CHAPTER 21

Mutual Aid, Tech, and the Problem of History

Dani Joslyn, Tyesha Maddox, and Robert Soden

Introduction

Collective care, support, and mutual aid are central elements of human response to crisis. In her book Necessary Trouble, Sarah Jaffe describes a story already well known to observers of the COVID-19 pandemic. A crisis hits, and mutual aid groups start en masse, seemingly out of nowhere but building on long-standing knowledge, networks, and practices. Through a combination of autonomous organization and tireless effort, they manage to provide better immediate relief than many of the large nongovernmental organizations that draw on public funding and donations to deliver these services. Jaffe’s arguments were related to the Occupy Sandy movement that grew out of Occupy Wall Street in 2011. She recounts how the politicized mutual aid participants saw their project as a criticism of failed government policy and as inextricably intertwined with a call for federal, state, and city relief. They believed in “mutual aid rather than charity—in acting in solidarity with the community members, making decisions collaboratively, getting help as they gave it.”1

In fact, some of the earliest organizers of Mutual Aid NYC, one of the largest umbrella organizations of local mutual aid groups to emerge during the pandemic, had been involved in the Occupy Sandy response to the 2012 hurricane. Occupy Sandy, in turn, was spearheaded in part by networks that came together during the Occupy Wall Street mobilizations. This lineage shows that spontaneous mobilizations to crises are not in fact spontaneous at all. Rather, they are built on the social and technological infrastructures that grow or dissipate over years and decades—much longer time cycles would be revealed by focusing on sensational moments of crisis. The focus on the spectacular centers the present, portraying its events as novel and concealing the connection to both prior mobilizations2 and the quotidian and structural roots of disaster.3 Nowhere has this been truer than in the rush of technologists, most of whom were fundamentally well-meaning, to engage with the mutual aid networks that came together in response to the pandemic.

Indeed, there is a long history of politicized, widespread, and effective mutual aid in New York City reaching as far back as the nineteenth century.4 Labor unions and tenant unions, in a city at the national heart of both movements, have long been pillars of collective care and support, as have immigrant benevolent associations, all of which provided their members with social protections and support in times of emergency. In the midst of the 1960s “urban crisis,” groups across the city, such as the Black Panthers and the Young Lords, mobilized against cutbacks in their community and demanded all manner of basic government support. In the 1980s politicized mutual aid took many forms, including widespread movements to “squat” in and take over buildings abandoned by landlords; tenant associations struggling to maintain their buildings amid massive disinvestment; the formation of all-volunteer neighborhood-rebuilding projects, such as the Banana Kelly neighborhood association in the South Bronx, among the hardest-hit; and the organizing and care networks developed by ACT UP within ballroom culture and within the welfare rights movement. In the new millennium, transnational networks of mutual aid tied New York and Puerto Rico in the wake of a series of disasters worsened by ongoing privatization and government disinvestment. New York City has also long been one center of prison and police abolitionist organizing, with groups such as Critical Resistance, the Queer Detainee Empowerment Project, the Prison Library Support Project, and the Black Trans Mutual Aid Fund developing mutual aid networks between people on the outside and inside and supporting recently freed people. These organizations and movements grew in part because of community connections and communication.

As technology changes, how we forge interpersonal connections and create community also changes. Although the speed and reach at which we connect have evolved, our efforts to build and sustain connection and our motivations to do so have remained consistent over time. In the Shock of the Old, historian of technology David Edgerton notes the tendency to orient discussions of technology around themes of novelty, innovation, and the future.5 He writes that technologists are often portrayed as inventors who are “ahead of their time.” This orientation delimits the identities of those who can be considered technologists as well as the technologies that are considered worthy of attention. Instead, Edgerton promotes a history of technology that studies “technologies in use” rather than technology as invention. We take a related approach in our efforts to think through the possible relationships between technology and mutual aid. Examining several forms of mutual aid organizing in New York City through the century, we argue that a greater attention to the history of these movements is necessary to guide the development and deployment of technologies in support of mutual aid movements in the future.

The Long History of Mutual Aid in New York City: An Example of Caribbean Mutual Aid Societies

Mutual aid networks existed in the United States long before the invention of social media applications and Slack channels. But how these societies have been able to evolve and merge their changing goals with technological advances has often been the predictor of their longevity. Such is the case of several Caribbean mutual aid societies and benevolent associations in New York City that have directly seen their sustainability linked to how well their members have been able to adapt to the changes of the twenty-first century. One example is that of the Bermuda Benevolent Association (BBA). Once booming in the 1930s with hundreds of members, the group saw its membership dwindle and eventually die out in the twenty-first century when it failed to attract younger participants.6

Prior to this period, the early twentieth century saw the formation of numerous West Indian benevolent associations and mutual aid societies in New York City. Caribbean immigrants applied the traditions of home to form groups in order to aid each other in times of need. While mutual assistance and primarily burial and sick relief were major objectives of these groups, they served many additional functions to their members such as being forums for discussions on Caribbean American affairs, hosting cultural activities, helping members find employment, and providing charity and welfare assistance, especially in the case of newly arrived immigrants. For instance, the BBA (founded in 1898) served as a gathering place for biweekly meetings, educational forums, and social affairs. However, its most common functions that members utilized were its sick and death benefits. The BBA guaranteed a funeral fund upon the passing of a member or a juvenile member to his or her beneficiary. In addition, the BBA established visiting committees in order to check on the well-being of its members, bring them flowers, and keep them in good spirits. In 1955, the group established a five-year scholarship for the Berkeley Institute in Bermuda and donated $600 toward the establishment of the institute’s science department, demonstrating the transnational connections these groups helped form. Additionally, the BBA established an investment committee, creating a portfolio that would include real estate (and also mortgage financing), government bonds, and mutual funds. The group hosted a youth-focused branch called the Rosebuds. The association eventually purchased a building in central Harlem to serve as its headquarters in 1932. The BBA would continue to operate from these headquarters until 1989, when members sold the building and began to hold meetings at Grace Congregational Church in Harlem, where several association members were parishioners. The BBA was eventually forced to dissolve a few years later in 1998, when the last remaining twenty members liquidated the association’s assets due to low membership numbers.7 The BBA dissolved one hundred years after its founding, no longer able to attract younger members to the group. Part of the reason for the association’s demise may have been its failure to keep up with technological advances, as membership into the group was mostly built on word of mouth and personal connections. Additionally, a reluctance to adapt to newer technology may have rendered the association inaccessible to younger generations.

Alternatively, an early twentieth-century mutual aid society that continues to operate into the twenty-first century is the Antigua and Barbuda Progressive Society, founded in 1934. Similar to the BBA, the society purchased a headquarters building that it named the Antigua House in Harlem. But unlike the BBA, members of the Antigua and Barbuda Progressive Society leaned into changing technology as a way to keep distant members connected to the activities of the society and attract new and younger society members. The society utilized Facebook as a resource to announce upcoming meetings and events, post pictures and videos, and engage with younger members.8 WhatsApp group chats were frequently utilized to keep members connected, and the association even has a YouTube channel where it post videos of its charitable endeavors and achievements. In a world where your online presence means everything, the group has an updated website that announces its existence in an ever-growing digital world. The long-term work of these groups to build community, develop practices of solidarity, and meet the material needs of their membership meant that the infrastructure for their mutual aid work during COVID-19 was already in place when the pandemic struck.

The New York City Mutual Aid Response to COVID-19

New York City was one of the most impacted cities in the world during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. Though widespread, these impacts were felt unequally and came on the heels of a preexisting affordability crisis already devastating communities of color and working-class residents.9 Though many of the groups participating in mutual aid in New York formed in the early days of the crisis, preexisting networks and organizations were a central part of the effort. Some early organizers had been part of the Occupy Sandy movement (such as Mutual Aid NYC). Many others had come out of a range of organizing backgrounds. The Crown Heights Tenant Union, a leader in the movement to cancel rent during the pandemic, had been formed in the wake of Occupy Wall Street in the mid aughts, while many workers in progressive immigrant organizations often pivoted toward mutual aid.10 In Manhattan, at least one state senator’s office, the local chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, and organizers with the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign each launched mutual aid efforts. Many organizations also pivoted from advocacy work toward mutual aid. These groups drew in participants from a wide range of backgrounds, many of whom were new to community organizing, creating new opportunities but also presenting their own set of challenges and tensions.

At the start of the pandemic, tens of thousands of New Yorkers from every borough joined Facebook groups, WhatsApp or Signal chats, and Slack channels or otherwise signed up to participate in mutual aid. Members of these groups raised millions of dollars through crowdfunding efforts and delivered countless tons of groceries, homemade masks and personal protective equipment, and other supplies. Other forms of care provided through mutual aid groups included free child and pet care services and running errands and conducting wellness checks for at-risk individuals. As the effects of the pandemic changed, the types of support provided by mutual aid organizations in New York shifted. Initial priorities around providing groceries and other support to those most impacted by the health effects of the pandemic were in many instances supplemented or supplanted by other work focused on the rent crisis or the Black Lives Matter movement. Many groups also shifted away from individual grocery trips toward bulk purchase and delivery of food and other supplies as they grew more organized and sought to increase the amount of assistance they could provide in the face of a growing economic crisis. As vaccines became available, outreach became important because appointments were only available online. Vulnerable populations who were not tech savvy or lacked reliable internet access were left struggling to sign up for inoculation appointments. Mutual aid groups stepped in to ensure that their communities would have access. As the pandemic continued, groups adapted and developed internal governance mechanisms, sought to combat burnout among their members, and stayed responsive to the changing nature of the crisis and the needs of their communities.

Social media and other internet technologies were central to these organizing efforts, particularly due to social distancing. Because people could not gather in person, nearly all organizing work was conducted online. As is the case in many emergencies, mutual aid groups mostly relied on tools familiar to organizers to address the problems and needs that surfaced during the crisis rather than inventing new technologies or software.11 Many neighborhood organizations ran their own Slack and WhatsApp groups along with citywide iterations of these networks to help coordinate and share information across communities. Zoom and other tools were used for video conferencing. Early on in the pandemic, a citywide volunteer registration and assistance request system was set up using Google Forms and Airtable in order to complement localized efforts. Google Docs was used widely by groups to manage information about members, requests, and organizational issues. As a complement to digital technologies, analog tools such as paper flyers, zines, and word of mouth were used widely for outreach and recruitment.

As the movement catalyzed, the case for mutual aid as part of a broader political, anticapitalist vision for human liberation grew. This vision closely intersected with the growing support for prison and police abolitionist work in the midst of the Black Lives Matter uprisings. “Solidarity Not Charity” was a rallying cry for a broad, autonomous political formation that would build alternative care-based systems that would sustainably challenge exploitation and oppression at their roots, destroying the existing system while building something new and better in its place.12 Within many groups, debates erupted over everything from the ethics of taking money or supplies from particular organizations, especially those seen as having central roles in gentrification or were known to have ties to law enforcement.

In a global finance and technology hub such as New York City, it is perhaps unsurprising that the question of technology—and the vision of tech working for good—would move into the center of popular discussions around mutual aid.13 During the pandemic, multiple different groups developed guides around how to use technology for mutual aid organizing as well as groups such as Code 4 Covid, devoted to employing skills gained in the tech industry toward mutual aid.14 Notably, one group, which was set up to support the development of mutual aid groups across the city, has shifted since then (alongside the contraction in organizing capacity) from this mission toward a project to build a volunteer-run 311 system, which received minor startup funding and support from a major business school. Similar projects made the rounds nationally, with dozens of applications in development promising to gamify or otherwise simplify the project of organizing mutual aid networks.

The pandemic also witnessed the emergence of philanthropic funding for mutual aid organizations. Groups such as Omidyar Foundation, the Open Society Foundations, and the Ford Foundation devoted significant capital to supporting the development of mutual aid efforts, with the apparent goal, as Omidyar phrases it, of “reimagining capitalism.”15 This is a notable rhetorical and ideological departure from the so-called millennial socialism that animated so much of the left-wing political discourse surrounding mutual aid at the time.16 One example of this impulse intersecting with the tech sphere may be seen in the One Project, a New York City–based philanthropic organization whose “architectures of abundance” project imagines the coming of a “new reality based on values like justice, fairness, empathy, solidarity, nonviolence, compassion, interdependence, and love for the universe.” This, the One Project contends, will be facilitated through an open source–based digital platform, an “accessible, user-friendly website and mobile app, built as a commons-based open-source platform cooperative, that allows any community to govern itself through collective intelligence, productive deliberation, and intelligent resource distribution.”17

An examination of how emerging tech can be deployed to support mutual aid work as well as broader efforts to build a more fair and just society is warranted. In their vision for the future, the authors of the document mentioned above describe how in their future “public institutions report to the people they most affect, not distant politicians and their appointees. When the people control the funding, rules, and leadership of the justice system, we can begin to heal from collective traumas like mass incarceration and the war on drugs. We can take back control of the designs and resources of our neighborhoods. (And, in a fair society where everyone has enough, there will be vastly less need for policing.)”18 Indeed, many of these ideas emerge in conversation with popular activist theories from past years, with nods to police and prison abolition, mutual aid, and anarchist writers such as David Graeber. However, as we have seen time and time again, such “tech for good” projects are unsuccessful and result in damaging their broader social aims.19 Part of the challenge of these tech solutions can be traced to failures to adequately historicize the work of the activists they are meant to support or the broader structures in contemporary society they struggle against.

Historicizing Tech and Mutual Aid

Though the presence in the mutual aid movement of individuals with fluency in certain communications platforms, such as Slack, Google Docs, and Airtable, facilitated the rapid growth and development of modern mutual aid networks, these same tools could prove deeply limiting. Such tensions may have been exacerbated by the dozens of self-proclaimed mutual aid organizations that sprung up across the city, many of which were largely organized by people who had suddenly switched to work-from-home jobs or had been laid off due to the onset of the pandemic. Unlike them, most New Yorkers did not begin the pandemic with any proficiency in Slack, and many found the need to sift through dozens of different channels a significant barrier to entry. This especially affected older and less technologically literate people, who were underrepresented across the newly founded mutual aid groups. As mutual aid organizing moved online, many struggled to reach disproportionately at-risk community members. Meanwhile, expectations of technology access and fluency also contributed to a widening rift between preestablished mutual aid organizations and those that arose in the immediate context of the pandemic. Such rifts had material impacts on who was able to participate in and receive support from the organizing work happening across the city.

Furthermore, the emphasis on building novel technologies or deploying those that require significant expertise distracted from the tools that people already used and were comfortable with. Organizing technologies, such as paper fliers, phone calls, door knocking, and even text messaging, have been used to mobilize communities for generations and in many cases do a better job of meeting people where they are. Many of the long-running mutual aid organizations in the city did not use social media or even show up on Google searches but instead relied on decades-old relational networks to distribute and provide aid, as in the case of older Caribbean immigrant mutual aid societies. “Mutual aid,” moreover, was not the terminology used by many different long-standing networks to describe their work and care to their communities. As a result, these groups were disproportionately left out of the boom of capital and energy that surrounded the emergent mutual aid milieu. Reliance on new tools may also lead to problems, including failure of critical systems or privacy/security breaches if relying on untested tools or those with which members of the group are not adequately familiar.

The focus on new technologies could also shift the internal dynamics around decision-making, organizing, and outreach strategies in favor of those with one form of expertise—technology—over other perhaps more important forms of knowledge, such as organizing experience and understanding local context and history. Skilled technical workers in the finance, technology, and creative industries who lacked a strong background in community organizing or the politics underlying the practice of mutual aid took on leadership roles within a host of newly emergent mutual aid groups.20 This led to the creation of often unintended hierarchies within mutual aid organizing, placing the perspectives of often more affluent participants in conflict with others. We saw mutual aid groups that had just been established take over the care of local neighborhood communities without looking to the frameworks that were already in place by more established mutual aid organizations. As a result, when the immediate needs of the pandemic shifted and we saw a drop in funding and volunteers participating in mutual aid efforts, communities were left vulnerable with no long-term frameworks in place. Groups particularly reliant on new technologies could also find themselves ever more susceptible to collapse or significant loss of capacity if the sometimes only technologist left. Alternatively, groups such as Bushwick Ayuda Mutua and Bushwick Mutual Aid, both created during the COVID-19 crisis, worked with established groups such as Latinos Unidos Bushwick, an organization that has worked in the community for over three decades, to provide English-language and citizenship classes, emergency and food distribution, and a forum to discuss community issues.21 Collaboratively, these groups assessed the needs of the community and focused mutual aid efforts on those pressing concerns.

Many of the weaknesses we identified in the technological imaginaries of those who engaged in or sought to support mutual aid organizing in New York during the pandemic can be traced to a failure to attend to the history of these movements. Such an imaginary, consistent with much of the culture and ideology surrounding contemporary internet technology,22 treats history as either distant and far removed if recognizing it at all. Strategies based on this imaginary fail to build on the existing organizations, people, and resources that have been built up over decades, including the Caribbean mutual aid societies described above but also forms of mutual care and support that have been intrinsic to tenant, LGBTQ, labor, abolitionist, immigrant, and other organizing for generations. These failures can serve to reinforce divides in the city at a time when we can least afford it.

In his Theses on History, Walter Benjamin famously wrote that “the tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule.”23 Lacking a clear understanding of the history of mutual aid, many organizers also failed to understand the many important ways in which the COVID-19 crisis deepened existing emergencies rather than creating a radical break from what came before. Stunted analyses such as these can spill over into strategic mistakes or lack of clarity in vision. Indeed, many of the mutual aid groups that arose during COVID-19 have since ceased or paused their activity. A limited or confused view of social change, in other words, made it particularly difficult to sustain activity once the spectacle of the crisis was felt to be over.

Conclusion

Theorists of technology have long debated the relationship between the interests that build technology and their uses. Idealists contend that technologies built by and for the well capitalized can be redeployed by the oppressed as tools of liberation. Constructivists, on the other hand, contend that technologies will tend to work in favor of the interests of the powerful. We suggest that technologies are sites of racialized/intersectional class struggle. Despite predictions about the overthrow of governments and big business by technological revolutions made by techno-optimist supporters such as Niarchos, the promise of mutual aid as a system for scaffolding more profound and radical change will not be realized without a commitment to maintain and build upon the hard-won lessons and resources of organizing work already being done as well as the traditions surrounding them.24 Liberatory mutual aid requires the development of long-term relations of care and hard grassroots organizing that bucks the temporalities of the boosters of modern technology.25 Networks of care cannot be built in an afternoon or even across a few weeks on Slack. As Mariame Kaba reminds us, there is freedom in recognizing our connection to the past as part of a continuity of work and struggle that has existed since before our time and one that will continue after we and the hype surrounding current technologies are gone.26

Notes

1. 1.  Sarah Jaffe, Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt (Bold Type Books, 2016), 61.
2. 2.  Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852).
3. 3.  Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Harvard University Press, 2011); and Jacob A. C. Remes and Andy Horowitz, eds., Critical Disaster Studies (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021).
4. 4.  David Spataro, “We Work, We Eat Together: Anti-authoritarian Mutual Aid Politics in New York City, 2004–2013” (PhD diss., City University of New York 2014), https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/114.
5. 5.  David Edgerton, The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900 (Profile Books, 2011).
6. 6.  Tyesha Maddox, “More Than Auxiliary: Caribbean Women and Social Organizations in the Interwar Period,” Caribbean Review of Gender Studies, no. 12 (December 2018): 67–94, https://sta.uwi.edu/crgs/december2018/documents/CRGS_12_Pgs67-94_Anti-Colonial_TMaddox.pdf.
7. 7.  Maddox, “More than Auxiliary.”
8. 8.  Tyesha Maddox, A Home Away from Home: Mutual Aid, Political Activism, and the Construction of Caribbean American Identity, 1890–1940 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024).
9. 9.  Victoria Lawson et al., Equality Indicators: Measuring Change Towards Greater Equality in New York City (Institute for State and Local Governance, 2018), https://nyc.equityindicators.org/; and “COVID-19: Data,” New York City Department of Health, accessed April 1, 2021, https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data.page.
10. 10.  Joymala Hajra, “Leading Communities of Care: Mutual Aid Powered by Bangladeshi New Yorkers,” Tides: Magazine of the South Asian American Digital Archive, February 9, 2022, https://www.saada.org/tides/article/leading-communities-of-care; and Premilla Nadasen, Care: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (Haymarket Books, 2023).
11. 11.  Robert Soden and Leysia Palen, “Informating Crisis: Expanding Critical Perspectives in Crisis Informatics,” Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 2, no. CSCW (2018): 1–22, https://doi.org/10.1145/3274431.
12. 12.  Dean Spade, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next) (Verso Books, 2020).
13. 13.  Carolynne Hultquist and Ramzi M. Tubbeh, “Digital Sociotechnical Systems of Mutual Aid: How Communities Connected, Adapted, and Innovated During the COVID-19 Pandemic in New York City,” Citizen Science: Theory and Practice 7, no. 1 (2022): 20, https://doi.org/10.5334/cstp.454.
14. 14.  Bed-Stuy Strong, “How to Make a Neighborhood Hub During the COVID-19 Pandemic Using Slack,” https://docs.google.com/document/d/1GHZ0fWeV1UIVV027wy96n-WUf_wvGrK1WuG_R5icZ7c/edit#heading=h.vc39owuapp8x; and NYC United Against Coronavirus, “NYC United Against Coronavirus—Resources and Information,” https://docs.google.com/document/d/18WYGoVlJuXYc3QFN1RABnARZlwDG3aLQsnNokl1KhZQ/preview.
15. 15.  “Three Important Lessons We’re Applying To our New Tech-Focused Strategy,” Omidyar Network, December 17, 2024, https://omidyar.com/update/three-important-lessons-were-applying-to-our-new-tech-focused-strategy/.
16. 16.  Chris Maisano, “The Making of Millennial Socialism,” Jacobin, October 2, 2023, https://jacobin.com/2023/10/the-making-of-millennial-socialism
17. 17.  “The Architecture of Abundance,” One Project, https://oneproject.org/architecture-of-abundance/.
18. 18.  “The Architecture of Abundance.”
19. 19.  Morgan G. Ames, The Charisma Machine: The Life, Death, and Legacy of One Laptop per Child (MIT Press, 2019); and Lilly Irani, Chasing Innovation: Making Entrepreneurial Citizens in Modern India (Princeton University Press, 2019).
20. 20.  Robert Soden and Embry Owen, “Dilemmas in Mutual Aid: Lessons for Crisis Informatics from an Emergent Community Response to the Pandemic,” Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 5, no. CSCW2 (2021): 1–19, https://doi.org/10.1145/3479862.
21. 21.  Tyesha Maddox, “Can Mutual Aid Withstand Pandemic Fatigue?,” Bloomberg, April 16, 2021, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-04-16/new-yorkers-need-mutual-aid-groups-more-than-ever.
22. 22.  Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, “The Californian Ideology,” Science as Culture 6, no. 1 (1996): 44–72, https://doi.org/10.1080/09505439609526455; and Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (University of Chicago Press, 2006).
23. 23.  Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Critical Theory and Society: A Reader, eds. Stephen Eric Bronner and Douglas McKay Kellner (Routledge, 1990), 257–58.
24. 24.  Spade, Mutual Aid.
25. 25.  Nadasen, Care.
26. 26.  Mariame Kaba, We Do This ’til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice (Haymarket Books, 2021).