A frustration felt by many of these bloggers have is that there seems to be more money to study the work of building online networks for social movements than there is to support the actual work.

At this moment, thousands of Ph.D.’s and “social movement experts” receive funding to explain the work that we do. They study our work and then present terrible versions of it to academia and the non-profit industrial complex. Okay, to be honest, not always terrible versions, but 80% of them are subpar to what we would be presenting ourselves if asked.

Radical online activism needs support. That support cannot be a paid position. The writers on the social networks built on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and others should be working class, of the world, in the world, with a proven commitment to creating and fostering networks for availability to activist groups needing to mobilize quickly. Crafting and driving content through social media networks are skills, skills that need practice and refinement every day.

At the moment, you can use communication technology as a tool to amplify new ideas, or you can use it as a consumer. Radical bloggers focus entirely on amplifying new ideas, challenging corruption, and raising the voices of thousands of people to speak truth to power. Bloggers have replaced the influence of the mainstream media and advertising. The effects of mainstream conversation being led by the working class are in infancy. Supporting this work, with an actual mutual aid-inspired fund, will provide the resources needed to both shift online political conversation and expand the voices in the online political conversation.

We know this will work because we have already changed the conversation to the political reality we find ourselves in today. The Radical Blogger Fund will be a source of sustainable resource support, raised by crowdfunding, distributed to working class people, by working class people, who know the craft of online communication. Further, the grantees will be brought into the fund as stakeholders in that they will be a part of approving future payments for new bloggers as well as being offered an opportunity to join a larger virtual community to review each other’s work and trade best practices.

Instead of asking individuals to submit complicated grant asks, we will be only asking for proof of work in the form of analytics reports and the work that we can see every day on the channels that they write on. Further, as the reach of the fund grows, the recipients will be involved in recommending and approving future grant recipients.

We are excited to partner with Alliance for Global Justice, an organization that helped to make the work of Occupy Wall Street and Occupy Sandy possible. We are confident that with their support, we will be able to not only provide these mutual aid payments to radical bloggers in the Occupy network but many other networks that have been built to support the efforts behind demanding a new political reality.

We need a world that does not put us into prisons for profit, criminalizes our reproductive choices, shoves us into indentured servitude through bank loans, or forces us to choose between gas and food money because we are in debt to health care or who knows what else. Solutions are in front of us, we need the imagination to implement them, radical bloggers will help make that possible.

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