The trap we’re stuck in

Two years of organizing for Gaza made something impossible to ignore: we’re fighting for people’s lives on systems built by people who don’t care if we live or die. The big platforms flooded us with “free” tools until email, calendars, group chats, and video calls all ran on their servers by default, and most of us never had the money or the time to build anything else. If your group has no budget - and most don’t - you don’t really choose Gmail or WhatsApp, you inherit them, along with whatever surveillance, data‑hoarding, and “community standards” they decide to drop on you.

If you’ve done any kind of political work, Palestine, housing, climate or migration, you know the feeling. Your posters are Instagram posts on feeds that can shadow‑ban or delete you. Your meetings are on Teams or Zoom, where IDs, metadata, and chat logs live on servers you will never see. Your plans sit in a Google Drive you don’t control, on infrastructure that can lock you out overnight. Every step of the work runs through companies that answer to states, cops, and shareholders, not to the people, and at any moment an algorithm, a terms‑of‑service change, or a quiet report button can cut the line between you and your own people.

We’re trying to organize inside their cage.

There are other options: privacy‑respecting email, encrypted file storage, self‑hosted chat, tools built by people who actually care whether we make it through the next decade. The problem is that the knowledge for using them is scattered across blogs no one reads, Git repos no one has time to decipher, and half‑translated guides passed around in DMs.

So every small group ends up alone, reinventing the same wheel. One collective spends months testing tools, learning which ones leak, which ones break under pressure, which ones actually hold. Another group, in another city, quietly repeats the same process from scratch because they never hear about that work. Almost nothing travels. We burn time and energy fighting the same fire in different corners of the same freaking building. That isn’t random. That’s how control works now: keep us dependent on hostile infrastructure, keep us fragmented, and let every hard‑won lesson die inside the group that learned it.

Why We Built Inter/rupt Zine

Inter/rupt didn’t start as “let’s make a magazine.” It started as a bunch of us trying to get out of that trap: setting up our own tools, testing self‑hosted stuff, mapping threats, and comparing notes on what actually works when the police are watching your movements and your phone becomes your biggest enemy. Very quickly, we realized the same thing that always happens was about to happen again: we’d learn a lot, maybe document a bit, and then it would all stay locked in our drives or die when people burned out or moved away. Inter/rupt is our way of refusing that reality.

You shouldn’t have to start from zero.

If you’re trying to hold a congress, set up an archive, start a mutual‑aid project, protect your community space, or just survive the next wave of repression without giving every detail of your life to Silicon Valley, you shouldn’t have to start from zero. We wanted to build channels where we can exchange knowledge and experience, learn from each others mistakes, and unify or efforts across borders and beyond socials' echo champers. Because no matter what cause is closest to your heart, and what chants fuels your rage, we're all fighting the same powers. So this zine is where we put the parts that might help someone we’ll never meet: field notes from protests and organizing rooms, how‑tos on switching off corporate tracking without switching off your entire life, breakdowns of the systems sitting on our necks policing borders, data brokers, “safety” tech and the cracks we’ve found in them.

What this zine is?

This is not a “media brand.” We’re not chasing “both sides” or pretending to be objective while people are being displaced, deported, surveilled, and killed. We’re writing from inside the mess, with the people who are hit first and worst.

Every issue is built out of real work: stuff we tried, things that broke, stories from people doing the hard, boring, unglamorous organizing that never makes it to glossy features or platform‑friendly explainers. Sometimes it will be rough. Sometimes it will be too angry for polite company.

This isn’t about drowning you in despair.

At the same time, this isn’t about drowning you in despair. If all we wanted was to scream into the void, we wouldn’t bother making a zine or showing up in your inbox. The point is to hand you something you can actually use, a way of seeing, a tactic, a tool, or even just the knowledge that someone else is fighting the same fight you are, somewhere else on this burning planet.

Where you come in

If you’ve felt any of this, you’re already part of the reason Inter/rupt exists. If you’ve spent nights trying to figure out how to move your collective off Google Docs, how to keep cops out of your chat, or how to fund anything without selling your soul, you’re our people.

This first issue is just the start. We’re going to publish what we learn as we build our own channels, our own spaces, our own ways of talking to each other that don’t depend on platforms owned by people who would rather we shut up or disappear.

Inter/rupt isn’t here to save you..

If you want to see where that goes, sign up, read along, argue with us, send your own notes, tell us what you’re trying. We use email for one reason only: so we can talk to you without an algorithm watching, ranking, or deciding who gets to listen. We don’t track opens or clicks, and nothing is paywalled—everything we make is meant to circulate.

If you’re able and want to, you can chip in with tips or a monthly contribution that lets you comment and plug in more deeply. If you can’t or don’t want to, you still get the same zine, the same tools, the same stories.

And finally, Inter/rupt isn’t here to save you. It’s here so none of us have to figure this out alone.

See you on the streets.