You Can’t Post Your Way Out of Fascism | Authoritarians and tech CEOs now share the same goal: to keep us locked in an eternal doomscroll instead of organizing against them
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LF leftists in Kansas. Organize
They're dozens of us.
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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 fragmented.
By the way, dictators 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
There is another way - if it’s in your power, don’t obey the regime in any way.
Can you please cite a historical event anywhere in the world from any time in history where this was done and worked?
Thanks.
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WDYM mobile-friendly? There are plenty of engines, I suppose some have adaptive design.
Anyway, I remember browsing websites of that time using Sony PSP default browser. This was certainly harder than anything you get today. Still bearable enough.
Just opened one forum made with Invision Power Board, it is of course not adaptive, but I don't need endless scroll on a forum. Pretty usable with, well, zoom in, zoom out, tap. All that.
WDYM have apps? You have a web browser. It's intended to visit websites. I would understand if those apps would provide any functionality outside of that of a website. Maybe putting website bookmarks on the home screen would be a good user-friendly feature for Android though. Those could even use RSS to indicate something. Maybe those should be just RSS indicators even.
If you mean that you don't want web, just something like Usenet - I have no answer except Usenet itself. Freenet (Locutus) seems to have a winter depression, but I haven't visited their Matrix channel lately.
What I mean is that there’s a whole different world of how you make an app usable on a mobile phone with portrait screen and a website that’s displayed on a big screen. Many remaining forums I’ve seen from the past were built for a different time, with outdated designs and no good usability on a vertical-based screen.
Now, I’ve seen something line the Swift and Rust forums that do look good on mobile, simple and aesthetically pleasing.
About apps, they’re not necessary indeed, but for many services it’s an assurance that the usability was thought for that environment. For example, the only reason I do enjoy browsing Lemmy is because of the Voyager app that resemble the defunct Apollo for Reddit and copied all the good usability of it for iOS. If it wasn’t for the apps people built for Lemmy, I’d probably not have much drive to come back to it often.
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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.
I am trying to get people I know personally to stop posting and reading and instead begin to focus on the very basics of actual organization, in the form of simply being able to communicate effectively and securely.
I have collected and written up information for them with the consideration that they are non-technical, pertaining to secure and private communications primarily, but also many more potentially useful emergency-scenario information and data which I will not speak about here.
The package I have started giving to my friends contains information such as:
- How to communicate securely using something like Simplex or I2P
- How to correctly configure and use a VPN
- How to flash a security distribution of Linux such as TailsOS to a flash drive and how to boot to it from a computer
- How to securely encrypt data to a device using an encryption software with hidden volume features such as VeraCrypt
- A litany of manuals for all kinds of useful information you can use in emergencies, which I will not detail here
- Files containing the data required to build potentially useful items in emergencies given access to the correct hardware which I will not detail here
I firmly believe that the majority of Americans will not do anything until someone is actually showing up at their door, coming after them in the street, or destroying the regularities of their personal day to day life, so my intention is to disseminate materials which they can turn to when the fear sets into them well enough that they are scared to talk about such things openly.
It is clear to me that most of my American friends at least, at this point, still only feel superficial fear and outrage. The other day I asked them "If you had to vandalize a public space with a piece of art, what would you draw or paint? Let's say it is the side of a bank".
One said "tits", one said "flowers", one said "a fox".
Even in a fantasy, they would not express fear or outrage in a public setting.
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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.
100000000% agree
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I am trying to get people I know personally to stop posting and reading and instead begin to focus on the very basics of actual organization, in the form of simply being able to communicate effectively and securely.
I have collected and written up information for them with the consideration that they are non-technical, pertaining to secure and private communications primarily, but also many more potentially useful emergency-scenario information and data which I will not speak about here.
The package I have started giving to my friends contains information such as:
- How to communicate securely using something like Simplex or I2P
- How to correctly configure and use a VPN
- How to flash a security distribution of Linux such as TailsOS to a flash drive and how to boot to it from a computer
- How to securely encrypt data to a device using an encryption software with hidden volume features such as VeraCrypt
- A litany of manuals for all kinds of useful information you can use in emergencies, which I will not detail here
- Files containing the data required to build potentially useful items in emergencies given access to the correct hardware which I will not detail here
I firmly believe that the majority of Americans will not do anything until someone is actually showing up at their door, coming after them in the street, or destroying the regularities of their personal day to day life, so my intention is to disseminate materials which they can turn to when the fear sets into them well enough that they are scared to talk about such things openly.
It is clear to me that most of my American friends at least, at this point, still only feel superficial fear and outrage. The other day I asked them "If you had to vandalize a public space with a piece of art, what would you draw or paint? Let's say it is the side of a bank".
One said "tits", one said "flowers", one said "a fox".
Even in a fantasy, they would not express fear or outrage in a public setting.
Is signal not good enough or something? I basically switched to signal.
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What I mean is that there’s a whole different world of how you make an app usable on a mobile phone with portrait screen and a website that’s displayed on a big screen. Many remaining forums I’ve seen from the past were built for a different time, with outdated designs and no good usability on a vertical-based screen.
Now, I’ve seen something line the Swift and Rust forums that do look good on mobile, simple and aesthetically pleasing.
About apps, they’re not necessary indeed, but for many services it’s an assurance that the usability was thought for that environment. For example, the only reason I do enjoy browsing Lemmy is because of the Voyager app that resemble the defunct Apollo for Reddit and copied all the good usability of it for iOS. If it wasn’t for the apps people built for Lemmy, I’d probably not have much drive to come back to it often.
I know what hobby project I'd want to lift, but I also know that I struggle with much simpler undertakings - like, for example, cooking something normal more than twice a week.
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I’m not sure how it is possible to produce merely average people though?
Not getting excited with global solutions and utopias. At some point in my 12-15 I considered libertarianism a far wiser ideology than the rest due to this, but then noticed how there are libertarian utopias emerging for all tastes. Panarchy (that's not yet a thing), agorism (that to some extent is, with cryptocurrencies and internet connectivity) and maybe something else.
Any wise construct stops being wise if you rely on it too much.
So people thinking "correctly" are not those you want to have, people familiar with good things, but not invested too much, are.
If you build a construct (say, in a game like Civilization) with -7 modifier to fascism, then the humanity will regulate to that and negate the modifier. Then your construct crumbles, and the humanity gets +7 to fascism. Was it really a good idea in the first place then?
So I would argue that we always should remain strong… it’s just that the definition of what that even means will constantly keep changing, in response to our circumstances.
And that means that trying to remain strong we'll waste effort in all directions instead of having some when needed.
But, Stoicism, yeah - it’s literally all that we can do, so let’s do that.:-)
Stoicism is about spending effort where you should and not spending when you shouldn't. It's not pure inaction, it's the way to do less nonsense.
Humans seem not to be great planners - we are too short-sighted and selfish, but like in a bad way where we first lie to ourselves, and then also to one another.
This allows us to get out of local minima as we spread to new areas, but that same trait seems equally likely to lead to our extinction when all areas have been found and we need rather to switch to a more stablilzed society, yet won't bc we don't feel like doing so.
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I can't upvote this strongly enough. Social media is doing everything in the establishment's favor - especially ingraining the habit of glancing at a news item and making an instant value judgement with minimal thought before scrolling along to the next item. It's not just the endless scrolling and venting vs taking real action, it's the encouragement of superficial thinking, which is solid gold for con men like Trump who depend on people jumping to stupid conclusions. People who get all their knowledge from memes are easier to fool than people who take time to think.
Social media is doing everything in the establishment’s favor
For about half a second, people used social media to organize. Then the fascists saw how to manipulate and control it, and jumped at the opportunity. At this point social media -- especially corporate controlled social media -- is just part of the fascist apparatus.
To a lesser extent, as this article talks about, the coping mechanism of posting allows you to vent enough to prevent you from having the discomfort necessary to actually do anything. It's not nearly as harmful, but it's not good either.
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Humans seem not to be great planners - we are too short-sighted and selfish, but like in a bad way where we first lie to ourselves, and then also to one another.
This allows us to get out of local minima as we spread to new areas, but that same trait seems equally likely to lead to our extinction when all areas have been found and we need rather to switch to a more stablilzed society, yet won't bc we don't feel like doing so.
Such situations would regularly arise till early XX century and even now, so, eh, humanity tries everything. I wouldn't assume I know a solution.
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Yes we're missing two things
- Anonymous ID / Reputation system to tell it's a human
- Community-run moderation. So some chronically online sadsack can't ban you from a significant portion of lemmy for life because you disagreed with them.
PieFed offers both, as well as most of the most heavily asked for features lacking from Lemmy (Categories of Communities, sign-up wizard asking for interests and subscribing to communities based on those answers, hashtags to facilitate cross-community discovery, etc.). Ironically it is the more foundational features (cross-posting, users tagging, comment previews, post searching) that it still lacks, but the point is that work is being done along the lines of what you said, even though I highly doubt that such will ever appear in "Lemmy" per se.
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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.
I feel personally attacked, I agree with the article, but painfully so.
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You are missing the point.
Those days might be numbered, but these places are the last bastion.
They will invade private homes, businesses and offices with impunity first.
Churches in particular have a long history of being relatively safe in (civil) war.
Not immune, just relatively.
these places are the last bastion.
That's what I mean? We need to cultivate and solidify our online sanctuaries, or at least methods of secure and private communication now, before everything goes full tits up, because, as you said, they will be all up in our business before we know it.
Like, I'm working on a solution to have someone "steal" my guns so I can file the police report relatively soon, as well as shoring up my servers/archives in the event that the internet becomes intermittent, including hosting a full copy of Wikipedia. I'm also looking into buying some ham radio equipment and speed running that learning curve. I hate to have a tinfoil hat on, but I'm fairly certain something between widespread civil disturbance, civil war, and the collapse of our country are right around the corner, and shit is about to get nasty real quick. The absolute most effective tools we'll have are communications and information.
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Is signal not good enough or something? I basically switched to signal.
It's good, but it's centralized. Let's say an authoritarian regime shuts down the central Signal servers. Then what?
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I can't upvote this strongly enough. Social media is doing everything in the establishment's favor - especially ingraining the habit of glancing at a news item and making an instant value judgement with minimal thought before scrolling along to the next item. It's not just the endless scrolling and venting vs taking real action, it's the encouragement of superficial thinking, which is solid gold for con men like Trump who depend on people jumping to stupid conclusions. People who get all their knowledge from memes are easier to fool than people who take time to think.
Why read the article (especially if there's a paywall) when you can read - or even better make - the comments?
Seriously, if the goal is that sweet sweet dopamine fix, then this is the most efficient means to achieve that end...
Thinking is hard, hence just don't do it! Better yet, downvote those who do as being "pretentious".
It's far easier to talk
rather than listenover others. -
Remember, there were plenty of rounds of moderator purges on reddit, especially when subs would lock down in protest. Any mod with ethics and a backbone would've been shown the door. So I think it's fair to say a lot of the moderation problems were at least in part caused by the admins.
At least on Lemmy, different instances have different ethoses, so communities can be more in line with the instance they're on, and there isn't this need for absolute centralised conformity.
Yeah there was still problems with the admins. But 95% of the problems people encountered were due to virgin subreddit mods.
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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?
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PieFed offers both, as well as most of the most heavily asked for features lacking from Lemmy (Categories of Communities, sign-up wizard asking for interests and subscribing to communities based on those answers, hashtags to facilitate cross-community discovery, etc.). Ironically it is the more foundational features (cross-posting, users tagging, comment previews, post searching) that it still lacks, but the point is that work is being done along the lines of what you said, even though I highly doubt that such will ever appear in "Lemmy" per se.
I wouldn't use any of those other features. I just browse by top all 1/6/12 hr (which piefed lacks) and the theme isn't great either.
How does it offer either of those things? I see an 'attitude %' on hover, and it says it has 'strong moderation tools'. But I mean 100% community run. Subscribers have to vote on bans or something. And proof of personhood verification tests.
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Is this some copypasta?
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.
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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.
@baggachipz @rimjob_rainer *shit furry
