Activists call on storytellers to stop making surveillance tech copaganda, launch toolkit
After a year-long collaboration with Strange Horizons, celebrated authors, and global creative and human rights conferences: a new resource for storytellers to clap back at encroaching fascism.
Digital human rights activists recognize the power of stories to cement or challenge social norms—like whether we all believe ubiquitous surveillance in the hands of the most powerful makes a safer world. The answer is no, yet the majority of stories that deal with dangerous AI technologies like facial recognition read as if they were written by a tech PR firm. That’s why activists and authors have united in a year-long effort to create and launch the Stop Surveillance Tech Copaganda Toolkit.
This toolkit of anti-surveillance stories, reactions, analysis, and incitement was built by privacy activists and human rights experts, in collaboration with Strange Horizons as well as the Decentralized Web (DWeb), DragonCon, and RightsCon communities. The toolkit is now available globally and for free to all creators who want to write more dynamic stories that challenge fascist repression via surveillance tech.
Explore the toolkit at https://stopcopaganda.compost.digital/
Learn more about the project at https://StopCopaganda.org
This effort comes as Hungary deploys surveillance tech to try and identify everyone who participated in Pride; as law enforcement in the US builds a panopticon to jail marginalized people that faulty tech regularly misidentifies and to supercharge the disappearances of political dissidents; and as Israel uses it to generate and carry out AI-assisted drone assassinations.
“A lot of surveillance tech is snake oil—but when it works, it’s even worse for human rights,” said Lia Holland (they/she), the author and activist who produced and edited the toolkit and serves as Campaigns and Communications Director at Fight for the Future. “Decisions about whether these technologies come into our communities are being made by the rich and powerful—and with the complicity of storytellers in writing free propaganda for the corporations and governments intent on Orwellian control of every moment of our lives. It is untrue that most surveillance tech actually works as its marketers say it will, or that only the so-called good guys will use it. It’s well past time that creative people put our minds to disrupting these false narratives. This is our clap back to surveillance tech’s capitulation to fascism, and we’re calling for every storyteller to get on board.”
The toolkit process began as a call for anti-surveillance short stories that launched during DragonCon 2025, using prompts generated by the DWeb community. It resulted in the publication of new works from pushcart-nominated and Emmy-winning authors in a special edition of Strange Horizons—works that are also reproduced in full in the toolkit. From among the selected authors, Christopher Muscato was tapped by a panel of judges that included Seanan McGuire and T.R. Napper to attend RightsCon 2025 in Taipei, Taiwan, and co-lead toolkit development sessions with over 100 human rights activists from across the globe.
“As creators, we bear responsibility in the narratives we enforce, propagate, or choose to dismantle,” said Christopher R. Muscato (he/him), whose story is featured in the toolkit. “There is no such thing as a passive story, nor an apolitical one. Every word we commit to paper is an act of either acquiescence or defiance. As an author, I encourage my peers to more actively engage in the impact of the futures they are imagining, and I’m proud to be a part of a toolkit that offers a great place to start.”
The toolkit has just launched as a decentralized and censorship-resistant, globally accessible digital resource. It is a special issue of COMPOST Magazine published both via the Sutty platform and on Filecoin. All toolkit content, save the short stories themselves, is released under a Creative Commons CC BY-SA license.
“At a time when mainstream corporate publishing tools systematically undermine the interests of the very people they’re meant to serve—authors, journalists, and creators—we felt it was important to showcase this toolkit using Sutty, a content management system like WordPress that is developed by a worker co-op in Argentina that centers the need of users,” said Lead editor of COMPOST Magazine and Senior Organizer at DWeb, mai ishikawa sutton (they/them). “Sutty uses Distributed Press to publish static websites across the World Wide Web and Decentralized Web, making web content easily archive-able and censorship-resistant.”