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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Maybe it's better to refrain from growing strong men, though, just average will do, with average children, not weak.
I'm not sure how it is possible to produce merely average people though? Anyway, even if humanity itself were to not change, the world around us still does. Perhaps one day aliens will show up, assuming that climate change doesn't kill us all in the moderate term future. Just like all those species of animals and plants and such that we've driven extinct: they lasted so long, but then could not survive us.
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.
But, Stoicism, yeah - it's literally all that we can do, so let's do that.:-)
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After working with computer software most of my life I've come to understand that if success relies on people 'paying attention to something, making an informed decision and then performing an action' that it is nearly impossible to get the desired outcome more than half the time.
We're so fucked.
Agreed. After 30 years working in IT for various companies from 40 employees to 300,000 employees, I believe about 70-80% of the corporate work force has an elementary school level of reading comprehension at best.
In the last 10 years of my career I stopped writing emails with more than 1 question, because otherwise most people would reply and only answer the first thing I asked (often poorly), ignoring the entire rest of the email.
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I’m afraid you can’t vote or protest your way out of fascism. Only way out is to shoot.
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.
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I’m afraid you can’t vote or protest your way out of fascism. Only way out is to shoot.
Not enough ammo...
They have the popular vote, most gun nuts are right wing. And they have the military, most of which voted trump. Are there even enough people who are left of center to fight against that?
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Plus, there are a lot of folks here (it seems like a majority sometimes in my personal experience) that are quick to advocate violence/sabotage in lieu of negotiation and debate. That reeks of puppeteering; there can’t be that many arseholes here, right?
That's because there are a lot of marginlized folks here - gay, trans, autistic, linux users - who have spent decades disucssing politely and negotiating.
Problem is the people throwing Nazi salutes and writing all these executive orders have, quite clearly, said they want us all either dead or in camps.
Now I wouldn't dream of speaking for everyone else, but I'm certainly not going to be attempting to politely debate myself out of a one-way train ride, if it comes to that.
So, yeah, while I don't encourage violence for the sake of violence, the neoliberal 'oh dear we must all be very polite at all times and let rationality solve all our issues!' is dead and worthless.
I've taken classes for and armed myself, and I have zero qualms with defending myself and friends and family by any means necessary if it comes down to a situation where it's us-or-them, regardless of who 'them' is.
If you told me even five years ago that I'd be carrying a gun and be fully prepared to use deadly force to defend myself I'd have called you goofy, and if you told me that I'd be willing to use it against agents of the state if they came after me, I'd think you have lost your damn mind.
But, well, it's been a long 5 years, and frankly, IMO, the rule of law and the trust in any governmental institutions have been eroded into nothing.
That's because there are a lot of marginlized folks here - gay, trans, autistic, linux users
I feel seen
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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
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You're talking about it.
I'm talking about a guy who made no impact on a single company much less an industry and then went to prison, throwing away all of his rich boy ivy league education.
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constitutional rights
Hate to say it, but there's the very real possibility those days are numbered.
As it sits, those of us that are savvy need to be actively using and promoting privacy-centric communications methodology to ensure we have a means to communicate safely and effectively as time goes on and those tights are further eroded. I don't see the internet completely dying, given the technical nature of it, but peering and connectivity will likely be hampered in the coming months and years, so it is in our best interest to find and employ feasible solutions now to attempt getting out ahead of anything those muppets come up with.
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.
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I'm talking about a guy who made no impact on a single company much less an industry and then went to prison, throwing away all of his rich boy ivy league education.
I'm talking about a guy
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I’m afraid you can’t vote or protest your way out of fascism. Only way out is to shoot.
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
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I agree.
"Planet's burning up, another genocide, fascism on the rise... ugh... where are the funny memes."
Apathy is the greatest tool of the oppressor.
And boredom is a crime.
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Agreed. After 30 years working in IT for various companies from 40 employees to 300,000 employees, I believe about 70-80% of the corporate work force has an elementary school level of reading comprehension at best.
In the last 10 years of my career I stopped writing emails with more than 1 question, because otherwise most people would reply and only answer the first thing I asked (often poorly), ignoring the entire rest of the email.
I mean 54% read at or below a 6th grade level, so that makes sense. Almost a fifth to a half of adult Americans are functionally illiterate depending on how you define it.
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I'm talking about a guy
Since you're refusing to back up your stance I take that to mean you've resigned from the argument and that you agree with me.
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Since you're refusing to back up your stance I take that to mean you've resigned from the argument and that you agree with me.
Back up my stance of "you're talking about it" when you begin your comment "I'm talking about it"?
I really don't see a reason to "back that up" any further. You did all for me.
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After working with computer software most of my life I've come to understand that if success relies on people 'paying attention to something, making an informed decision and then performing an action' that it is nearly impossible to get the desired outcome more than half the time.
We're so fucked.
Also in that field, but… I think you have to acknowledge that being, usually, in your example 1) at work and 2) on a computer, make people that much less interested in giving a shit. Compare to various systems people use in their free time, and you probably see that people are pretty good at attending to the things they think matter.
Capitalism, or, at the very very least, unfettered capitalism, are the real problem, not people writ large.
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Back up my stance of "you're talking about it" when you begin your comment "I'm talking about it"?
I really don't see a reason to "back that up" any further. You did all for me.
I see you have the memory of the goldfish so I'll recap the discussion for you.
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User above stated we need more luigis
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I brought up the fact that Luigi 1 accomplished nothing
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You retort that we are talking about it
So either your response was completely pointless and off topic or you meant it as evidence that Luigi 1 accomplished something. What did he accomplish? How does talking about it change anything for anyone?
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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.
literally just don't doomscroll, go read my recent post over in eudaimonia.
You literally just don't have to do it lmao.
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I agree.
"Planet's burning up, another genocide, fascism on the rise... ugh... where are the funny memes."
Apathy is the greatest tool of the oppressor.
Apathy is the greatest tool of the oppressor.
apathy is the tool of the strong in the times of the weak.
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Doesn't really work once spaces are established. Most of reddits problems aren't the admins, it's the volunteer subreddit mods which function just the same as lemmy.
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.
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I see you have the memory of the goldfish so I'll recap the discussion for you.
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User above stated we need more luigis
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I brought up the fact that Luigi 1 accomplished nothing
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You retort that we are talking about it
So either your response was completely pointless and off topic or you meant it as evidence that Luigi 1 accomplished something. What did he accomplish? How does talking about it change anything for anyone?
I brought up the fact that Luigi
Still talking about it.
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