Six years of doing this! – A report to the shareholders~ 4 min

Por Guilhotina.info

Today, Guilhotina celebrates its birthday. As such, it’s also an occasion to make our report to the shareholders. 2019 has remained a complicated year in terms of time available for the project, as we reported on our previous message about the status of Guilhotina.

Progress

This was made worse by the fact that much of our free time was swallowed up by the task of building the infrastructure we need to facilitate the inclusion of new members or those with less time available, learning to work with and implement new features on the website, financing and, finally, creating new content distribution pipelines to reduce our dependency on specific social networks.

On that last front, we’ve created channels on Telegram, Instagram and our own mailing list.

On the other hand, much of that work is close to finished, and we predict that we will soon be able to return to a more aggressive rhythm of publication. Many stories have remained untold, for example when it comes to Venezuela, Yemen or, more recently, Hong-Kong. To our great frustration, as that means our refutation of the lies spread by an incredible imperial propaganda machine remains undone.

We’ve published 37 articles and 4 videos since early January, when the last report was published, and present day. A clearly sparse quantity of content, despite the fact that many articles are individually much longer than their predecessors, with multimedia elements that create additional work.

Such is the case with the in-depth interview about the work of the Stevedores Union or the dismantling of the fallacies that the prostitution regulatory lobby tries to use to sell us the commodification of women’s bodies, in what was also the first test in cooperating with other platforms (in this case, Feminism with Class), something which we intend to do more of in the future.

As we concluded that we are tending towards long form content, we decided to also consider the way we present our work. Some experiments with dividing long texts into smaller parts didn’t leave us feeling very satisfied with the results, so we decided to stop trying to fight the inevitable and instead try to adapt the form to fit the content.

Longer reads are now made easier by content indexing, a reading progress marker and an estimate of the time required for a full read. Those contents we consider more critical will have, in the future, video or audio conversion in order to reach audiences that might not necessarily have an hour to sit down and read an article.

Numbers

In terms of what content people visited the most in Portuguese, the winner was the report, with images, first-person accounts and videos, of the anti-racist demonstration in downtown Lisbon, which followed an episode of police violence at the Jamaica neighborhood. The demonstration, which caught everyone by surprise, also ended with police violence.

Head to head, and somewhat worryingly, the article about the Whitestar debt collection company continues to be one of the most searched for, despite having been published in 2018. We imagine that many people are still being hounded by these debt vultures and trying to find all the information they can get.

In a collective third place is the reporting on anti-fascist activity in Portugal, national trade union struggles and commentary on the maneuvers of imperialism or of “Potemkin” environmentalism.

In terms of the English audience, revolutionary Kurdistan and the projects being implemented there were one of the most searched for subjects, along with the struggle of the stevedores’ union SEAL, which caught the attention of the internationalist stevedoring union movement.

In third place, an article about the growth of rape crimes in Portugal, also dating back to 2018, is still one of the most viewed articles, which creates some concern about the kind of situation motivating people to search for it.

A reader sent us a letter commenting on their experience with this kind of case in the Portuguese Justice system and how commonplace the misogynous attitudes described in the article are among judges, even female judges.

Plans

As the background work wraps up, we intend to test the new infrastructure by initiating new partnerships and doing in-depth research on subjects which will be critical in the coming years, using a greater division of internal labor to better allow us to make good use our team members’ differing time availability.

Which subjects? Climate solutions, for example. Which approaches truly have a chance of rescuing the planet from turning into a meatball which has been left too much time in the oven? What are the real costs of different approaches, technically and politically? What are the consequences of capital trying to subvert many of the solutions so that they serve its necessities, rendering them toothless, and what political context would allow things to be different?

We plan to return to a ferocious criticism of all that exists. The planet burns, time is running out. Half measures and reformist or liberal snake oil solutions only buy capital more time to throw firewood into the raging inferno. To a sixth year of taking no prisoners.

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