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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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.

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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.

No shit, so when I'd say this in year 2013, it wasn't worthless nerd screeching aimed at satisfying my hunger for attention which I don't get because I'm a worthless nerd and can't accept the new world where tech helps, you know, normal socialized people, not like me, to fix every problem with their mutual likes and reposts and flashmobs.

Seems damn clear that radio reproductors on German streets didn't help against Nazism.

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What a useless pile of words spent moaning about ad clicks, specifically to gain ad clicks.

Don't talk, "organize."

Okay, how? How do we effectively organize to fight against an enemy who has already for all intents and purposes won, in a way that won't get us rounded up and shot by the Gestapo? Please tell us.

"We don't know, that's your problem. Just 'organize.'"

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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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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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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