Shaping Reality
Shaping Reality: Building Informational Power to Resist Authoritarianism
By Lewis Raven Wallace
Messages alone don’t change minds. Neither do facts. Where facts and messages are most effective is in the context of relationships, lived experiences, and actions that change people’s immediate surroundings and lives. Messages and facts only matter in the context of a movement that is building power.
Informational power establishes sustained, proactive community control over the facts and information that we need in order to struggle and survive, and that inform how we make sense of the world together, and the actions we take to shape our futures.
Shaping Reality: Building Informational Power to Resist Authoritarianism lays out an essential framework and guiding questions for building community-controlled informational infrastructure.
In this new report, Interrupting Criminalization’s Journalism Fellow Lewis Raven Wallace explores the need for informational power and informational infrastructure on the left, through profiles of five local abolitionist organizing efforts and four movement media and information projects. It explores how we are already building this kind of power locally, and poses questions about what nationally networked informational infrastructure might look like and how to build and fund it. Organizers, activists, movement media makers, journalists, and funders in those areas are encouraged to read, study, discuss, and share feedback on this framework.
If you would like support strategizing about informational power, you can sign up for a free consultation with Interrupting Criminalization’s Abolition Media Office Hours!
Acknowledgements: This report was designed by Micah Bazant.