New Years' Prepositions: What's IN and what's OUT?
Six Ins and Six Outs for 2026. Time to get away from despair, and from renting software from billionaires. Time to get into community-ownership, DIY culture and taking action with a certain gusto and resolve.
Here we stand, a quarter of the way through the 21st Century. Out with landlines and in with eerily portable ‘smartphones’! Ah, but the Century is nothing new: let's narrow things down. It's a new year and also a new month. (January is never really acknowledged in its own right).
It's the year of the Fire Horse – but not until February, when I'm sure we'll hear more about that symbol of transformation and light. It's also the UN's Year of the Woman Farmer – a time to work for growth.
So what's the 2026 rumpus? What can we jettison, and what can we embrace as we enter this bright, cold, potent year? Here come some of our suggested INs and OUTs.
Feel free to ‘boo’ the outs if you wish, and/or to approach both categories with skepticism and curiosity. I'm not the boss of you, and nor shall I ever be.
Out: Spotify!
This may be old news, but Spotify simply underpaying its musicians to a grievous degree is now one of the lesser evils they conduct, with it being widely reported that CEO Daniel Ek invested $600mn in AI-powered military drones. More recently, they have been running adverts for ICE over in America. Exploitative, and siding with the modern SS, this is a service to do away with.
Leaving Spotify for Tidal may just move us from one bad billionare to a slightly less worse one (in this case, Twitter's @jack), but at GFSC we're always looking at truly community owned DIY solutions. Kim wrote in detail last year about her musical jouney and breakup with Spotify, and explored the currently quite complex route to doing it yourself.
I look for a future where we can do all things ethically, but it’s a way away. A goal to work towards. In the meantime, let’s cut Spotify out of our lives one way or another.
In: Community-owned media
Subvert is an online co-operative, a member-owned, artist-driven alternative to Bandcamp – it’s still in early stages, and it remains to be seen how it will prosper, but this kind of service is an encouraging step away from profit-driven sites – if you’re a music maker you may be interested in signing up at alpha.subvert.fm
Other artist-owned co-operatives include Stocksy, a reassuringly human-made collection of stock images, and Means TV, a streaming service wholly owned by its creators. This is a good time to seek, join and make use of workers collectives in the arts, as in all things. You'll be hearing from us fairly soon about the present and future of the fediverse, and ways to take ownership of social media.
Out: Facebook and Instagram
Ah, but you know this one already. It’s still great if you love adverts, and seeing your older relatives wooed by generative AI. Instagram, specifically, can get in the bin as our primary communication method.
In: Communal toolbanks
If you have too much, or if you have too little, sharing can be a boon. You can save your wallet and your shelves by using libraries for books, and can do something similar with toolbanks and tool-libraries, borrowing and sharing within the community. Most will rent tools out at a low cost, with a deposit you’ll get back when you return it. I have far more tools than I use, and those which do get used lie fallow most of the year. Who can’t say the same? I recommend googling your local one (or ecosiaing it, but that’s an awkward verb) or having a look if you have a local Karrot.
Out: Renting software from billionaires
Fifteen years ago, the Internet seemed a big old world, filled with hopeful (relatively) independent websites like MySpace, Bandcamp, Livejournal and even Tumblr, all since snapped up by the big dogs of big tech. There was breadth to it, a freedom. Since then, the Internet has boiled and reduced like a thickening broth, and our lives have become centralised under a smaller number of owners.
It feels impossible to use sites, services or apps without putting money in the pockets of Meta, Google and Microsoft – whether directly or through ad revenue. The bigger they get, the bigger we make them. It's time to get real about the impact of corporate tech.
Writers from the reasearch studio co-matter and Mozilla have been speaking about the end of the “naïve Internet”, and we love this framing. The optimistic era was building the Internet big for one and all. This gave us the giants! In the post-naïve era Internet, we must look less at size and expansion, more at values, more at the people who run it and how it's funded. It's time to build sites and services where the goal is to aid the user and the community, not the shareholder and the CEO.
We all prop up Big Tech, and this often feels unavoidable. However, Paris Marx of Disconnect provides an in-depth look at alternatives to Microsoft and the rest, and ways to decentralise US-based services. There are other ways ahead, and we need to turn to each other. That leads us to our next IN:
In: DIY culture
As above, the big companies seem to own it all. Meta and TikTok have taken down queer content and information on abortion access. Offline, both main political parties are fuelling division and discrimination. It's apparent there's no space for us right now, so it's time for a return to DIY – and that doesn't just mean putting up a shelf. It's about putting up a society.
This means we like zines and zine distros like Pen Fight
Also weird live shows with experimental technology
Also paper flyers like Another Subculture's London punk listings
and also DIY tech like PlaceCal.
DIY has always been a method of the people.
Out: Six-Seven, for some reason.
Please? 🙏
In: Giving money to things you care about
2025 saw the great collapse of the funding model for most orgs. If we are going to build the world we want we are going to have to start paying for it, and demanding more from each other. Give it to your friends and your communities, and things begin to grow to the benefit of one and all. That's why we'll be heartily glad if you can:
Out: Paranoid Passivety
It's a delight to read, to listen and live a sedentary life, but it's hard to get anything done if you don't also write, speak and take some sort of action (according to your ability, natch).
I'd roll maundering into this topic, as well. It's easy to look at the world and despair and fall into a slump. It's harder but a notch more fruitful to write to your MP, to say no (in some way, shaper or form), to volunteer, to donate or to simply look out for neighbours, for strangers, for anyone who crosses your path.
In: Passionate Proactivity
Take action, and do so with gusto. Literally do something and not nothing. As simplistic as that sounds, it's the sentence I turn to whenever I get stuck doing nothing and not something.
My personal philosophy on creative activity: children are willing to sing, dance, make music and art and so forth with very little concern for whether they're good at it or not. Adults have a single try at a new instrument, at zine-making, at pole-dancing, or what-have-you and then give up on it. Or worse, they never try in the first place, saying ‘I'd love to do that, but I'm no good at it’. They're missing how easy it is to start something so long as you're willing to enjoy it, to do it as play. That's the way to develop a skill: to literally do it, and to enjoy the process, rather than obsessing over the output. Start like that and you can do almost anything.
Out: Alliteration
Sorry for the alliteration there. Very 2025 of us. We won't do it again.
In: Pride Place
Local groups are a boon, and local queer groups are a delight. Leeds’ queer cohousing project Pride of Place Leeds launched a local events calendar in December using GFSC's PlaceCal tech. If you want queer things to do in Leeds check it out!
If you want queer things to do almost anywhere else, queer infrastructure projects are popping up in a number of cities, and they're a thing worth building wherever they aren't already found.
...Shake It All About?
We'd love to hear from you this year (and, right away, if you will). For one thing, what INs and OUTs did we miss? What are your INs and OUTs for 2026? Not a rhetorical question, by the way. Let us know in the comments, or join us on the Geeks for Social Change Discord. Stay tuned, stay woke, and stay active in whatever you're seeking to do. We have a whole year to make things better for one another – and then another one, and another one.
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