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.
I can’t upvote this strongly enough. Social media is doing everything in the establishment’s favor - especially ingraining the habit of glancing at a news item and making an instant value judgement with minimal thought before scrolling along to the next item. It’s not just that endless scrolling and venting take time away from real action, it’s the encouragement of superficial thinking. People who get all their info from memes are solid gold to con men like Trump who depend on triggering simplistic kneejerk conclusions. They got conservatives to worship him by not thinking too much, and they can do the same to liberals.
Why read the article (especially if there’s a paywall) when you can read - or even better make - the comments? 😜
Seriously, if the goal is that sweet sweet dopamine fix, then this is the most efficient means to achieve that end…
Thinking is hard, hence just don’t do it! Better yet, downvote those who do as being “pretentious”.
It’s far easier to talk
rather than listenover others.After working with computer software most of my life I’ve come to understand that if success relies on people ‘paying attention to something, making an informed decision and then performing an action’ that it is nearly impossible to get the desired outcome more than half the time.
We’re so fucked.
Agreed. After 30 years working in IT for various companies from 40 employees to 300,000 employees, I believe about 70-80% of the corporate work force has an elementary school level of reading comprehension at best.
In the last 10 years of my career I stopped writing emails with more than 1 question, because otherwise most people would reply and only answer the first thing I asked (often poorly), ignoring the entire rest of the email.
I mean 54% read at or below a 6th grade level, so that makes sense. Almost a fifth to a half of adult Americans are functionally illiterate depending on how you define it.
Also in that field, but… I think you have to acknowledge that being, usually, in your example 1) at work and 2) on a computer, make people that much less interested in giving a shit. Compare to various systems people use in their free time, and you probably see that people are pretty good at attending to the things they think matter.
Capitalism, or, at the very very least, unfettered capitalism, are the real problem, not people writ large.
in my workshop I keep safety glasses at each station, and then some more just around. I bought 6 pairs of the same model after trying out 8-10 different styles so they fit and work well also. I still need to force myself sometimes to take 3 steps to put them on.
The people who sit down to put together a solution for our mess will need to plan this way too. They will need to factor in how to make it easy for people. How to get the desired path of the chaotic group to align with the solution.
For an idea, I have been thinking a lot about decentralization like here at lemmy. What if, the government, was social media. What if each post was a proposal, and the up and down votes were actual votes. It could replace all politicians. No more lobbyists paying $5k for policy implementation. They would need to bribe us all, which would just be us getting better quality of life. A system without centralized power.
If it was in the top 3 apps in the mainstream repositories millions would stumble into it on their own.
They have done the same to liberals, just in a different way. Why do the harder thing when the easier thing is just as good? Most liberals already believe bullshit just as convenient for Trump.
How you support or not support an idea is not less important than what is that idea.
Social media is doing everything in the establishment’s favor
For about half a second, people used social media to organize. Then the fascists saw how to manipulate and control it, and jumped at the opportunity. At this point social media – especially billionaire controlled social media – is just part of the fascist apparatus.
To a lesser extent, as this article talks about, the coping mechanism of posting through better platforms allows you to vent enough to prevent you from having the discomfort necessary to actually do anything. It’s not nearly as harmful, but it’s not good either.
I agree.
“Planet’s burning up, another genocide, fascism on the rise… ugh… where are the funny memes.”
Apathy is the greatest tool of the oppressor.
And boredom is a crime.
It’s probably boomers’ fault for creating PCs so GenX could create the Internet. They should have seen this coming!!!
edit: yep LOL - nobody likes to hear that maybe something isn’t boomers’ fault.
The blame can be placed accurately: https://www.quora.com/Who-invented-the-modern-computer-look-and-feel/answer/Harri-K-Hiltunen
Apathy is the greatest tool of the oppressor.
apathy is the tool of the strong in the times of the weak.
You can’t even get Lemmings to leave Facebook because “muh marketplace” or “muh Auntie I haven’t seen in a decade.” Good luck. Y’all are addicted to this shit.
getting the fediverse into the mainstream should be our focus, a single entity will not be able to silence anyone
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.
true
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.
So why are we talking - nothing gives me any indication you are in the same community as me (odds are strongly against it), so nothing is being organized. The world needs more ways to organize communities not large groups who don’t have a small communities in common to do something about.
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.
Anyway … You’re sitting here posting on a fuckin forum. Go do something.
For better or worse, this seems to be way less of a problem on the Fediverse. I can’t tell if it’s because it’s federated OR if it’s because corporate America hasn’t woken up to it (yet?!?). I find way more interesting discussions on lemmy than anywhere else on the net. Hopefully it stays that way!
Doom scrolling is facilitated by ad-optimised algorithms that push low-nuance, emotive content that gets a reaction, for views. (Thinking particularly of twitter and Facebook here)
The fediverse doesn’t have that, and has no reason to, because as soon as any provider starts pushing ads, people will switch servers. So I think it WILL stay that way.
Also, I think as a consequence of having less combatitive content up front, people are generally in a less heightened emotional state as a baseline, and are able to approach more nuanced content more thoughtfully.
For anyone interested here is the CIA’s publicly available field manual for simple sabotage. Dated, but mostly still relevant.
The field manual was to cripple the nation (Nazi Germany) so it could be conquered by other nations.
The USA being conquered won’t reduce fascism in the slightest.
Funny, I find this in my doomscroll app. I just want out, man
I am trying to get people I know personally to stop posting and reading and instead begin to focus on the very basics of actual organization, in the form of simply being able to communicate effectively and securely.
I have collected and written up information for them with the consideration that they are non-technical, pertaining to secure and private communications primarily, but also many more potentially useful emergency-scenario information and data which I will not speak about here.
The package I have started giving to my friends contains information such as:
- How to communicate securely using something like Simplex or I2P
- How to correctly configure and use a VPN
- How to flash a security distribution of Linux such as TailsOS to a flash drive and how to boot to it from a computer
- How to securely encrypt data to a device using an encryption software with hidden volume features such as VeraCrypt
- A litany of manuals for all kinds of useful information you can use in emergencies, which I will not detail here
- Files containing the data required to build potentially useful items in emergencies given access to the correct hardware which I will not detail here
I firmly believe that the majority of Americans will not do anything until someone is actually showing up at their door, coming after them in the street, or destroying the regularities of their personal day to day life, so my intention is to distribute materials which they can turn to when the fear sets into them well enough that they are scared to talk about such things openly.
It is clear to me that most of my American friends at least, at this point, still only feel superficial fear and outrage. The other day I asked them “If you had to vandalize a public space with a piece of art, what would you draw or paint? Let’s say it is the side of a bank”.
One said “tits”, one said “flowers”, one said “a fox”.
Even in a fantasy, they would not express fear or outrage in a public setting.
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.
That’s what she said
i have been trying to look for any organization that would try to do something. I know i cant found anything like that myself so best i can do is support someone else. I have no idea where to even look or are there even such groups in my city or even country.
Only one i know of (extinction rebellion) are basically glorified facebook group(at least their local group, no idea how they are in general) that might occasionally do something that causes slight outrage and not even about the issue, just against them.
Is signal not good enough or something? I basically switched to signal.
It’s good, but it’s centralized. Let’s say an authoritarian regime shuts down the central Signal servers. Then what?
any group that hopes to have any success or effect on anything should thoroughly plan for the eventuality status quo wants to put stop to them. You make very good 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.
ahem lemmy
Maybe we won’t be guillotining them anytime soon, but we can at least slow their roll: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVgNJf6CsBA
100000000% agree
deleted by creator
They’re dozens of us.
“bread and circuses” has been an effective strategy for thousands of years.
which is why i refused to pay for tv/movies. I refused to spend my hard earned money on their “circus”
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.
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.
Maybe it’s better to refrain from growing strong men, though, just average will do, with average children, not weak.
ADD:
Also from LOTR, a smart thing in the same direction, I think one can find most of Tao Te Ching and Art of War rephrased in LOTR.
“Other evils there are that may come; for Sauron is himself but a servant or emissary. Yet it is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule”
I’m not sure how it is possible to produce merely average people though? Anyway, even if humanity itself were to not change, the world around us still does. Perhaps one day aliens will show up, assuming that climate change doesn’t kill us all in the moderate term future. Just like all those species of animals and plants and such that we’ve driven extinct: they lasted so long, but then could not survive us.
So I would argue that we always should remain strong… it’s just that the definition of what that even means will constantly keep changing, in response to our circumstances.
But, Stoicism, yeah - it’s literally all that we can do, so let’s do that.:-)
I’m not sure how it is possible to produce merely average people though?
Not getting excited with global solutions and utopias. At some point in my 12-15 I considered libertarianism a far wiser ideology than the rest due to this, but then noticed how there are libertarian utopias emerging for all tastes. Panarchy (that’s not yet a thing), agorism (that to some extent is, with cryptocurrencies and internet connectivity) and maybe something else.
Any wise construct stops being wise if you rely on it too much.
So people thinking “correctly” are not those you want to have, people familiar with good things, but not invested too much, are.
If you build a construct (say, in a game like Civilization) with -7 modifier to fascism, then the humanity will regulate to that and negate the modifier. Then your construct crumbles, and the humanity gets +7 to fascism. Was it really a good idea in the first place then?
So I would argue that we always should remain strong… it’s just that the definition of what that even means will constantly keep changing, in response to our circumstances.
And that means that trying to remain strong we’ll waste effort in all directions instead of having some when needed.
But, Stoicism, yeah - it’s literally all that we can do, so let’s do that.:-)
Stoicism is about spending effort where you should and not spending when you shouldn’t. It’s not pure inaction, it’s the way to do less nonsense.
EDIT: Or the biblical example with 7 abundant years and 7 hungry years - imagine taking all the increase in food for granted, many more children being born, many more slaves brought in, expecting to be able to pay many more debts perhaps, thus taking more, and then during hungry years not only the difference in population dying, but more (because those who die from hunger still consume food before it, those who are used to eating more need more to survive, some debt payments can’t be postponed, and a weaker state spends more resources to defend its borders).
Humans seem not to be great planners - we are too short-sighted and selfish, but like in a bad way where we first lie to ourselves, and then also to one another.
This allows us to get out of local minima as we spread to new areas, but that same trait seems equally likely to lead to our extinction when all areas have been found and we need rather to switch to a more stablilzed society, yet won’t bc we don’t feel like doing so.
Such situations would regularly arise till early XX century and even now, so, eh, humanity tries everything. I wouldn’t assume I know a solution.
Ironically, religion seemed to be helping. And before that (before humanity itself), tribes. An extension of “self” to include other who nonetheless were not “other”, at least not fully. But people seem to prefer wanting to game the system,
allowingforcing others to put into while themselves pulling out from.The age of enlightenment did much good to expose religious corruption, yet offered an inferior product to replace it: “knowledge”, which so few people know how to properly handle, lacking training. e.g. in the USA we knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that most people were too busy and tired to properly educate themselves, yet we placed no restrictions upon voting (like a college degree, or even a test as simple as asking how many branches of government there are - which even that would cause many people to fail).nor did we offer the requisite aid (like a livable minimum wage, or conversely access to a minimum form of healthcare) to help people to help themselves, nor did we keep watch against the predators that would take advantage, e.g. safeguarding the media (instead allowing it to be bought out by billionaires, rather than staying true to the mission of doing “journalism”, the seeking out and reporting of actual truth facts).
We brought this upon ourselves. Even if Donald Trump were to have a tragic accident tomorrow, even if the entire Republican party were to disappear into thin air, or all politicians combined, we would still be left with a broken system, just as before. We cannot escape the laws of Nature (whether put there by a God or not, but it’s worth noting that for those who believe in such, He agrees that we deserve this fate).
Even so, I hope for better. I don’t know what, or how, only that I need such for the sake of my own sanity.
Reminder that the USA has a nationwide protest at State Capital Buildings TODAY.
I feel personally attacked, I agree with the article, but painfully so.
Organising to do what exactly? A majority of the US population wants this nightmare. The Trump administration is expected to destroy norms and institutions to bring about their bigot’s utopia, they ran on that promise.
It’s really that dire. It’s beyond the reach of the checks and balances that have kept things somewhat on-track up until just after 9/11. Checks and balances are precisely what the voters want to delete from the courts.
If Trump wants a 3rd term, he will get it, and his voters will not be moved by marches or sit-ins or AOC exquisitely calling out the scum and villainy from the floor of the senate. Either talk Luigification, or let the people post their fucking memes in peace.
A third term implies the constitution is still in place and don’t see them passing an amendment without doing something ridiculous like creating a bunch of extra states.
Far easier to just never end the second term. Claim a national emergency and suspend elections/the constitution.
Barely 50%, and not even, and let’s hope a significant, even if it’s just small it’s significant, percentage didn’t want all the chaos and corruption, that they falsely believed he would be good, and when he isn’t will flip back to being more rational. Let’s hope, and let’s try to convince them.
