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After the 2025 inauguration in the U.S. we set up camp here at northernaction.org to provide a base out of which to publish content. We have been serving a growing number of small resistance organizations with their digital communications.

We are working artists with coding skills that stretch back to the early days of the internet. Our mission is to use simple, human-readable, non-proprietary tech tools as much as possible ::: to resist the big-tech chokehold on our creative expression & community conversations.

"For the master’s tool will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change."
— Audre Lorde

We live under a powerful, trans-national era of surveillance capitalism and our channels of communication are clogged with the resource-guzzling, generative production of AI text (a textmageddon mush of stolen content filtered through potent confirmation-bias, opaque algorithms controlled by a very small group of technocrats).

Neverthless, we harness the power of old-school, open-source tools to resist. Even if this resistance is just a performance of possibility ::: a hope left from the early days of the world wide web ::: that we could share accessible tools in order to communicate with each other. This vision also runs through small, locally-owned newspapers, radion stations & cable television. It is vibrantly alive in zines, posters, hand-made protest signs, street performance & funky potluck conversations. Northern Action throws its lot in with these efforts ::: a grassroots solidarity.

We are grateful to work within a loose collaboration with other writers, tech workers & activist organizations. They are an invaluable part of this work.

We aren't slick & we aren't expensive. We don't sell data to the highest bidder. We make hand-coded websites using old-school, community-built standards. We own the means of our production.

We lean into the very human act of sharing links, writing, reading outside of the AI summaries that hijack our search/information environment. To share links is an old-school means of navigation. It creates agency & transparency and the possibility of a critical discourse ::: it is a citational resistance. ::: it is a performance art ::: an insistant belief in the possibilities inherent in our messy attempts at human connection.

We are just getting started.