Postcards against Chat control

On the 20th of August 2025 a dozen hackers met in a park to write postcards against Chat Control. This event was quick to organize, fun to do and saw plenty of people interested: the topic and the form of mobilization spoke to people. So this post notes some aspects of organization that worked well, as a reminder to myself and perhaps because it is useful to others.

“Stop Chat Control 2 - Write a postcard” wrote Swedish net-activism foundation 5th of July, the gist being that physical mail is more effective than the more common mass e-mailing campaigns. Already thinking of mobilizing in some way around Chat Control, members of lodis.se decided to organize an evening of postcard writing.

We ended up writing 74 postcards in total

• 30 to swedish parliament
• 2 to the danish parliament
• 2 to strasbourg
• 40 to brussels

some things that went well

Initiative can be infectious. A few exchanges in a chat lead to a plan. Someone puts effort drafting a newsletter and it is no longer non-committal. Someone put time in, thus others felt like doing so as well. Then a quick design gave the thing a look and a website means it can be shared around. Suddenly its a real thing.

Without too much coordination someone got snacks for the event, another chanced upon a big stack of postcards in a thrift store and got them and a third buys enough stamps to send them off¹.

Organizing it in a park was good because it meant it could be a larger group and both parents and their children could join.

Mini site and identity helped making it more serious.

Some prepared addresses of representatives and had the idea of making a system with little snippets of paper that people could pull randomly from a bucket to get writing. This was great as it answered people’s question of “where do I start?”

There had been some collaboration on sharing templates of messages in different languages beforehand.

Older hackers gave younger hackers tutorials on how to use this “postal” system.

Some struggles:

Most of the mobilization was about writing MEPs. However people pointed out that in this stage of the EU process it was national governments that had to reflect on the proposal. Thus is what not clear what the best point of intervention was. We ended up writing about half to national parliamentarians, half to MEPs.

You need hard surfaces to write on, and people forget to bring them.

It gets cold quite quickly outside, limiting your event timespan. Can be also used to your advantage.

Run your own!

It is a quite fun and low effort event format for mobilizing against bad legistlation. If you want to run your own session, feel free to use any of the visual assets.