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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Agree, best thing we can do is starve their platforms and deny them advertising revenue. Just delete our accounts.
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Get on the streets and see who else is there and organize with them the old fashioned gen-x way.
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The article is full of examples of ways people have organized.
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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.
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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.
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getting the fediverse into the mainstream should be our focus, no one entity will be able to silence a group
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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.
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I would argue that journalism is necessary, just not sufficient, for moving into the future.
Ironically this is true for every one of the myriad sides in this conflict.
I recall a sci-fi book from CS Lewis... anyway my point is that this was well known after WWII, and probably often had to be rediscovered throughout history. Strong societies produce weak children and so on. We've had our Yin, now time for the karmic Yang to brutalize us for being so extremely negligent.
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This is a very enlighting article
Posted from my iPhone
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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.)
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The next step, in my opinion, is strong privacy and decentralized organization that fully leverages constitutional rights.
I.e. a privacy preserving social media where labour unions, political parties and religious groups can federate with each other. Servers hosted on their premises and members register through an on-premise process.
A church in a foreign country could generate a thousand aliases and distribute them to their federated sister organizations in a privacy preserving way. Only the church knows which organizations got which aliases and they protect this information.
Your local labour union chapter picks up 20 of those aliases and distributes them to members. They are the only one who knows the person behind the alias.
An observer in this private fediverse trying to obtain the identity would first need to approach the church. The church can stall them and warn downstream through a canary.
The labour union chapter observes the canary and immediately wipes all information.
And if that fails, then full I2P and Tor, with nodes hosted on-premise of churches, political parties and labour unions.
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