If a corporation can buy your data, it can buy your silence. Our job is to make both transactions impossible.
1 ▸ The New Poll Tax
In 1965, voting required money, literacy tests, or pure luck. In 2025 the ticket price is a smartphone, a broadband plan, and the willingness to surrender your behavioral data. Digital access fees—from metered hotspots to pay‑per‑gig municipal Wi‑Fi—function like modern poll taxes, gating civic participation behind a cash register.
2 ▸ Algorithmic Redlining
Data brokers segment whole ZIP codes into “high‑conversion cohorts.” Ad costs soar in low‑income neighborhoods, so political campaigns simply spend elsewhere. The result? Voters deemed “unprofitable” never see issue ads, registration reminders, or fact‑checks. Silence by spreadsheet.
3 ▸ Climate Debt, Unpaid
Every dollar of Wall Street’s quarterly profit carries a carbon surcharge the Street never invoices itself for. Meanwhile frontline communities buy bottled water when taps run brown. Occupy 2.5 demands a Carbon Reparations Fund—financed by the top fifty global emitters, distributed to the bottom fifty percent of climate‑impacted populations.
4 ▸ How to Resist in Three Steps
| Action | Why it Hurts the Machine | How to Start Today |
|---|---|---|
| Encrypt routine messages | Mass surveillance loses predictive accuracy when the “harmless” chatter goes dark. | Install Signal and set disappearing messages to 24 hr. |
| Flood FOIA queues | Bureaucracies bog down; transparency requests create archival pressure. | File one request about algorithmic contracts in your city. |
| Peer‑to‑peer skill shares | Knowledge that never hits a central server can’t be monetized or censored. | Host a sidewalk teach‑in on offline mesh networks. |
5 ▸ Art as Ammunition
Street projections, wheat‑paste posters, guerrilla theater—these bypass algorithmic choke points and force raw attention. This month’s featured tactic: “Receipts on the Wall.” Volunteers print corporate‑lobby expenditure reports and plaster them outside legislators’ district offices. No spin, just line‑items.
6 ▸ Call to Conscience
“When the law makes you a bystander, break the law.”
—Occupy 2.5 Graffiti, Leyte, Philippines (2025)
Occupy 2.5 upgrades that ethos for the data age: “When the platform makes you invisible, build a crowd the platform can’t ignore.” Bring a neighbor, bring your own hotspot, and bring proof that another world is already under construction. hotspot, and bring proof that another world is already under construction.
Stay noisy, stay encrypted, stay human.
Occupy 2.5 