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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Let's see that package
I can't share it all here for reasons I can't detail.
I may do a second write up at some point for public distribution and if so, I will share it with you here.
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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.
Funny, I find this in my doomscroll app. I just want out, man
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How do you solve that though?
Idk. Ban from communities after negative karma threshold with an automatic vote weighted by users subreddit karma to appeal? Just the first thing that popped to mind though sure there’s better ways. Matrix was working towards something iirc last i checked.
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Idk. Ban from communities after negative karma threshold with an automatic vote weighted by users subreddit karma to appeal? Just the first thing that popped to mind though sure there’s better ways. Matrix was working towards something iirc last i checked.
If that was in place you could get banned from all of lemmy for saying that but it wouldn't even have to come from a mod just someone with enough free time to make a couple thousand accounts. I personally like the way one of the discords im in does it where it is basically a draft from the mod team to be head mod and leads to significantly less power tripping because they will be gone in the next month.
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If that was in place you could get banned from all of lemmy for saying that but it wouldn't even have to come from a mod just someone with enough free time to make a couple thousand accounts. I personally like the way one of the discords im in does it where it is basically a draft from the mod team to be head mod and leads to significantly less power tripping because they will be gone in the next month.
Hence weighted by reputation.
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thanks for the links, looking forward to checking them out.
You're welcome
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Excellent set of resources - ty for posting them
No problem
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How do you solve that though?
You pay mods and make them have rules.
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Then start your own server and post whatever you want.
Then there's nothing unique about open and decentralized social media.
The technology where I could "start my own server" has always existed.
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Then there's nothing unique about open and decentralized social media.
The technology where I could "start my own server" has always existed.
Right, but getting people to actually know it exists is the problem. That's why federated decentralized media is a good thing.
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Idk. Ban from communities after negative karma threshold with an automatic vote weighted by users subreddit karma to appeal? Just the first thing that popped to mind though sure there’s better ways. Matrix was working towards something iirc last i checked.
If you (rightfully) believe that, then any place blocking you isn't somewhere you want to be, anyway.
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If you (rightfully) believe that, then any place blocking you isn't somewhere you want to be, anyway.
Huh, why? Because of shit management?
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that requires effort to move away from platforms that force you to doomscroll with their algorithm. For many people that is very strong chain. If you relinquish your mind its not easy to even see the reason to take it back on your own.
it requires effort for sure, but even if you don't want to permanently do it, just spend like a week, without using tiktok or something.
It's worth it. At least let yourself understand both worlds fully.
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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.
You are right, but you are just missing an important ingredient: a physical community.
It's quite easy for autocrats and gangs to isolate and eliminate loners.
And as for the communities, there is a hierarchy. Police officers and soldiers have no hesitation to eliminate gangs and terrorists. That's their job.
They will have a little more hesitation to attack civil organisations, e.g. sports clubs, political parties and trade union places. But eventually, if someone tells them that terrorist activities were being undertaken, they'll just follow orders. The way this is done is by getting people unfamiliar with the community to come in and do the dirty job.
They will have the most hesitation to attack religious places of their own religion. Many of the grunts tend to still be religious/superstitious.
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it requires effort for sure, but even if you don't want to permanently do it, just spend like a week, without using tiktok or something.
It's worth it. At least let yourself understand both worlds fully.
the problem with this is that A LOT of people needs to do it. Personally I dont have any problems with trying to maintain my sanity by not reading about awful things or by treating tiktok like the plague it is. But so many are basically addicts and dont even want to hear anything about changing what they do or just plain dont care what you say to them.
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You are right, but you are just missing an important ingredient: a physical community.
It's quite easy for autocrats and gangs to isolate and eliminate loners.
And as for the communities, there is a hierarchy. Police officers and soldiers have no hesitation to eliminate gangs and terrorists. That's their job.
They will have a little more hesitation to attack civil organisations, e.g. sports clubs, political parties and trade union places. But eventually, if someone tells them that terrorist activities were being undertaken, they'll just follow orders. The way this is done is by getting people unfamiliar with the community to come in and do the dirty job.
They will have the most hesitation to attack religious places of their own religion. Many of the grunts tend to still be religious/superstitious.
Ah gotcha. Yeah my entire purpose for such means of communication is directly for the purpose of supporting a physical community via ease of digital communication, as well as maintaining communication with the wider world to stay on top of what's happening outside of our local community.
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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.
I love mastodon because its actual people I'm following, so I can see whats happening in their lives, in contrast to twitter, which just showed me constant outrage bait and shitposts.
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I love mastodon because its actual people I'm following, so I can see whats happening in their lives, in contrast to twitter, which just showed me constant outrage bait and shitposts.
I've been lazy on Mastodon because I've been spending all my time on Lemmy ... I really should do more there in the future ... thanks for the reminder.
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I've been lazy on Mastodon because I've been spending all my time on Lemmy ... I really should do more there in the future ... thanks for the reminder.
Heh, same. The "subreddit" format is incredibly addictive.
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the problem with this is that A LOT of people needs to do it. Personally I dont have any problems with trying to maintain my sanity by not reading about awful things or by treating tiktok like the plague it is. But so many are basically addicts and dont even want to hear anything about changing what they do or just plain dont care what you say to them.
the problem with this is that A LOT of people needs to do it.
yeah, and they should, it's worth the time investment, or in this case, time gain.
