Fight for the Future

Fight for the Future is the United States' most prominent dedicated grassroots digital-rights campaign organization, operating as a deliberately small, all-remote team that has repeatedly organized some of the largest coordinated online mobilizations in American civic history. Founded in October 2011 and incorporated in Boston, Massachusetts with roots in Worcester, the organization frames its mission explicitly around the choice between liberation and oppression at the point of contact between technology and political power. Its operational model — a core team of campaign directors, technologists, and communications specialists who translate complex policy fights into mass participation moments — has produced documented legislative and regulatory outcomes on copyright law, net neutrality, government surveillance, and biometric recognition across more than a decade and multiple administrations. Fight for the Future operates as a 501(c)(4) advocacy organization, giving it the flexibility to engage directly in legislative campaigns, with a 501(c)(3) sister entity, Fight for the Future Education Fund, for tax-deductible educational work.

Founding

Fight for the Future was founded in October 2011 by Tiffiniy Cheng and Holmes Wilson, childhood friends who met at the Massachusetts Academy of Math and Science in Worcester. The two had previously worked together at the Participatory Culture Foundation, a nonprofit open-source media project, before launching Fight for the Future with an $800,000 seed grant from the Media Democracy Fund — a funder focused on democratic media and telecommunications policy — specifically to fight the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and its Senate companion the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA). These bills, advanced by the entertainment industry, would have empowered the government and rights holders to mandate DNS blocking and other infrastructure-level internet censorship under the framing of copyright enforcement. Holmes Wilson left the organization in 2018; Tiffiniy Cheng remains connected to the organization's strategic direction. All staff operate remotely, with no central office, from Worcester, Massachusetts as the registered address.

The internet protest model: SOPA/PIPA and net neutrality

The founding campaign established the organizational template. In January 2012, Fight for the Future coordinated the largest mass internet protest in American history at the time: more than 115,000 websites — including Wikipedia, Reddit, Mozilla, and Craigslist — went dark or displayed protest banners for 24 hours. The mobilization delivered more than 12 million messages to Congress, crashed servers at the Senate and House switchboards, and produced a political reversal within weeks: SOPA and PIPA were shelved indefinitely. The campaign also seeded a lasting piece of digital infrastructure — the Internet Defense League, a mechanism allowing participating websites to rapidly coordinate protest banners in future advocacy moments. The operational lesson the organization drew — that mass online mobilization, timed precisely against legislative inflection points, could shift outcomes in fights widely considered settled — has structured every subsequent campaign.

Fight for the Future ran multiple rounds of net neutrality advocacy producing concrete regulatory outcomes. The 2014 Internet Slowdown Day campaign, organized in response to FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler's proposed rules permitting internet service providers to charge differential fees for prioritized traffic, generated 780,000 comments to the FCC — among the largest regulatory comment volumes in agency history at that point — and contributed to the political conditions in which Wheeler reversed position and proposed Title II common-carrier reclassification. On February 26, 2015, the FCC voted to classify broadband internet under Title II, establishing the net neutrality protections the Obama administration sought. When the Trump-era FCC reversed this decision in 2017, Fight for the Future organized the Day of Action to Save Net Neutrality, with more than 50,000 websites participating, contributing to a 2018 Senate vote restoring net neutrality rules through the Congressional Review Act.

Surveillance, facial recognition, and AI

Fight for the Future launched banfacialrecognition.com in July 2019, becoming one of the first civil-society organizations in the United States to run a dedicated campaign calling for an outright moratorium on government use of facial recognition — explicitly demanding the Facial Recognition and Biometric Technology Moratorium Act rather than a regulatory-rather-than-ban approach. The campaign drew more than 40 organizational endorsements including the ACLU, Color of Change, EPIC, Demand Progress, and MoveOn, and frames facial recognition as fundamentally incompatible with democratic accountability on grounds of unreliability, racial bias, and the potential for mass surveillance without democratic oversight. The campaign has expanded to specific sectors: Fight for the Future has organized to remove facial recognition from schools, university campuses, transit systems (its Ban the Scan campaign), and concert venues — winning a commitment from LiveNation to cease facial recognition research at events.

The organization's Amazon Ring campaigns traced a sustained arc against the surveillance infrastructure of residential doorbell cameras. The #CancelRing campaign beginning in 2020 exposed Ring's partnerships with more than 1,700 law enforcement agencies, allowing police to request video footage from residents without warrants — pressure that drove the New York Times Wirecutter product recommendation team to retract its Ring endorsement. By 2024, sustained organizing had contributed to Amazon eliminating Ring's "Request for Assistance" tool, the primary warrantless data-access pipeline the campaigns had targeted. The 2022 Dump ID.me campaign targeted government use of ID.me's facial recognition system for IRS and state benefit agency identity verification, arguing the system imposed biometric surveillance on benefit claimants without adequate consent or accuracy standards; the IRS subsequently discontinued its use of ID.me.

In April 2026, Fight for the Future was a lead signatory of an open letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg demanding the company halt planned facial recognition features for Ray-Ban and Oakley smart glasses, reportedly known internally as "Name Tag." Simultaneously, the organization launched an AI in healthcare campaign, working with nurses, doctors, and patient advocates to oppose what it characterises as top-down AI mandates in medical settings that impose algorithmic decision-making on clinical workflows without adequate safeguards or worker input.

Leadership and structure

Sarah Roth-Gaudette became Executive Director in 2018 when Holmes Wilson departed, having previously served as Chief Operating Officer; she brings more than 25 years of supervisory, campaign product, and technology development experience. Evan Greer, the organization's Director and a prominent transgender activist and musician, leads campaign strategy and public messaging — particularly on the intersections of LGBTQ rights with content moderation, data privacy, and algorithmic harms; Greer is among the most visible public faces of the US digital-rights movement on those intersections. Caitlin Seeley George serves as Campaigns and Managing Director. The full staff as of 2026 numbers roughly 20 people, organized across campaign, policy, communications, design, technology, and operations functions. The deliberately small organizational scale is a strategic posture, not a resource constraint: the organization explicitly describes itself as "intentionally small" and disciplines itself around high-leverage campaign selection rather than institutional breadth.

Position in the movement

Fight for the Future sits in this corpus as the US campaign organization that most clearly represents the orchestrated-mass-mobilization model of democratic advocacy against technology power — organizing not through litigation infrastructure, sustained member organizations, or think-tank research production, but through coordinated online protest moments that concentrate public pressure on legislative and regulatory decision-makers at critical votes and rule-makings. Its complementary relationship with the Electronic Frontier Foundation — with which it has collaborated on surveillance and privacy campaigns including the 2025–2026 "Report an Incident" project documenting abortion censorship experiences — illustrates how the US digital-rights field divides labour: EFF provides the long-arc legal infrastructure and open-source tool production that FFTF does not attempt to replicate, while FFTF provides the mass-mobilization capacity that EFF's membership model does not optimize for. Fight for the Future's explicit framing around liberation rather than oppression, and its consistent prioritization of communities facing structural harm — people of color disproportionately misidentified by facial recognition systems, LGBTQ people threatened by content censorship and age verification requirements, healthcare workers and patients subjected to algorithmic systems imposed without their input — aligns directly with the criterion this corpus tracks: people outside the AI-development community being engaged in shaping how AI is built, deployed, and held accountable.