- cross-posted to:
- usa@lemmy.ml
- politics@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- usa@lemmy.ml
- politics@lemmy.world
If there’s one thing I’d hoped people had learned going into the next four years of Donald Trump as president, it’s that spending lots of time online posting about what people in power are saying and doing is not going to accomplish anything. If anything, it’s exactly what they want.
Many of my journalist colleagues have attempted to beat back the tide under banners like “fighting disinformation” and “accountability.” While these efforts are admirable, the past few years have changed my own internal calculus. Thinkers like Jean-Paul Sartre and Hannah Arendt warned us that the point of this deluge is not to persuade, but to overwhelm and paralyze our capacity to act. More recently, researchers have found that the viral outrage disseminated on social media in response to these ridiculous claims actually reduces the effectiveness of collective action. The result is a media environment that keeps us in a state of debilitating fear and anger, endlessly reacting to our oppressors instead of organizing against them.
Cross’ book contains a meticulous catalog of social media sins which many people who follow and care about current events are probably guilty of—myself very much included. She documents how tech platforms encourage us, through their design affordances, to post and seethe and doomscroll into the void, always reacting and never acting.
But perhaps the greatest of these sins is convincing ourselves that posting is a form of political activism, when it is at best a coping mechanism—an individualist solution to problems that can only be solved by collective action. This, says Cross, is the primary way tech platforms atomize and alienate us, creating “a solipsism that says you are the main protagonist in a sea of NPCs.”
In the days since the inauguration, I’ve watched people on Bluesky and Instagram fall into these same old traps. My timeline is full of reactive hot takes and gotchas by people who still seem to think they can quote-dunk their way out of fascism—or who know they can’t, but simply can’t resist taking the bait. The media is more than willing to work up their appetites. Legacy news outlets cynically chase clicks (and ad dollars) by disseminating whatever sensational nonsense those in power are spewing.
This in turn fuels yet another round of online outrage, edgy takes, and screenshots exposing the “hypocrisy” of people who never cared about being seen as hypocrites, because that’s not the point. Even violent fantasies about putting billionaires to the guillotine are rendered inept in these online spaces—just another pressure release valve to harmlessly dissipate our rage instead of compelling ourselves to organize and act.
This is the opposite of what media, social or otherwise, is supposed to do. Of course it’s important to stay informed, and journalists can still provide the valuable information we need to take action. But this process has been short-circuited by tech platforms and a media environment built around seeking reaction for its own sake.
“For most people, social media gives you this sense that unless you care about everything, you care about nothing. You must try to swallow the world while it’s on fire,” said Cross. “But we didn’t evolve to be able to absorb this much info. It makes you devalue the work you can do in your community.”
It’s not that social media is fundamentally evil or bereft of any good qualities. Some of my best post-Twitter moments have been spent goofing around with mutuals on Bluesky, or waxing romantic about the joys of human creativity and art-making in an increasingly AI-infested world. But when it comes to addressing the problems we face, no amount of posting or passive info consumption is going to substitute the hard, unsexy work of organizing.
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I have the social skills of a cholla cactus and so when someone says ѻɼﻭคกٱչﻉ ץѻપɼ กﻉٱﻭɦ๒ѻɼɦѻѻɗ กﻉՇฝѻɼᛕ I find it only confusing and unintelligible. I did consider making cookies for my neighbors with a notice saying _I don’t know how to ዐዪኗልክጎጊቿ ል ክቿጎኗዘጌዐዪዘዐዐዕ ክቿፕሠዐዪጕ but maybe someone else does…here’s some cookies? Mind you, my neighborhood is a tad lower class and has an air of desperation so they may not trust my cookies.
It’s a thought. My kitchen appliances are lent out right now, and I don’t actually know how to bake.
But I seem to understand enough leftist theory to bridge those who, like me, have been brainwashed to see communism and socialism as derisives and terms of contempt.
I’m also going through a psychotic break because a lot of stressors piled up at the same time seventy-seven million voters decided to give the Genie’s lamp to Jaffar.
People even knowing their next door neighbors NAME is leaps and bounds ahead of where we are right now.
Not a comment on the merit of the article, but a tangential thought: Fediverse has presented the same amount of doom to scroll as the algorithms. I open my phone to get a break from work, life, etc, and any app I think to open for social or news, presents the same anxiety of “I just can’t deal with that type of shit right now; where can I bury my head in the sand?”
For anyone interested here is the CIA’s publicly available field manual for simple sabotage. Dated, but mostly still relevant.
For better or worse, this seems to be way less of a problem on the Fediverse. I can’t tell if it’s because it’s federated OR if it’s because corporate America hasn’t woken up to it (yet?!?). I find way more interesting discussions on lemmy than anywhere else on the net. Hopefully it stays that way!
Doom scrolling is facilitated by ad-optimised algorithms that push low-nuance, emotive content that gets a reaction, for views. (Thinking particularly of twitter and Facebook here)
The fediverse doesn’t have that, and has no reason to, because as soon as any provider starts pushing ads, people will switch servers. So I think it WILL stay that way.
Also, I think as a consequence of having less combatitive content up front, people are generally in a less heightened emotional state as a baseline, and are able to approach more nuanced content more thoughtfully.
Reminder that the USA has a nationwide protest at State Capital Buildings TODAY.
Hey! I’ve seen this one before!
Agree, best thing we can do is starve their platforms and deny them advertising revenue. Just delete our accounts.
If you must be on those platforms (because face it, that is where grandma is) don’t doom scroll. I block all from the creator of shared memes on facebook - then when I block two I use that as a sign I’m done for the day. You should follow similar rules - make it clear that you want social media for social purposes and the memes, information (which is likely false or exaggerated), and everything else is not welcome to you. Alone you and I are nothing, but together we start to become a statistics that they will notice. Thus my plea that you follow similar rules as me in blocking the non-social parts and not doom scrolling - if there are enough of us they will be forced to make their platform more useful to keep us for one more ad.
LF leftists in Kansas. Assemble
They’re dozens of us.
What a useless pile of words spent moaning about ad clicks, specifically to gain ad clicks.
Don’t talk, “organize.”
Okay, how? How do we effectively organize to fight against an enemy who has already for all intents and purposes won, in a way that won’t get us rounded up and shot by the Gestapo? Please tell us.
“We don’t know, that’s your problem. Just ‘organize.’”
The article is full of examples of ways people have organized.
You’re already on a decentralized platform that can be used to help with that. You can also make plans with a close group of friends/family you trust to figure out ways you can help resist. Use encrypted communications platforms to talk to them. There’s plenty of ways to do stuff beyond apathetic doomerism.
Get on the streets and see who else is there and organize with them the old fashioned gen-x way.
So what is the alternative? If we log off, what exactly are we supposed to do instead? How are we supposed to get information without constantly raising our antennae into the noxious cumulonimbus cloud of social media?
It isn’t quite as simple as “touch grass,” but it also sort of is.
Trusted information networks have existed since long before the internet and mass media. These networks are in every town and city, and at their core are real relationships between neighbors—not their online, parasocial simulacra.
Here in New York City, in the week since the inauguration, I’ve seen large groups mobilize to defend migrants from anticipated ICE raids and provide warm food and winter clothes for the unhoused after the city closed shelters and abandoned people in sub-freezing temperatures. Similar efforts are underway in Chicago, where ICE reportedly arrested more than 100 people, and in other cities where ICE has planned or attempted raids, with volunteers assigned to keep watch over key locations where migrants are most vulnerable.
A few weeks earlier, residents created ad-hoc mutual aid distros in Los Angeles to provide food and essentials for those displaced by the wildfires. The coordinated efforts gave Angelenos a lifeline during the crisis, cutting through the false claims spreading on social media about looting and out-of-state fire trucks being stopped for “emissions testing.” Many mutual aid groups in Los Angeles have not just been helping people affected by the fires but have also focused on distributing information about how to learn about and resist ICE raids in Los Angeles. It is no surprise that some of the largest and most coordinated protests in the early days of Trump’s term have happened in Los Angeles, where thousands of anti-ICE protesters shut down the 101 highway and several streets in downtown Los Angeles Sunday.
Some of these efforts were coordinated online over Discord and secure messaging apps, but all of them arose from existing networks of neighbors and community organizers, some of whom have been organizing for decades.
You won’t find such on Lemmy, we are far too niche here, and we barely have “news” that isn’t using Arch btw.
But AOC gave a talk a couple days ago if that’s what you are looking for: https://youtu.be/CVgNJf6CsBA. (And yes, I searched, but Lemmy has no matches to any variation of this link that I tried. Meanwhile it’s all over Bluesky and Reddit. Make of that what you will.)
getting the fediverse into the mainstream should be our focus, a single entity will not be able to silence anyone
when it comes to addressing the problems we face, no amount of posting or passive info consumption is going to substitute the hard, unsexy work of organizing.
The fediverse is great, but the problem is that it isn’t organizing. It isn’t mobilizing people to scare politicians and businesses into behaving better.
true
It’s a medium for organizing. You should act in your community how you think best and let people who want to ensure we have non-corporate communications be.
One of the problems with online forums for organizing is that it’s hard to naturally build an organizational structure. It’s possible, but I think it requires experienced organizers to start choosing collaborators from the userbase.
- in online forums, people get upvoted based on how much users agree with the comment. They are rewarded for being popular, not for having a direct impact on the problem being discussed.
- IRL people who commit effort to the cause get a certain amount of social capital, and the satisfaction of having an effect. They also form social bonds with other people in the group. Participants are rewarded for having an effect.
We haven’t seen a lot of organizing boiling out of the existing forums (Reddit, Facebook, blogs) and microblogging (Twitter) platforms. There have been a bunch of leaderless movements, like #metoo and BLM, but those have had a moment and then faded out. If they were effective tools for organizing, I would expect to see more organizations come out of them and persist.
Conversely, volunteer community organizations form all the time - people are physically situated near people experiencing similar problems who are invested in solutions they think will work for their community. In-person organization is self perpetuating in the sense that there is an inherent reward for having an effect.
I think it’s possible to use online tools to create a movement, but like the author of the article says, most of us spend our time posting and upvoting rather than doing something that will change policy.
Anyway … You’re sitting here posting on a fuckin forum. Go do something.
So why are we talking - nothing gives me any indication you are in the same community as me (odds are strongly against it), so nothing is being organized. The world needs more ways to organize communities not large groups who don’t have a small communities in common to do something about.
Removed by mod
No. You claim to be a journalist; you don’t just stop reporting on the President of the United States. We don’t have that luxury.
Sounds like a complicit media attempting to absolve itself.
I suspect the vast majority of people turning to social media as a pressure release valve feel disempowered, and don’t know what more they can reasonably do. When voting is no longer enough, and you have little time or money to spare, what’s next? How can a fly meaningfully change the orbit of a planet?
This article is insightful, but practically useless. I think it would be better if it also presented specific actions and achievable goals that would lead to shutting down encroaching fascism.
It’s super helpful to identify the issue.
Vast numbers of people feeling disempowered … sounds like the Trump crowd when he appeared and proclaimed himself their savior. Liberals are in for the same treatment from someone with a different sales pitch. Some people think that’s who Kamala Harris was, I truly believed in her, but maybe that was the whole plan and it’s already like professional wrestling - you win this match, I’ll win the next one, and we both take home the money. I dunno.
People need to know that posting doesn’t actually do anything!
posts an article about it
Posts comment about it.
How about joining the Fediverse?
And ad blocking.
Seriously. Participation in Google/Meta/Tiktok/Whatever and their manipulative algorithms is what makes a lot of this go around. Break their ad revenue, break out of the algorithms, and you break their manipulation.
It’s easy. It’s free. You can do it on your butt, in the same timeslots you doomscroll. And it would draw more devs into developing/hosting.
Well at least the article validated some of my feelings and gave me a sense identification of the problems I have been sensing around me with the flaccid liberal rebellion.
Hey wait a sec! Dammit!Most concrete action I can think of is some posts I remember seeing about coat-hanger do it yourself frontal lobotomies. I’ve seen plenty of very low IQ Americans with economic status as bad or worse than mine somehow perfectly happy with all the fascist shit that is going down. This seems like an opportunity to join in their bliss.
Get to know the people in your community. Take an interest in growing food, learn how to fix things. Get a gun (or two) and learn how to use them.
https://mutualaiddisasterrelief.org/
Establish secure lines of communication and start preparing for what’s coming. The next decade is going to be hard but we’ll probably know how it’s going to shake down by then.
edit: formatting
I’m afraid you can’t vote or protest your way out of fascism. Only way out is to shoot.
Except you won’t, because you are already coping on Lemmy
I’m on lemmy. Just got back from working with firearms at my camp today.
Turns out some mags need oiled, a dead scope battery (no extras on hand!), new shotgun strikes light, need to adjust the trigger pull (again), new 10-round AR mags are a dream, not sure about the red-dot, but it puts steel on target as far as I’m able to shoot.
As always my Colt 1911 Government Model is flawless with every mag. Compact Ruger 9mm fired flawlessly, hard to aim a 2.75" barrel. About my crappiest gun, the Taurus Spectrum, actually ran perfectly. Weirder things have happened. (It always runs perfectly, just jams on the last round, every time.)
Rotated out some old ammo, had more than I thought! Guess I was being extra conservative on holding. :)
Is this some copypasta? :D
What the fuck did you just fucking say about me, you little bitch? I’ll have you know I graduated top of my class in the Navy Seals, and I’ve been involved in numerous secret raids on Al-Quaeda, and I have over 300 confirmed kills. I am trained in gorilla warfare and I’m the top sniper in the entire US armed forces. You are nothing to me but just another target. I will wipe you the fuck out with precision the likes of which has never been seen before on this Earth, mark my fucking words. You think you can get away with saying that shit to me over the Internet? Think again, fucker. As we speak I am contacting my secret network of spies across the USA and your IP is being traced right now so you better prepare for the storm, maggot. The storm that wipes out the pathetic little thing you call your life. You’re fucking dead, kid. I can be anywhere, anytime, and I can kill you in over seven hundred ways, and that’s just with my bare hands. Not only am I extensively trained in unarmed combat, but I have access to the entire arsenal of the United States Marine Corps and I will use it to its full extent to wipe your miserable ass off the face of the continent, you little shit. If only you could have known what unholy retribution your little “clever” comment was about to bring down upon you, maybe you would have held your fucking tongue. But you couldn’t, you didn’t, and now you’re paying the price, you goddamn idiot. I will shit fury all over you and you will drown in it. You’re fucking dead, kiddo.
For sure. This is all hypothetical. No real threats of violence here.
Violence is bad. And it won’t help anyway, unless it only makes things worse and society even more divided, leading the country into cycles of endless dictatorship.
The only way to get rid of illegitimate leaders is for at least 50%+ of the entire country to get together and protest all the way to Washington.
There is another way - if it’s in your power, don’t obey the regime in any way.
That’s the whole point of dictators - they come in when some economic crisis starts and/or the people are divided.
By the way, authoritarians thanks to the fact that people are divided, and continue to rule. And also political apathy and social conservatism are only to the advantage of dictators, so they should have been regarded as evil from the beginning
Ignoring all the times that violence did in fact help won’t help.
deleted by creator
That’s just what they want you to believe. Most of the country does not support the capitalists. Support for Luigi remains bi-partisan.
The US has experience being beaten by smaller, poorly-armed forces.
That’s been the outcome of every war we’ve fought for 50+ years. We just lost a 20 year war against goat herders.
Guerrilla Warfare by Che Guevara is a good starting point.
This is what cracks me up about the “your rifle won’t fight a tank!” jackasses.
It’s like, have tanks ever worked against a domestic insurgency? Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, I can’t think of any time the U.S. military just wiped the floor and left.
And in those circumstances, the loss of life was even less of a hit. For every American you ordered shot, that’s one less customer or soldier you have, if the soldier you ordered to do the killing doesn’t just turn on you or refuse. Your position becomes weaker, even if you gain ground anywhere.
You are correct. These people won’t be stopped with words or rational arguments. They are past the point of being able to cooperate. We will be killing each other before long. Sorry to say, but if you don’t have the tools and skills to do that, you might want to learn. Or be prepared to be owned or killed by those that do. Adolph Musk and crew want to OWN you or DESTROY you depending on how you look. Start preparing for what that means.
I fucking hate that it’s coming to this, but without a major change of direction (that I see no evidence of yet) that’s where this ends up. The red menace was in our own country the whole time.
I am an infantry veteran and I will be fighting on the correct side of history until I can’t anymore. I do wonder how many of my fellow comrades I might come into conflict with once this all kicks off.
Disagree. Calling leftists Nazis for not voting for Harris is basically the same thing as Stalingrad
