THE OFFLINE STRIKES BACK: COMPLICATING THE ROLE OF DIGITAL TECHNOLOGIES IN COVID-19 MUTUAL AID ACTIVISM

Resumen

As the Covid-19 pandemic spread globally, activist-led mutual aid efforts quickly emerged all over the world to help people access food and other basic necessities. Mutual aid activists relied on multi-layered digital practices to coordinate their efforts, largely by employing corporate digital technologies. In conversation with the literature on digital activism and drawing on 40 interviews with activists in the US, Italy and the UK, in this paper I examine how Covid-19 mutual aid complicates our understanding of the intersection of activism and digital technologies and of the online/offline divide. I show that contradictory experiences of the digital marked this wave of solidarity activism. First, while mutual aid was fully digital, especially given the necessity to organize while physically distancing, it was also embodied, because activists physically had to come together to prepare and distribute food and PPE. At the same time, there was also a new appreciation for digital-only activism as an equally valid form of engagement. Second, some mutual aid groups adopted very sophisticated tech-enabled systems, which required significant labor to manage and had a steep learning curve. Other groups, however, relied on less sophisticated tech practices (e.g. Whatsapp chats and phone calls). Even in a moment of heightened centrality of digital communication, such as the pandemic, the offline was still crucial. I argue that we can make sense of these somewhat contradictory aspects through activists’ commitment to care as overarching principle, which oriented them towards developing more inclusive movements, built on overlapping modalities of activism.