Solidarity in the Dark

role-playing comrades with Avner Shanan

Xiaowei Wang: Could you tell us what brought you to the Collective Action School Space?

Avner Shanan: My name is Avner Shanan. I live in Chicago and I’m Chicago born and raised. I’m a software engineer and activist and I’d been a fan of Logic(s) from when CAS was first launched and was immediately interested. From the very beginning, I was impressed with the broad and inclusive way y’all were defining who counted as a tech worker for the purpose of this program. It’s not often, in my experience, that you see such a broad definition that recognizes the ways there are many laborers besides software engineers involved in any piece of technology. Lately, there’s been a lot of conversation about software engineers unionizing, or talking about unionizing, which for a long time we’ve been resistant to. And I’d personally like to see a lot more solidarity across different types of workers in tech. So that was a big part of what drew me here, as well as the idea of being in community with like-minded people who are all working on something creative and in the tech space. I applied for the first cohort and didn’t get in, but I did keep an eye on the syllabus that y’all posted and kept an eye on things so that I could try again this past year.

Xiaowei: And we’re so glad you applied again. Could you talk a little about your project and how it began?

Avner: There is a connection between my final project and one of the ideas I included in my application to the school. But it’s pretty different than what I had talked about in my application. I think there were a lot of folks who came in not really know what they wanted to work on, myself included. I had some vague ideas and some directions that I was interested in learning more about. My project is called “Solidarity in the Dark.” It is a table top (pen and paper) role-playing game, based on a rules system that is open source, Creative Commons. Basically I took this game that was originally written for doing heists in a fantasy world and tweaked and changed things so that instead of being about doing heists, it’s about being in solidarity with the people you work with in an unjust world that is literally crumbling around you; asking: how do you organize with your comrades to make it more livable?

My original idea came from being part of a couple successful-ish organizing campaigns and what I heard especially from some of the folks in the cohort was, “I don’t see enough stories of success, what does success look like?”

The original idea was going to be a zine, with a stretch goal of interviewing other people about their experiences and successes, right? And that still sort of lives on in Solidarity in the Dark. It’s basically using my experience as the example of play. And so in addition to hopefully being an actually fun game to play and a way to sort of gently radicalize your coworkers, or maybe build solidarity with your comrades (maybe even role-playing and strategizing and getting comfortable with action at work), it’s also a tool for mapping out the flow of power in your workplace, or in a workplace. So it’s based off of some reading from Secrets of a Successful Organizer and also the book, Midwest Academy’s Manual for Artists, which has a really great section on power mapping. I combined material from both of those resources with some of my own experiences and some game design to make it part of the game.

Xiaowei: What does a successful organizing campaign look like?

Avner: Let’s see, in 2017 or 2018 I think, I worked at a company that had a fairly well supported Employee Resource Group (ERG) system. My mom is from Argentina and I am a white Latino, and I joined the Latinx ERG with some mixed feelings because what does it mean to be a white Latino and have as much privilege as I do. It felt really good to be part of that community, and at some point, our company was switching one of our technology vendors. And it seemed like without much discussion, the decision was going to be that we were going to use a vendor who had somewhat recently had a high-profile scandal because they were collaborating with ICE. As a Latino, as the child of immigrants, as a Jew, I worked with friends and colleagues who I knew were politically aligned to start organizing against this. They/we didn’t want to be using a vendor that is hurting our community, so it’s a pretty straightforward ask. I reached out to also the Latinx ERG and, with support from other ERGs at the company, we built up some solidarity across the organization. Eventually, while leadership was very explicit about how our organizing had nothing to do with the decision, we ended up not going with that vendor and instead selected an alternative. Along the way, in conversations with mid-management to C-Suite, we did put pressure on them to start working on guidelines for vendors and how the company makes ethical and political decisions on which vendors to work with. They’ve made choices to not work with cigarette companies, for example, but the rest is often on a case by case basis.

Xiaowei: Where is your project now?

Avner: I’ve done a little more work on it. I started a new job, not that long after, so that’s been where a lot of my energy has gone. I do have, uh, plans is probably too strong, but dreams, goals of doing more work on it and getting it to a place where I can run a play test or two, that would be really cool. I know folks in the cohort expressed interest in doing some play testing. And I think that I still feel like I could get some of them to do a play test with me. That’s one way that the cohort is still helpful now: feeling like I have folks I can reach out to who already know what I’m up to and are down. In retrospect, the cohort really helped in crucial ways with direction. Dorothy Santos as well, who during the mid-point reviews really helped me dig into the game a bit. As well as talking to Chloe (Xuan) who was also making a game. We ended up forming our own little game making support group.