"National Shutdown" seems to be about this: https://nationalshutdown.org/ (found via https://thehill.com/homenews/nexstar_media_wire/5712766-nati...)
> national SHUTDOWN FRI JAN 30 NO WORK. NO SCHOOL. NO SHOPPING. - The people of the Twin Cities have shown the way for the whole country – to stop ICE’s reign of terror, we need to SHUT IT DOWN. On Friday, January 30, join a nationwide day of no school, no work and no shopping.
So servers will still be running and websites, but won't be any people in offices, school, factories, shops, and so on.
I had never even heard about this before today...
It was posted here but flagged and hidden.
As far as I've heard it's being suppressed on most social medias Americans use. I guess what was once "only possible in China" made it way overseas as well.
how do you get from no school/work/shopping to no websites/servers?
No, I was clarifying because another commentator seemed to misunderstood that this shutdown was specifically about the EFF and potentially about their website, so probably others could have read it the same way too.
how do you get from no school/work/shopping to no websites/servers?
Servers perform work. For people. My oven (KitchenAid) is a machine, yet has a setting that makes it non-functional during certain religious events that require people not to work.
Similarly, B&H Photo's web site won't take orders on the Sabbath. They'd rather take the revenue hit than violate their principles.
A foreign notion to the tech industry.
Your oven doesn't work on Sundays? That ranks high among the stupidest things I've ever heard.
So, how do you get around that? Constantly messing with the clock?
They said it was a setting.
Chick-fil-A too, has this principle. I'd rather have no principles than stupid ones.
what social effect does this have if personal screen silos are Business As Usual while social interaction is halted?
Posted "January 29, 2026"
Seriously... If y'all want a general strike, we need:
* 2 weeks' notice to plan
* Conditions for when the strike ends
This almost feels like "corporate manipulation": Let the slaves "have a day" to cool off and feel like they've accomplished something, then get 'em back in the mines!
> * 2 weeks' notice to plan
Here you have two more further in the future: https://www.fiftyfifty.one/
> February 17th: Impeach, Convict, Remove, Defund
> March 28th: No Kings
Out of those two, I'm guessing the "No Kings" one will be the larger.
> This almost feels like "corporate manipulation":
It is indeed! Manipulating the corporations by showing that people can actually decide to stop working, and it generally scares all the executives because they realize (yet again) that it's actually them who depend on the workers, not the other way around.
This is all strikes. People love to point to the strikes that got us forty hour work weeks and women voting but they forget that the other side has had time to respond. So now we waste our time with this instead - and look at your proposal seriously. What kind of strike give two weeks notice to the entities you're striking against?
I wonder if a large chunk of the population choosing to only buy non-discretionary goods for an extended period of time might freak policy makers out more. Not a targeted boycott. Not a strike still going to work. Lower effort to participate. For example if this caused US Amazon orders to fall by a 1/4 for two weeks and similarly across all retailers.
Low effort to participate isn’t a feature. The point of these kind of actions is to show that there’s a lot of people who are really fired up and won’t be placated or deterred unless policymakers meet their demands.
Sort of? You want something that's going to actually affect the corporations involved. It's not about showing effort, because the government doesn't care how much effort you put in. It's about showing power, making a statement that we "the people" have power and can use it if you don't do what we want. A long-term "nonessentials boycott" might be more impactful in that sense.
> We do not make this decision lightly, but we will not remain silent.
While I fully support this, this irony is a little amusing. By closing they are actually staying silent for a single day.
> By closing they are actually staying silent for a single day.
If they were just staying home, yes, but that's not what they're doing, so they're not "staying silent".
You can find out where everyone is going instead of working here: https://nationalshutdown.org/actions
I really hope it's a massive success.
This is an unhelpful and poorly explained message on very short notice. What does shutdown even mean? Is the website going down? Are they going to redirect the website? Won't a shutdown only hurt the people that need their services? How exactly is shutting down helping protestors say things are out of control?
It’s called a general strike.
But the EFF doesn't provide services to the government; this action will actually benefit the 'offending' government officials by relieving them of the pressure the EFF is intended to effect.
You don’t seem to understand what a general strike is
I just don't think a general strike should necessarily involve government watch-dogs; people like them and the media should work harder to amplify their messages.
And yet many people here are just hearing about this due to the EFF announcement.
Why should anyone care what you think about this? You clearly don’t understand collective action, so why don’t you just go about your business as usual?
living up to the name dingus88
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If everybody doesn't participate equally in the general strike, then it's basically burning down your own neighborhood to protest something that happened on the other side of town.
If everybody does participate, then it amounts to burning down the whole city.
It's such a dumb idea that it's almost indistinguishable from an attempt at subversion by the actual parties/powers being protested. Announcing such an effort 3 days ahead of time while making no specific demands is just icing on the proverbial cake.
sounds like it's a religious ceremony to you. the purpose of the strike is to increase pressure on the government, you're demanding actions that decrease that pressure, apparently for piety reasons.
Exactly. The Monday backlog will be twice as big as usual and somehow this is also the measurement for a successful strike??
Sure, if you needed a haircut the day of the strike and you didn't cut your own hair, you're still gonna have to go to the hairdresser the day after. Maybe as part of the general strike you cut your own hair or you just skipped a completely optional purchase though so there is no backlog the next day.
Many strikes don’t directly affect government services, so I don’t understand your point.
In this case, the EFF striking would help "ICE's reign of terror", by removing a watchdog.
It calls for no work, school or shopping, not for them to stay home and close their eyes.
I thought that the EFF’s ‘work’ was to ‘open people’s eyes’ by highlighting important concerns.
Put another way: should television and newspaper reporters not work, and avoid covering any of the protests?
Is it? I genuinely don’t know, this is the first thing I’ve heard about a national shutdown and the source link doesn’t point me towards any more information. Is this a nonprofit thing or does it have broader currency? Has it been in the works for a while and I just didn’t hear about it? If I tell my boss I’m going on strike tomorrow morning, will I be one of many or one of one?
right? are they going to go dark on the website? Or is it about some kind of physical office? It doesn't say anything.
I always understood that the very most important thing in any strike is to make it crystal clear what you want. How else are the targets of your strike to understand what you desire, were they in the mood to grant it?
On this webpage, I do not see a clear demand. What specific action or series of actions do they actually demand, and of whom?
> “On this webpage, I do not see a clear demand.”
Maybe it’s just people are Mad as Hell and they’re not going to take it anymore!
Quick! Repeal Section 230 while they aren't looking!
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The EFF I remember fought for open source, ownership rights and privacy. I stopped donating in 2020 .
> privacy
ICE is literally buying all your data right now, paying surveillance contractors to rapidly install vastly more CCTV cameras than we've ever seen before, purchasing malware to target citizens, and filling secret watchlists with thousands of innocent people. And you're sitting here angry that EFF is opposing exactly what they've been against this whole time.
You stopped donating to EFF because you stopped caring about mass surveillance, because your ideological allies wanted it. Keep on folding like a lawnchair.
This may be a weird take for some but I don't care if cartel members or fraudsters get the right to privacy. That's not why I've been following and donating to the EFF since the mid 90s.
Making sure I get unfettered access to the OS I run and devices I buy is a good cause. Defending criminals (many violent) or directly interfering with law enforcement doing it's job is not.
ICE hasn't gone after cartel members or fraudsters in the past year. ICE does not conduct fraud investigations at all. It's a complete lie. The goal is to attack innocent people, while freeing actual drug traffickers and dangerous people. You've been duped by a modern Nazi movement.
There's no such thing as privacy for innocent people and no privacy for bad actors. Logically how is that supposed to work? Predictive policing?
Governments that feel justified in thuggery and murder will also engage in violations of privacy and freedom.
Federal agents taking photos of your face while you are minding your own business, to upload them and compare them against a database of “citizens” is quite a privacy concern in my books
And to demonstrate their devotion to the cause, the EFF will take a day off from advocating against these behaviours? This makes no sense to me; why should a watchdog participate in a strike like this?
They're trying to call attention to it. This thread is one example of how taking that action is helping to accomplish that task.
That may be the intention, but to me it looks like the EFF is just giving its employees a paid day off. Also, you're not really striking if your employer approves of it, and pays you for it.
There actions are to raise awareness. People reaching out to them on Friday or going to the website will see a shutdown notice. Meanwhile, employees are available to strike, document the day, or do whatever they wish.
yeah it may not be helpful, but at least it's starting a conversation. most people aren't even aware yet, and there's no way to raise awareness without a vacation. for example none of our web designers knows how to put a message on the website without shutting it down. and none of our managers knows how to shut down a website without taking a vacation.
This is right-wing authoritarian virtue signaling IMO.
it's crypto-fascist misogynoir!
Solidarity.
All I can come up with is virtue signaling. Seems like their backlog work is low and they are making a strategic choice to try and get a funding boost by attending the protests (their message says nothing about this. It doesn't say much of anything, actually).
It is strange when unrelated topics get lumped together, almost forcing people to have to take sides they don't want to take. It creates animosity beyond what's at stake.
There is a paramilitary force murdering people with impunity in the streets of America, commanded by a demented pedophile conman. What do you think is beyond those stakes?
In retrospect, it turns out that in the 90s we had a paramilitary force murdering people with impunity in the streets of America, commanded by a demented pedophile conman, and it went down quite smoothly.
It's fascinating how a rectal-caudal interface can be so effortlessly implemented.
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This is about the US, not the UK.
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I stopped donating in 2020 .
Then you don't get a say. By your own choice.
Are you also one of those people who doesn't vote, then complains about how lousy the politicians are?
What voting are you talking about? By not giving funding it's exactly that. A vote. A choice. I also stopped donating to the EFF when they showed they are shifting more political (non-tech space) than privacy focused etc. Does the EFF hold an annual vote I missed as a sponsor?
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