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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Thanks for sharing this article. What a disgustingly crass sentiment
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Yeah, the US Constitution is just a piece of paper now because nobody's enforcing it.
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You are the exception, not the rule. Just because you have an easy time with something does not mean everyone does. Everyone experiences interaction in a different way.
Just because it brings no value to your life does not mean that opinion is universal.
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Sure you can. Fight online propaganda with online propaganda.
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It may be a good time to note that the constitution page on whitehouse.gov is still 404ing.
It's available on congress.gov and archived under bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov, but the current admin has yet to put it back.
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TLDR - We need more Luigis against the techbros
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Oh god, I haven't checked the White House website since it went full fascist. A big-ass picture of Dear Leader right at the top. North Korea, China, Russia...even those countries don't have anything so blatantly cult of personality on the front page of their websites.
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One of the problems with online forums for organizing is that it's hard to naturally build an organizational structure. It's possible, but I think it requires experienced organizers to start choosing collaborators from the userbase.
- in online forums, people get upvoted based on how much users agree with the comment. They are rewarded for being popular, not for having a direct impact on the problem being discussed.
- IRL people who commit effort to the cause get a certain amount of social capital, and the satisfaction of having an effect. They also form social bonds with other people in the group. Participants are rewarded for having an effect.
We haven't seen a lot of organizing boiling out of the existing forums (Reddit, Facebook, blogs) and microblogging (Twitter) platforms. There have been a bunch of leaderless movements, like #metoo and BLM, but those have had a moment and then faded out. If they were effective tools for organizing, I would expect to see more organizations come out of them and persist.
Conversely, volunteer community organizations form all the time - people are physically situated near people experiencing similar problems who are invested in solutions they think will work for their community. In-person organization is self perpetuating in the sense that there is an inherent reward for having an effect.
I think it's possible to use online tools to create a movement, but like the author of the article says, most of us spend our time posting and upvoting rather than doing something that will change policy.
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For anyone interested here is the CIA's publicly available field manual for simple sabotage. Dated, but mostly still relevant.
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Just because you have an easy time with something does not mean everyone does
That was the whole point of my answer.
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People need to know that posting doesn't actually do anything!
posts an article about it
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Posts comment about it.
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Not a comment on the merit of the article, but a tangential thought:
Fediverse has presented the same amount of doom to scroll as the algorithms. I open my phone to get a break from work, life, etc, and any app I think to open for social or news, presents the same anxiety of "I just can't deal with that type of shit right now; where can I bury my head in the sand?" -
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What will matter in the end isn't what you put online.
It'll be how good your memory becomes when ICE comes knocking on your door asking about your neighbors.
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