The year ahead: How decentered stories can counter tyranny

Here we are, closing out a year that in some respects seems unfathomable, but in many others, seems par for the course. We continue to experience the normalization — the numbness — in which encroaching authoritarianism envelops us all. For those of us who have ever been part of a decentered group, we understand the squeeze that takes hold under a government that wants to be oppressive. We know in our bones how to navigate. What we can and cannot do. And perhaps, when to stop asking how can this be? Because that answer never truly comes. It is a tsunami that a person watches in awe, while clinging to a patch of higher ground.

I was a child when the Islamic Republic came to power in Iran. My parents’ generation – the ones responsible for the surge of frustration that ushered in the revolution – walked around holding up two fingers to represent how long this regime would stay in power. Two weeks, two weeks, they told each other. Here we are, 46 years later. It quickly became a police state, complete with the mass arrest of dissidents and marginalized groups, re-written histories, and the annihilation of free speech.

As those weeks stretched into years, my family moved to the United States. I won’t get into the details of how or what happened next. That kind of discretion is learned early, and for good reason, especially when governments keep records and decentered lives are criminalized. Here we are, watching our backs again from another government and its surveillance. Don’t want to divulge too much information. Don’t want a record of it all. That said, we eventually naturalized. My grandmother went first, and as a young child, I quizzed her every day in preparation for her citizenship test.

Fast forward 30 years, and I started to teach ESOL and citizenship prep classes at the Brooklyn Public Library. Depending on the English level of the students, the classes can go anywhere from literacy training to a master class in political science — sometimes both at the same time. How is that possible? Because, again, many of the students have come from places where they inherently understand the politics of life. They are the decentered. And in those rooms, where we have young men from Guinea, Sierra Leone and Haiti, mixing with seniors from Ukraine, Russia, and Yemen, we understand each other — and it is not about language. The common ground is based in their lived experience of power, and often how they have been criminalized for their existence.  

And so when I first encountered Afsaneh Rigot and her work, it made perfect sense. The first project I did for her was the final edits on the Queer Resistance report, which was done in collaboration with ARTICLE 19. As I read through this three-part report, it was illuminating. Through meticulous documentation grounded in specificity and hyper local contexts, she put into words experiences that resonated globally. 

While the documentation, the policy and technology recommendations, and the appeal to technologists were clear, as a trained journalist who had spent time in major newsrooms, the case studies stood out. Quote after quote after quote of people recounting their experiences with authorities felt like I was reading a police blotter as a cub reporter (or for those familiar with Robert Bolano, his massive tome, 2666). I walked away from that report in a daze, unable to shake the voices.

Once Afsaneh and Jess Fjeld launched The De|Center last year, I was happy to join as an editor and writer — and now Communications Director. Throughout my career I have watched the rapid evolution of what we call news. As a clerk at The New York Times, I remember when the Executive Editor at the time left to work on something called The Marshall Project, a criminal justice organization. (Martin Garcia, who was previously incarcerated and is a journalist, recently joined us as a guardrail advisor.) At the time, it seemed new. Journalism was supposed to be objective. Journalists with any integrity did not engage in “activism.” So for such a huge figure in media to jump ship for a cause-oriented organization was confusing, to say the least. 

From there, it happened more and more. Another major editor left to work for STAT, a health based new site. Many of my colleagues went to work for The Trace, Bloomberg’s gun reform platform. Tina Brown started her Women in the World organization while still running The Daily Beast, where I was among the first staff members. The list continues. The key to the success of those organizations was anchoring an idea, a movement, in the narrative power of individual stories. The news business has been in a so-called crisis since I entered 20 years ago. While we seem to have more “content” than ever before, the budgets for long-term, trust-based, slow reporting seem to be vanishing. Today, much of that work is found in research. Through institutions whose research is deeper than any reporting out there. So why bury these stories inside of academic and policy-oriented silos? They should also rise to the top. Why not use tabloid headline writing skills for good? 

The media landscape has been changing as news organizations grappled with the best way to move online for decades now. But in the last year alone, there has been a much more dangerous consolidation of media unfolding before our eyes. Public radio and television have been defunded. Sinclair and Nexstar have gobbled up so many local markets in the US that they have the power to cancel shows based on their own political desires. Larry Ellison and his son, David, continue to make aggressive and hostile moves to buy up large sections of media. Most recently, the CEO they installed as editor-in-chief of 60 Minutes, Bari Weiss – known widely in media circles for lopsided political affinities – pulled a story about the Venezuelan men that the Trump administration deported to El Salvadaor’s CECOT prison. It was clearly a case of censorship. To call it any other name is a disservice to what we call freedom of the press in the US. 

“These men risked their lives to speak with us,” wrote Sharyn Alfonsi, the reporter of the story in an internal memo. “We have a moral and professional obligation to the sources who entrusted us with their stories. Abandoning them now is a betrayal of the most basic tenet of journalism: giving voice to the voiceless.”

Which brings us to our great experiment of 2026. We aim to feature profiles of the people interviewed for our reports alongside the academic rigor of the research itself. While we continue to publish reports that are framed by the decentered, we will also highlight the people who inform it and bring out their stories. From those incarcerated in the US and El Salvador, to queer and migrant rights advocates in Tunisia, and survivors of genocides in Sudan and Palestine. 

Normalization and numbness are inevitable when those in power nudge the needle of morality each week. But we have lived through this before, and the decentered have the answers. We do not have to re-invent the wheel. There are ways to resist, survive, and even perhaps thrive. If  corrupt authorities derive power through generalizing masses of people into faceless mobs, then the antidote is to continue to give them voices, faces, lived experiences. 

This coming year, we will publish our methodology to de-weaponize tech, which is aimed at technologists who can use our Design from the Margins methodology no matter where they work. We are in the planning stages of holding a major workshop for our community members who inform our work. We have reports coming out including ones aimed at philanthropy and civil society. We will continue to focus on how states and powerholders target decentered communities through routine device searches and surveillance – and what they need and want in order to resist. We have expanded our original research, which was based on how tech is weaponized in queer communities in MENA, to decentered groups around the world — including incarcerated people and migrant communities in the US, Tigrayans in Ethiopia, people in Mexico and El Salvador, and more. The common ground is based on their lived experience of power, and how they have experienced being criminalized for their existence.

And finally, for now, as we watch the number of jobs and funding shrink, we are grateful that we will be staffing up across research, ops, and communications. So if you or someone you know has the skills to amplify these voices and our work, and is committed to decentered voices, please reach out.

Thank you to all of those who have supported us this past year.  We saw companies and organizations continue to make changes based on our documentation and the experiences of the  decentered. It shows what it can mean if methods of navigation and survival are built into our strategies and tools.

Here’s to the year ahead. See you there.

Roja is a writer, editor, and teacher. She has worked for The New York Times, The Daily Beast, and Al-Monitor, among others. She teaches ESOL and citizenship prep classes at the Brooklyn Public Library. On the longform side, she ghostwrites memoirs, has been an Open City fellow at the Asian American Writers Workshop, and a Writer-In-Residence at Hedgebrook.