Kaaperdatud loomaõigusliikumine

See lugu ilmus eesti keeles ajalehes Sirp ja seda saab lugeda siit.

Aga inglisekeelne algtekst on siin lehel. Siin on küsimused ja vastused teises järjekorras:

I heard that you are going to Amsterdam in May? To participate in the Animal Liberation Summit. Why do you think it’s important to travel and meet activists? We can communicate via the web?

My personal preference is for online communication because web-based meeting is more advantageous for people with financial limitations or who are physically unable to meet in person due to disability. I also prefer it for ecological reasons and work constraints. Also, the evidence suggest that an increasing number of people are being disabled by long-term illness due to the unchecked spread of covid since 2020. 

Nonetheless, I still believe the entire spectrum of communication is important, from online to in-person and everything in between. For example, in-person communication is advantageous because, among other things, its easier to observe nonverbal communication in real time and provide support for people in the moment who need it. Plus, in-person communication is not subject to the same level of surveillance culture as online, which allows for sensitive discussions to be shared in intimate environments that are much safer for people to participate in. That’s huge when you’re talking about organizing against tyrannical actors who seek to control speech and hamper liberation movements. So it sometimes beats online in terms of security, safety, and support. 

Most importantly, however, I take the scholarship from women of color very importantly. Zeynep Tufecki is a Turkish-American technosociologist who wrote the book Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest. In it, she describes how online movements are easy to organize but hard to sustain and provides examples from around the world, including Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring. In a 21st century era of social justice, both are necessary for work to flourish.

How did all this start for you? How did you become an activist? Or do you even use this term?

I personally don’t use activist to describe myself because I think activism is something that all of us are responsible for in some way or another at different times. Author Alice Walker said, “Activism is the rent I pay for living on the planet,” and I think that’s true. We have an obligation to each other and the world that we live in to constantly fight for our collective freedom. At the end of the day, I’m a journalist and media scholar. If documenting a written record of injustice as faithfully and objectively as I can and then sharing that knowledge with younger generations is activism, I’m proud of doing that work.  

Your presentation in our conference “Animal Futures” is about disinformation, Infighting, and Elite Capture within Social Movements. What is this about? (The article is going to be published before the conference). What is the difference between infighting and different opinions? Is one of the problems that social movements are relatively young? I mean, they don’t have good structure, traditions and are trying to be non-hierarchical?

My thoughts on infighting vastly differ from those in the mainstream community. Recently, infighting has been blamed for many of the movements woes. Animal activist Wayne Hsiung was featured in a recent article by the New Yorker, and in it he addressed infighting. He makes some interesting and valid points. But I also think taking advice on infighting from men who are credibly accused of sexual assault is a terribly dangerous standard. Other thought leaders within the movement have been very vocal about infighting this past year as well. However, it is clear to me that the thought leaders who do so are using “infighting” as a dog whistle to locate blame on people who rightly observe corruption, racial antagonism, and sexual violence within the movement for creating dissent and “dividing us.” Whether it is intentional or not, the net result is to cast those people as dangerous ideologues and extremists and shift the conversation away from their own transgressions which cause harm to the movement and, by extension, the animals they tasked themselves with protecting. 

Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò identified this in his book Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (and Everything Else). He talks about how in the philanthropic sector, the production and distribution of information is especially significant because those philanthropists control the major organs of global research that create and disseminate information about who is suffering, what’s being suffered, what it’s going to take to alleviate that suffering—or what pretends to. Applying these theoretical principles to animal rights, the ‘professionalized’ wing of the movement is financed by a vanishingly small number of such philanthropists. As such, they set the agenda by determining, through their dollars, for who the knowledge creators are, what knowledge is produced, and what outcomes count as success—in other words, coordinated campaigns of disinformation orchestrated by people who benefit from keeping the world exactly as it is.

In my estimation, it’s quite obvious that this is a far greater contribution to infighting, to the extent that it exists and does a measurable harm to activism. The interests of the financial elite and those of the oppressed (human and otherwise) rarely intersect. It shouldn’t be controversial to say so, and yet here we are. 

Do you have a vision of the AR movement in 20 years? What do we want?

I’m not sure what my vision is for the AR movement any longer. I confess that I’ve become increasingly disillusioned as money has corrupted a lot of activist communities. If anything, my vision would see the community divest from capitalism and recapture our radical spirit through the grassroots work that animated previous generations. 

I asked my supporters-patreons questions for you. And got only one: When is the book coming? (:))

HAHAHAHAHAHA. I’ve been working on so many damn projects, I’m not even promising a book anymore. But if you want to support my written work, you can always check out my essays in other books. My essay “Anti-Blackness and the Effective Altruist” in The Good it Promises, the Harm it Does: Critical Essays on Effective Altruism discusses the prevalence of anti-Black racism in the animal movement caused by EA. And I also have an essay in The Edinburgh Companion to Vegan Literary Studies discussion adaptation, and how Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West is an explosive parable about about veganism, animal rights, state violence, and terrorism. 

And. Do you have recommendations for books and also social movement “influencers” you like and really believe in? Why?

My recommended reading list always includes the work of Black feminists such as Audre Lorde, bell hooks, and Angela Davis. I would especially recommend Davis’ Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundation of Movements. But if we limit ourselves to the scholarship of animal rights, I also recommend Carol Adams and Corey Wrenn. I also am a big fan of Animal Oppression and Capitalism edited by David Nibert (point of clarification, it’s two volumes and I STILL have not finished reading it). And I recently purchased an incredibly witty book by Benny Malone called How to Argue with Vegans. Dinesh Wadiwel and Lori Gruen are some other favorites. There’s just so many to list!

Currently on my bookshelf, I’m reading If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution by Vincent Bevins, Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires by Douglas Rushkoff, and The Day the World Stops Shopping: How Ending Consumerism Saves the Environment and Ourselves by JB MacKinnon. None of these books reside directly within the animal rights canon, but I don’t believe you can achieve animal liberation without understanding the dynamics of social movements past and present (Bevins), the psychopathy of the ruling class elite (Rushkoff), or the perils of consumption (MacKinnon). 

As for influencers, I have a very troubled relationship with them. On the one hand, I think social media is an incredibly fertile place for discovering and curating knowledge. But also, as the internet shrinks to center around the creator economy (thanks, capitalism), too much of influencer culture focuses on conspicuous consumption, lifestyle, and individual consumer choices. So if you’re looking for people to follow, I’m a bad person to ask. I don’t even like telling people to follow me! Not only will I let you down (because parasocial relationships make it an inevitability), you just can’t expect consistency from me. Honey, I’m burnt out and mentally ill.