Resisting in Parallel
Throughout 2025, a series of conversations, workshops, research processes, and informal exchanges kept circling around the same questions. They emerged in different rooms at RightsCon, MozFest, the Coalition of Independent Tech Research summit and Splintercon. These were conversations across regions, disciplines, and political contexts, yet some of the patterns felt familiar.
What follows is not a summary the events, but a compilation of ideas that surfaced repeatedly between the lines of those discussions and investigations: about digital repression, collective safety, and the fragile infrastructures communities build to stay connected when systems are designed to isolate them.
“No straight road takes you there”
One of the clearest lessons from these conversations is that digital repression rarely appears as a single, coherent strategy. Instead, it takes shape through overlapping measures that accumulate over time: surveillance technologies deployed unevenly, censorship applied selectively, administrative barriers that restrict mobility, and narratives that normalize exclusion or violence. These mechanisms do not need to be fully legible to be effective. On the contrary, their power often lies in producing uncertainty, exhaustion, and fragmentation, making coordination harder and long-term strategies difficult to sustain.
Across contexts as different as Latin America, Central Asia, and Europe, repression may look distinct on the surface, but it operates through familiar logic. Technologies meant to facilitate participation become tools of monitoring. Laws presented as protective are repurposed to criminalize dissent. Information ecosystems are distorted to erase people, events, or entire categories of harm.
Digital repression, in this sense, is never just technical. It is infrastructural, legal, narrative, and deeply social.
When participants were invited to map the barriers they face in responding to these systems, several themes surfaced again and again. Many are framed as technical problems, but at their core they are relational and political.
Access and knowledge
There is often limited literacy around the tools that are supposedly available to protect communities, especially when those tools are designed far from the contexts in which they are deployed. Ethical or privacy-preserving technologies can remain inaccessible, unusable, or even risky if they rely on assumptions about connectivity, language, or institutional trust that do not hold. Lock-in effects, lack of interoperability, and the absence of shared standards further restrict meaningful choice.
Another set of barriers is narrative and emotional. Dehumanizing frames — particularly around migrants, political opponents, or marginalized groups — make repression easier to justify and harder to contest. Rage and fear are highly mobilizing; hope, care, and long-term imagination less so. Many organizers spoke about how exhaustion, suspicion, and the constant need to assess risk undermine coordination, even among groups that share values and goals.
Structural mismatches compound these challenges. Resources are scarce and often short-term. Finding collaborators, especially across borders, is difficult. “Third spaces” where people can meet informally, experiment, and learn from one another are fragile and easy to lose. At the same time, large international organizations frequently struggle to work alongside grassroots actors in ways that respect their rhythms, risks, and priorities. This is not always a matter of intent, but of structure: timelines, funding logic, and metrics rarely align with the realities of repression on the ground.
It is not all obstacles
These conversations were not only about challenges. They were also about the ways communities respond when default protections do not exist (or when the very idea of protection has been distorted).
One crucial insight is that effective responses to digital repression cannot rely solely on regulatory templates developed in the “Global North”. Legal concepts such as privacy, accountability, or data protection operate differently across continents. Copy-paste frameworks, detached from local contexts, may fail or even be weaponized in unpredictable ways. We’ve known this for a while. Understanding must come from lived experience: from those navigating repression daily, often at great personal risk.
Across regions, front-line actors — women activists, community organizers, journalists, Indigenous leaders, diasporic networks — are not merely implementing strategies designed elsewhere. They are co-producing knowledge in real time. Their expertise circulates through informal channels, peer-to-peer exchanges, and what I often describe as “digital third spaces”: semi-private, transnational digital communities that exist beyond official narratives and constant visibility.
Many of us working in this field belong to a generation that grew up between analog and digital worlds. We know what it means to build homes “in the air”: spaces that are neither fully public nor fully private, neither strictly national nor entirely global. In the Venezuelan context, for example, these third spaces — small chat groups, cross-border collaborations, alternative platforms, and community-run infrastructures — have become essential. They are where people recenter reality when official narratives attempt to erase it. These are the spaces where we ask questions, exchange digital security strategies, coordinate beyond borders, support one another, and also remind each other that our current reality is not what it should be.
Insights from the work we do at Curious Shapes and collaborations such as the work with Puentes reinforced this point. Studying how people intentionally create spaces to remain in contact — to avoid isolation — reveals something fundamental: authoritarian systems do not only repress through force or surveillance, but by fragmenting relationships. Countering that fragmentation requires more than tools. It requires relational infrastructures that allow people to learn together, imagine alternatives, and sustain each other over time.
This brings us to coordination
There is a temptation either to romanticize cross-border collaboration or to dismiss it as unrealistic. Neither position is helpful. Coordination at scale is difficult, and it should not be idealized. At the same time, communities of defense cannot afford to think only within national or regional silos. Authoritarian tactics travel. They are shared, adapted, and refined across borders. Responses must do the same.
Crucially, this collaboration needs to be both cross-regional and cross-disciplinary. Some of the most appreciated conversations in spaces like SplinterCon were those grounded in lived experience and attentive to social and human dimensions, rather than purely technical or regulatory analyses. Engineers, policy experts, artists, archivists, organizers, and storytellers each hold pieces of the puzzle. No single discipline can grasp the full picture of digital repression, let alone counter it.
When participants shared examples of what actually helps in hostile systems, a set of practices emerged, not as go-to solutions, but as adaptive strategies.
Documentation appeared repeatedly as a form of resistance and care. Archiving data, stories, and experiences is not only about evidence or accountability; it is also about preventing erasure and burnout. Documenting is a way of saying: we were here, and our knowledge matters, even if institutions disappear or change.
Culture plays a central role, and I can’t stress this enough. Humor, satire, and artistic expression allow people to speak obliquely, to say what cannot be said directly. Proxy actions — through art, performance, or unexpected formats — create room for dissent without exposing individuals to the same level of risk.
Infrastructure choices matter as well. Open-source and decentralized modes of organizing are valued not as ideological commitments, but as practical ways to adapt, fork, and survive. Offline-capable tools, distributed archives, and low-tech solutions often prove more resilient than sophisticated systems that depend on stable connectivity or centralized control.
All of this challenges how “digital safety” is commonly understood. Safety is not a feature that can be built into a platform once and for all. In hostile systems, it is a collective, situated, and constantly negotiated process. It is shaped by relationships, trust, imagination, and the small spaces people create to keep each other informed and less alone.
This conversation matters because of the historical moment we are in. Authoritarian governments are coming to power through elections. Democracies are adopting increasingly authoritarian practices, and we’re trapped in good guys bad guys narratives that invisibilize a lot of suffering and make us waste time. The comforting narrative that “it can’t happen here” no longer serves us. Nor does a simplistic North–South dichotomy.
Wealthy democracies need to pay attention to these cases, not as distant warnings, but as sources of insight. Their civil societies have as much to learn as to share.
If there is one lesson to carry forward from the laboratory of chaos and control I’ve been observing in Venezuela and other fields, it is this: digital repression is never just about technology. It is about how laws, infrastructures, narratives, and inequalities are woven together. And resistance is never just about tools. It is about relationships, learning, and the fragile third spaces we build to remain connected in systems designed to pull us apart.
None of this can be understood — or transformed — by experts alone. It requires keeping these conversations open, cross-regional, and grounded in the lived experiences of those already navigating these landscapes every day.
May 2026 find us much stronger.