Let's guess that there are fifty important industries that Trump and his crew are quickly undermining, maybe even destroying here in the United States. One, for example, is higher education. American universities and colleges are a treasure. We know that tens of thousands of people come to the country each year to study, and that many of them pay the highest rate of tuition, making it possible for more American citizens to go to university too. It's a clear example of a valuable industry, the work of many decades and many thousands of creative and hard-working people, and layered with social benefits that are not hard to recognize. And the Trump team would be pleased to undermine and capture this industry, intending to remake it for its own grim, narrow purposes.
If you were concerned about this industry, where would you go to keep up on the news about it? How would you learn about the possibilities for pushback, the places one could pitch in? Is there a single news source that gathers, sorts, and reposts the day's news about higher education?
Looks like The Chronicle of Higher Education is behind a paywall, and Inside Higher Ed offers five free articles a month. As in the past, a person could go searching each day for industry news. Maybe a Google Alert or two would help. But in general, news about a given industry is dispersed or hidden behind paywalls. In a crisis, a person of good will probably can't find the industry's news in a single place or in a couple of places.
There are models for kind of heroic single-person news sites, daily searching, collating, and reposting by a solo investigator on a focused topic. From afar, this model looks valuable to me but also may tend toward burnout. And then there's the question of how a solo researcher's site finds a wide enough audience to be worthwhile and useful.
And let's guess that there are fifty notable American industries at risk right now. Even if there were enough of these solo sites in operation, fifty or more, maybe more than one for each important industry, they'd surely be more powerful if they were affiliated with each other. If they were, then people could say, "Hey, fifty of the most important industries threatened by Trump are covered every day, and you can follow any and all of these industries starting at this home page."
Heroic soloists are great, but I remember when studying episodes of effective activism that small groups that found a way to affiliate with others always, always, always had the best chance of success. So much so that my students and I concluded that without affiliation there was rarely any hope.
Everything said above about fifty industries at risk might also be said for fifty institutions at risk. Various kinds of courts, for example. We could really use an affiliated site focusing our access to this news too. And the core values of the society, maybe another fifty there too.
Trump and crew are obviously a grave problem, but it's also an information problem, an affiliation problem too.
Years ago food bloggers saw the power of affiliation. It can be done. They'd decide to invite posts on a certain day addressing a certain topic, and dozens of people would step up. The publishing on that day was substantial, full of resources and ideas, and gave me hope for the idea of collaboration and affiliation even among people who didn't know each other. One way or another, it can be done. If historical episodes of activism are a clue, it must be done. What other choice is there?