On behalf of Hypha Worker Co-op, I’d like to nominate Fight for the Future. More about their work below!
Fight for the Future is one the most active digital rights nonprofits fighting for human rights-centered crypto policy, building on their decade of advocacy and activism for open source software, privacy, free speech, and the democratization of the internet. The mission of this queer women led organization is to ensure that technology is a force for empowerment and free expression rather than corruption, surveillance, and inequality. By employing a tactical combination of technology, alliance-building, advocacy, and messaging, Fight harnesses the power of the Internet to mobilize people on an unprecedented scale. They speak to legislators with users’ rights and interests at heart, and often give lawmakers the push they need to do the right thing.
In the summer of 2021, when the Senate added a provision that would threaten the entirety of the cryptocurrency ecosystem to a must-pass bill, Fight launched a massively viral effort at dontkillcrypto.com. They drove more than 40,000 calls to senators, helping to generate the introduction of two competing amendments in less than a week. While the Senate failed to amend their original, harmful language, the campaign succeeded in exploding the issue into the public’s radar, earning more attention to cryptocurrency policy than ever before and demonstrating that Congress will be held accountable for trying to sneak through laws that have the potential to change the future of the internet and undermine privacy. Since then, for better or worse the crypto lobby has spent a lot of money on lobbying. Among all thought leaders on the hill, Fight is a unique voice with a passionate focus on human rights including the first amendment right to code and the right to privacy. They have been meeting with legislators, taking principled, powerful, user-focused stances on ham-handed legislation, engaging on topics from Russian sanctions to financial surveillance and CBDCs.
Fight’s latest work includes active resistance to the sanctioning of Tornado Cash’s open source software code, launching rapid-fire statements and targeted legislative outreach to preserve and defend not only the US’s first amendment protected right to code but the necessity of privacy tools and a robust open source culture of building them. Fight for the Future has also called for legislators to adopt a human rights framework in any regulation of decentralized technologies. Using this framework, they pushed back on multiple pieces of bad legislation and political opportunism. They launched new campaigns for a surveillance-free and censorship-free digital dollar and co-hosted a salon series with Amnesty International convening human rights organizers and web3 creators to intentionally shape a human-first future for the web. Most recently, Fight for the Future organized 60 open source, decentralized, human rights and privacy preserving orgs to fight for privacy by demanding the 118th Congress take a principled stand and protect privacy-promoting technologies, their creators, and the intimate personal data of everyday people. Fight for the Future believes that consumer protections in tech are necessary now more than ever but they have to be done right. For more information about their work, check out their 2023 page.