There’s No Opting Out of These Crises – Liberation Is Collective
Why you can trust us
At a moment when our attention is split between many mounting crises, YES! Media’s coverage of the movement-builders, the seed-planters, the collective experiments, and the creative resistance is all the more important. The mission is urgent, and we need your help to nurture this project in the coming months and years. Please join us in helping to build the more just world that we all want by becoming a monthly sustainer of YES!
The last year has seen a remarkable upswell of grassroots resistance to the latest spawn of Big Tech: data centers. The threats of these centers are multitudinous — air, water, and noise pollution; environmental racism; ballooning electricity bills; loss of energy resources; and ever more corporate control over our data.
Communities facing the impact of data centers have responded quickly, standing up to these technological catastrophes. Often building across partisan lines, organizers — both new and veteran — have won moratoriums on data center construction, stalled or halted projects altogether, and forced candidates for office to take a position on this issue. These communities have recognized a fundamental truth about challenging systems of power: You can’t do it alone.
While campaigns against data centers are relatively new, social movements have for a longer time recognized Big Tech’s data projects as a pernicious form of social control. AI, algorithms, and other technological developments have been used to criminalize populations, deepen exploitation at work, or enable bodily harm.
Writing for YES! in 2024, Juliet Kunkel warned us that there is ultimately no path to winning by individually opting out, but “that in order to confront these systems, we must build something greater than individual autonomy”:
Our response to a world trending toward alienation from each other and data-driven social control cannot be based solely on personal privacy. Any engagement with these systems that takes solidarity seriously must remember that, whether we find ourselves shoulder to shoulder or embedded in an algorithm, our liberation is bound up with each other.
–Juliet Kunkel
Read the full article: We Keep Our Data Safe
From the Archives: Care in the Aftermath of Wildfires
Wildfires are scorching the U.S. Pacific Northwest, with Oregon seeing record levels of destruction, while Spain, Portugal, and France are each enduring the largest wildfires in their respective histories. While building the struggles to halt climate catastrophe through systemic changes is absolutely necessary, it is also crucial that the victims of these crises receive compassionate responses in the immediate aftermath. The stories of mutual aid movements in response to past wildfires can help guide the way.
Writing for YES! in the wake of devastating wildfires in North California in 2017, Dani Burlison reported on how “Santa Rosa residents — and the greater Sonoma County community — rushed in to offer support services through pop-up holistic clinics, mental health education, and free counseling services. It’s a response that may help other communities cope with future disasters.”
Read the full article: What Wildfires Do to Our Minds
From the Archives: A Decade Since the Sanders Shakeup
Almost 10 years ago, Sen. Bernie Sanders launched his first campaign for the U.S. presidency. His seismic run played a major role in generating electoral coalitions and inspiring other campaigns to challenge the neoliberal, corporate hold on the Democratic Party.
Writing for YES! in 2016, Sarah van Gelder advised progressives to utilize key lessons from the Sanders movement in organizing their own communities. She urged readers to ground their politics at the local level to build enduring power: “Local is where we are unstoppable, where corporate money has less influence and we can do more with volunteers and our own $27 contributions. That is where we can build the foundations of a movement that extends from our communities to Washington, D.C., and brings about real change, while holding those we send to D.C. accountable to we the people.”
Read the full article: Sanders Might Soon Be Out of the Race, But Not the Revolution
New Work by YES! Contributors
- Sonali Kolhatkar, the host of Rising Up With Sonali, reports on the first case to hold Big Oil accountable for an individual’s death in a climate-related disaster.
- Sarah van Gelder, founding editor of YES!, revisits advice from organizers about using midterm elections to build local power.
- Marianne Dhenin reports on organizers who are pressuring local and state agencies to cut ties with the federal task forces endangering their communities.
New Solutions Journalism From Independent Media
📊 You Can’t Drink Data: Native Communities Are Resisting the AI Death Cycle – Truthout
✊ What Amazon Organizers Can Learn From the Fight for 15 – In These Times
🕯️ Tennessee Death Row Abolitionists Organize Vigils to Protest State-Sanctioned Murder – Prism
🪳 What India’s Cockroach Party Won — and What’s Next – Waging Nonviolence
🥹 Being Pro-Working Class Isn’t Enough: We Need Victories People Can Feel – Convergence
Rising Up With Sonali
Rising Up With Sonali, formerly the broadcast arm of YES! Media, is lifting up solutions journalism through hard-hitting interviews.
Sonali has a new book out this year that collects powerful interviews from her show with activists who battled ICE raids and with academics who put the attacks on immigrants into a broader historical and cultural framework. Breaking ICE: Community Defense Against State Terror and MAGA Fascism (Seven Stories Press, August 2026) is available for pre-order now through an independent bookstore. You can also directly subscribe to support Sonali’s solutions-based broadcast effort.
We Are Keeping Us Safe – Now Keep It Going!
If we can’t opt out of crises, then we certainly cannot opt out of the care we will all need to truly become an unstoppable — and sustainable — collective force. Whether taking on data centers, providing mutual aid in the aftermath of ecological disasters, or building local power for the long haul, communities are coming together in the toughest times to forge interdependence and practice tangible hope.
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Truthout
hosts a monthly newsletter with relevant content from the YES! digital archives and new solutions journalism from a variety of publications. These curated resources can help us imagine – and build – movements for transformation.
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