Source: https://www.interruptingcriminalization.com/resources-all/shaping-reality
Publisher: Interrupting Criminalization (Lewis Raven Wallace)
Date Published: July 22, 2025
Relevant To: Strategic framework for community-controlled informational infrastructure; conceptually parallels BPA’s own Source Library/Link Archive model
Verification Status: Verified
Notes: Confirmed via full-text fetch (landing page; full report is a downloadable PDF at interruptingcriminalization.com/s/Shaping-Reality-Report.pdf). “Shaping Reality: Building Informational Power to Resist Authoritarianism” by Lewis Raven Wallace (Interrupting Criminalization’s Journalism Fellow), designed by Micah Bazant. Core thesis: “messages alone don’t change minds. Neither do facts” — facts and messaging are only effective in the context of relationships, lived experience, and movement-building actions that change people’s immediate circumstances. Defines “informational power” as sustained, proactive COMMUNITY CONTROL over the facts and information needed to understand the world and act within it — as opposed to relying on mainstream/corporate media or official government/police narratives. The report profiles five local abolitionist organizing efforts and four movement media/information projects to explore how this kind of power is already being built locally, and poses questions about what a nationally networked informational infrastructure could look like and how to fund/build it. Landing page notes a free consultation offering, “Abolition Media Office Hours,” available to organizers wanting to strategize about informational power. CONCEPTUALLY HIGH VALUE for BPA: this report’s central framework — community-controlled informational infrastructure as a form of power distinct from and prerequisite to messaging/advocacy — describes almost exactly what BPA’s own Source Library, Link Archive, and public education work already function as. Worth reading the full PDF for the five local case-study profiles, which could offer direct organizational-model comparisons for how BPA might formalize, network, or fund its own informational infrastructure work going forward.