Welcome to IYKYK
In early 2025 I was preparing to go on a sabbatical following a long 4-year journey to attaining my Master's degree. At the time I had decided that I was going to write in presence for a year, just to get back into the habit of putting my thoughts into written form. Using a well-known content platform, over the course of the year I gradually published 23 long-form written pieces and a slew of news clip notes into the ether, covering aspects of spirituality, psychology, consciousness, news, and grief and loss. I gained a few subscribers, published a couple of test broadcasts using the streaming features, but overall I was writing and producing content for my personal sanity and creativity, not for any particular audience. After all, I was beginning the second phase of a new career as a Licensed Drug and Alcohol Counselor and Psychotherapist. I didn't really have time to do much more than creative writing as a hobby.
Parallel to the hobby writing I was doing, a dark cloud of authoritarianism, corruption, and graft fell over the United States. Corporatized news media, formerly referred to as "The Fourth Estate," proved that it was also corrupted. Not only did corporate news media organizations bow down to the forces of authoritarianism and censorship, in many ways they demonstrated a proclivity to bend the truth, ignore hard facts, and sell versions of stories that supported the oligarchs that own them. The corporate news media system revealed its true face as a propaganda tool of the state. All of a sudden, many of the professional journalists, writers, and experts I respected were leaving their corporate positions to begin posting on self-publishing websites and broadcasting via streaming resources. Just last week The Washington Post itself was gutted by the oligarch that owns it, spilling more quality journalists into the streets without support.
Many popular self-publishing sites were also not immune to the problem of media ownership conflicts. Over the course of Autumn 2025 I did a deep dive into who owned the platform on which I was posting my content. It was not a happy swim. I learned that the platform I was building a following upon itself was owned by a wealthy group of investors the bulk of whom also participated in and fed the authoritarian regime's coffers. Unknowingly I had been feeding the media beast with my content, allowing the platform to profit from eyeballs that I helped it bring in. That money was turned around and given back to the very regime that in my previous life as an organizer I had sworn to defeat. It certainly didn't drop any money into my pocket, that's for sure. Suffice it to say I was conflicted as what to do.
Then in early December the authoritarian scourge arrived at my back door here in frozen Minnesota. 3000 ICE/CBP/DHS agents swarmed the Twin Cities and outstate in greater Minnesota, rounding up hundreds of peaceful neighbors, citizens, and legally-authorized non-citizen residents, killing peaceful observers and protesters, disappearing U.S. citizens and non-citizens alike. Like our sisters and brothers in L.A., Chicago, DC, and Portland, the Twin Cities (Minneapolis and Saint Paul) were turned into war zones by ICE/CBP/DHS. During this time thousands of individual Minnesotans have shown up to heroically defend our community from this authoritarian fascist activity, engaging in peaceful resistance, documenting illegal activities by government authorized agents, and creating a network of mutual aid response in our community. Their organizing actions to assist our neighbors are truly inspiring.
In my professional life I am not currently able to participate in the movement in the way that I would have in my younger organizer years. This time around, instead of being on the front lines of the protests and marches I have engaged in mental health support for my neighbors doing Constitutionally-protected activities like free speech protesting, legal observing, following ICE/CBP/DHS Gestapo teams and documenting their activities, and providing mutual aid. As they sat in the therapy chair telling me about their trauma experiences, anxiety, depression, fears, and concerns for our future, I listened. It was clear that more help was needed.
A week ago Saturday afternoon, while listening to Minnesota Public Radio, I learned about a resistance media effort in Los Angeles supporting protesters, neighborhood protectors, and antifascist organizers, broadcasting a daily stream of information about ICE/CBP/DHS activities in the City of Angels. It dawned on me that across the United States, indeed across the world, there is a building greater emphasis on supporting independent activist journalism, information aggregation, creation of and access to channels of unfiltered, uncensored, untethered distribution of real-time news and information. Any effort would need to include sandboxed projects that could help citizen journalists and whistleblowers connect, provide secured and compartmentalized investigative workspaces, and host virtualized newsroom environments where the work can proceed without interference or obstruction by authoritarian fascist forces. In other words, multiple resistance newsrooms would need to be created, funded, and built from the ground up.
About 20 years ago I created an idea platform called the Chicago MediaHub Project. The concept was a unified community media infrastructure platform which could be used to organize, aggregate, report, and distribute news and entertainment content as a counterbalance to the corporate and religious media powerhouses of the day. Along with a couple other media nerds I even created a daily internet talk show and blog to demonstrate parts of the concept. For an entire summer we broadcasted a live 3-hour daily talk show from my dining room, and hosted it on my public blog site. Sadly, back in the early 2000s it was still too early in the development of the Internet for this kind of project to succeed. When the money ran out we each went our separate ways, in my case returning to reporting, broadcast hosting, and issues organizing in the trenches of progressive social justice movements.
Now, however, the game has changed. With the advent of distributed content networks, secure aggregation, the blockchain, encryption, and open source technology platforms; the harder-t0-accomplish pieces of the original CMHP project idea are available to support a much wider array of independent activist journalism projects. Inspired by activists, organizers, journalists, and fellow resisters across the United States, from Los Angeles to Chicago, DC to Portland, Phoenix to Atlanta, the time has come to assemble a distributed independent network of independent activist newsrooms to feed a larger freedom of information movement, to push back on authoritarian propaganda in every city, town, village, township, district, and county across the United States; and eventually also to war torn and authoritarian areas abroad.
IYKYK is a first effort at building such a independent activist journalism media ecosystem. Starting with this basic website, I will share not only my own thoughts on how we need to move forward, but it will be a place where we can begin to build-out architecture to enable truly independent activist journalism across the country, and hopefully the entire planet. The only way this is accomplished is with your support. So, if you have made it this far and are excited about this idea – please subscribe to IYKYK and send this post to a friend. I am building IYKYK on the Ghost platform to start. A great deal of future backend infrastructure will exist in other public and private spaces as the project gains other founders, journalists, editors, producers, technologists, and operators. If you are interested in participating in the project, by all means please send a message here. I will get back to you within 7 days. There will be a vigorous vetting process in order to protect these projects from being compromised.
Thank you for reading this, and for considering joining this effort. Together we can build the independent activist journalism platform of the future, and bring real truth back to the masses.
SF, IYKYK Founder
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