corporate capture and the feed make it harder, not impossible. The fight is over who learns to use them, and how well.
• The European Centre for Digital Action on what’s actually working in digital organising. Take-aways: nonprofit TikTok grew 34% last year (despite ownership changes), while X dropped 3%; META’s platforms get the best returns for ads; 58% of organisations ran influencer campaigns; recurring donors now bring in a third or more of revenue. (I know a lot of organisers have quit X, and others want to. But X is the opposition’s narrative machine, and if we stop listening to it, it’s our loss. I agree that we can no longer use it for reach, though.)
• Student organisers in Bremen on how their university, founded in the spirit of 1968 now calls the police on Palestine camps and threatens to expel students with no criminal charge. They’re right when they say crackdowns on Palestine solidarity are a trial balloon, and the rest of the Israel-aligned West is watching what Germany gets away with. (I made the same case last year in this video rundown of that country greatest repression hits.)

• Also: Hanno Hauenstein on the case of Abdallah A., stripped of his citizenship — granted weeks earlier, in the only country he’s known since he was two months old – over two pro-Palestine Instagram posts. No conviction, no charge. The trigger: press inquiries from a hard-right outlet and an influencer. Troubling, infuriating, but a good dissection of the mechanisms they use to repress activists. See also: what Germany did to journalist Hüseyin Doğru, and is still doing.
• Al-Jazeera on why the anti-war protests in the West have been so quiet on Iran. The same question I wrote a piece on in March. Read them side by side — here’s mine.
• Eric Blanc on Bouncy Castle Communism. Why has the US right out-organised the left at the grassroots since the 1970s? Part of the answer, says Eric: the right throws picnics with bouncy castles, and the left holds meetings. For the right, fun wasn’t a distraction from the organising; it was the recruiting engine. I came at the same idea from a slightly different angle a while back: on laughter as an activist tool.

One more thing

An audience can be deplatformed in a second. A movement can’t. So if you’ve built a big audience, what’s your plan to turn it into a movement?