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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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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The greatest thing that social media ever did for humanity was in its ability to allow all of us to talk to each other in an open platform.

Those private corporate platforms have slowly been eroded and controlled to only waste our time and designed to keep us all angry, afraid, anxious and confused.

Open decentralized social media is bringing us back to that era 20 years ago when social media was just starting and people just talked and openly discussed the issues of the day with one another. It doesn't matter what kind of platform we have or can create, as long as it is decentralized and controlled by people, everyone will always find value in it because it allows us to talk to one another. The greatest thing I've ever found in taking part in the fediverse was in connecting to like minded people who want to talk about the important issues of the day without all the distractions of advertising and without having having to give up my privacy or security and have my identity sold to the highest bidder.

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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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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.

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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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allow all of us to talk to each other

I was doing that just fine 30/40 years ago with BBS, newsgroups, and later with forums such as Lemmy. Social media put a name or a face on people, and was combined with the regular "eternal septembers," but it didn't bring anything useful to the conversation IMHO.

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While I like to agree with that vision of decentralized social media, even here on lemmy we have our own pitfalls. Echo chambers are unchecked and defederation (even justified) happens.

I don't assume everyone here is a real person. There was a article recently that AI was training "persuasiveness" using reddit subreddits. I have to believe a similar trial exists on the fediverse least I be caught off guard.

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 reaks of puppeteering; there can't be that many arseholes here, right?

I know I have some strong biases that lean towards peace, and I'm confused sometimes why a comment of mine in the fediverse gathers double digit upvotes steadily only to plummet to the negatives overnight. I get old reddit botnet vibes on some topics.

I suppose I want to like lemmy, the freedom, these communities, but it is still polarizing and influenceable by [insert tech/political/financial interests]. I don't trust this enough to recommend to friends and family, but my presence here makes it a fraction more what I want to be.

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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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"I’m glad there’s OxyContin and video games to keep those people quiet", allegedly - Andreessen

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Open decentralized social media is bringing us back to that era 20 years ago when social media was just starting and people just talked and openly discussed the issues of the day with one another.

Unless the mods remove your posts.

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It did break down the barriers for those less technical by bringing the conversation to a web browser that was certainly more accessible as opposed to a terminal, for better or worse. It's not far off from the fediverse in that it does take some technical understanding to navigate, which does create a sort of barrier. Now, whether that is good or bad is a subject of debate, and I'm inclined to agree that the more accessible a platform is, the more watered down the conversations become.

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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.

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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.

ahem lemmy

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"bread and circuses" has been an effective strategy for thousands of years.

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They've been censorious for over a decade. It's just the old target was "acceptable" to most denizens of reddit and similar social media. Now that the censors are expanding their reach, we see umbrage? Come on now.

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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.

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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