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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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.
Yes it is, but how to make them understand it is
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Right, but getting people to actually know it exists is the problem. That's why federated decentralized media is a good thing.
Isn't federation just another version of moderation?
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Isn't federation just another version of moderation?
No. It's how different instances share content with one another.
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Yes it is, but how to make them understand it is
look that's not my problem, you want to continue being glued to your screen and wasting your time on shit that's trivial and unimportant, be my guest, but i can more than assure anybody in the world that literally nothing will happen if you stop using social media. Just try it. It's literally free.
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look that's not my problem, you want to continue being glued to your screen and wasting your time on shit that's trivial and unimportant, be my guest, but i can more than assure anybody in the world that literally nothing will happen if you stop using social media. Just try it. It's literally free.
i think you are misuderstanding me. I dont use social media, unless you count using lemmy. I find facebook and xitter disgusting.
What I mean is that those who do use them need to understand its bad not only for them but whole society and that they should stop. But getting them to understand is the problem.
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i think you are misuderstanding me. I dont use social media, unless you count using lemmy. I find facebook and xitter disgusting.
What I mean is that those who do use them need to understand its bad not only for them but whole society and that they should stop. But getting them to understand is the problem.
no i understand perfectly what you're saying, it's just not your or my job to tell other people how to live their lives, if they want to ruin their lives, by all means they have the right to go and do it, but if you are going to listen to me, you better damn well take my advice because this should be paid. That's the point i'm trying to make.
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no i understand perfectly what you're saying, it's just not your or my job to tell other people how to live their lives, if they want to ruin their lives, by all means they have the right to go and do it, but if you are going to listen to me, you better damn well take my advice because this should be paid. That's the point i'm trying to make.
we all have tried apathy and look what it has got to us. Though maybe i am just wrong about this and should be content in watching the world burn.
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we all have tried apathy and look what it has got to us. Though maybe i am just wrong about this and should be content in watching the world burn.
we've tried literally everything, nothing has worked, the only thing we can do at this point is be content in ourselves, try to offer people help when they need it, and laugh at those who perish by their own musings.
It's sink or swim, and if you aren't going to swim, you're going to sink.
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I suspect the vast majority of people turning to social media as a pressure release valve feel disempowered, and honestly don't know what more they can reasonably do. How can a fly meaningfully change the orbit of a planet?
This article is insightful, but practically useless. I think it would be better if it also presented specific actions and achievable goals that would lead to shutting down encroaching fascism.
Voting can never be enough when you have two choices at best.
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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.
Everybody, do yourself a favour and actually read this article.
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