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 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.
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?
I feel personally attacked, I agree with the article, but painfully so.
The revoltion will not be televised - Gill Scott Heron
Even people agreeing with this are wary of any revolution which is not in some way being televised. And more trusting to television than to what they can see with their own eyes.
100000000% agree
LF leftists in Kansas. Assemble
They’re dozens of us.
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 stupid conclusions. They got conservatives to worship him by not thinking too much, and they can do the same to liberals.
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.
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.
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.
Apathy is the greatest tool of the oppressor.
apathy is the tool of the strong in the times of the weak.
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!!!
The blame can be placed accurately: https://www.quora.com/Who-invented-the-modern-computer-look-and-feel/answer/Harri-K-Hiltunen
literally just don’t doomscroll, go read my recent post over in eudaimonia.
You literally just don’t have to do it lmao.
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I’m afraid you can’t vote or protest your way out of fascism. Only way out is to shoot.
Except you won’t, because you are already coping on Lemmy
I’m on lemmy. Just got back from working with firearms at my camp today.
Turns out some mags need oiled, a dead scope battery (no extras on hand!), new shotgun strikes light, need to adjust the trigger pull (again), new 10-round AR mags are a dream, not sure about the red-dot, but it puts steel on target as far as I’m able to shoot.
As always my Colt 1911 Government Model is flawless with every mag. Compact Ruger 9mm fired flawlessly, hard to aim a 2.75" barrel. About my crappiest gun, the Taurus Spectrum, actually ran perfectly. Weirder things have happened. (It always runs perfectly, just jams on the last round, every time.)
Rotated out some old ammo, had more than I thought! Guess I was being extra conservative on holding. :)
For sure. This is all hypothetical. No real threats of violence here.
You are correct. These people won’t be stopped with words or rational arguments. They are past the point of being able to cooperate. We will be killing each other before long. Sorry to say, but if you don’t have the tools and skills to do that, you might want to learn. Or be prepared to be owned or killed by those that do. Adolph Musk and crew want to OWN you or DESTROY you depending on how you look. Start preparing for what that means.
I fucking hate that it’s coming to this, but without a major change of direction (that I see no evidence of yet) that’s where this ends up. The red menace was in our own country the whole time.
I am an infantry veteran and I will be fighting on the correct side of history until I can’t anymore. I do wonder how many of my fellow comrades I might come into conflict with once this all kicks off.
Not enough ammo…
They have the popular vote, most gun nuts are right wing. And they have the military, most of which voted trump. Are there even enough people who are left of center to fight against that?
The US has experience being beaten by smaller, poorly-armed forces.
That’s just what they want you to believe. Most of the country does not support the capitalists. Support for Luigi remains bi-partisan.
Violence’s bad. I think it won’t help anyway, unless it only makes things worse and society even more divided, leading the country into cycles of endless dictatorship, especially when we know that 70+ millions Americans voted for felon.
One of the ways to get rid of illegitimate leaders is for at least 50%+ of the entire country to get together and protest all the way to Washington.
There is another way - if it’s in your power, don’t obey the regime in any way.
That’s the whole point of dictators - they come in when some economic crisis starts and/or the people are divided.
By the way, authoritarians thanks to the fact that people are divided, and continue to rule. And also political apathy and social conservatism are only to the advantage of dictators, so they should have been regarded as evil from the beginning
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Ignoring all the times that violence did in fact help won’t help.
I suspect the vast majority of people turning to social media as a pressure release valve feel disempowered, and don’t know what more they can reasonably do. When voting is no longer enough, and you have little time or money to spare, what’s next? How can a fly meaningfully change the path of a rhino stampede?
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 the encroaching fascism.
People need to know that posting doesn’t actually do anything!
posts an article about it
Posts comment about it.
How about joining the Fediverse?
And ad blocking.
Seriously. Participation in Google/Meta/Tiktok/Whatever and their manipulative algorithms is what makes a lot of this go around. Break their ad revenue, break out of the algorithms, and you break their manipulation.
It’s easy. It’s free. You can do it on your butt, in the same timeslots you doomscroll. And it would draw more devs into developing/hosting.
It’s super helpful to identify the issue.
Vast numbers of people feeling disempowered … sounds like the Trump crowd when he appeared and proclaimed himself their savior. Liberals are in for the same treatment from someone with a different sales pitch. Some people think that’s who Kamala Harris was, I truly believed in her, but maybe that was the whole plan and it’s already like professional wrestling - you win this match, I’ll win the next one, and we both take home the money. I dunno.
Well at least the article validated some of my feelings and gave me a sense identification of the problems I have been sensing around me with the flaccid liberal rebellion.
Hey wait a sec! Dammit!Most concrete action I can think of is some posts I remember seeing about coat-hanger do it yourself frontal lobotomies. I’ve seen plenty of very low IQ Americans with economic status as bad or worse than mine somehow perfectly happy with all the fascist shit that is going down. This seems like an opportunity to join in their bliss.
Get to know the people in your community. Take an interest in growing food, learn how to fix things. Get a gun (or two) and learn how to use them.
https://mutualaiddisasterrelief.org/
Establish secure lines of communication and start preparing for what’s coming. The next decade is going to be hard but we’ll probably know how it’s going to shake down by then.
edit: formatting
TLDR - We need more Luigis against the techbros
Luigi 1 didn’t accomplish anything, though.
You’re talking about it.
I’m talking about a guy who made no impact on a single company much less an industry and then went to jail awaiting prison, throwing away all of his rich boy ivy league education, because people like YOU keep bringing him up.
I’m talking about a guy
Since you’re refusing to back up your stance I take that to mean you’ve resigned from the argument and that you agree with me.
Back up my stance of “you’re talking about it” when you start your comment with “I’m talking about it”?
I really don’t see a reason to “back that up” any further. You did all for me.
I see you have the memory of the goldfish so I’ll recap the discussion for you.
-
User above stated we need more luigis
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I brought up the fact that Luigi 1 accomplished nothing
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You retort that we are talking about it
So either your response was completely pointless and off topic or you meant it as evidence that Luigi 1 accomplished something. What did he accomplish? How does talking about it change anything for anyone?
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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.
Same. I’ve learned a lot since I joined Lemmy.
I genuinely believe centralised social media was created to make you feel like you’re doing something.
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.
It did break down the barriers for those less technical by bringing the conversation to a web browser that was certainly more accessible as opposed to a terminal, for better or worse. It’s not far off from the fediverse in that it does take some technical understanding to navigate, which does create a sort of barrier. Now, whether that is good or bad is a subject of debate, and I’m inclined to agree that the more accessible a platform is, the more watered down the conversations become.
It did break down the barriers for those less technical by bringing the conversation to a web browser that was certainly more accessible as opposed to a terminal, for better or worse.
I beg your pardon, but what about web forums? I don’t think anything technical was required with those.
They were good, but is there good forum platforms nowadays that are mobile friendly, have apps etc.?
WDYM mobile-friendly? There are plenty of engines, I suppose some have adaptive design.
Anyway, I remember browsing websites of that time using Sony PSP default browser. This was certainly harder than anything you get today. Still bearable enough.
Just opened one forum made with Invision Power Board, it is of course not adaptive, but I don’t need endless scroll on a forum. Pretty usable with, well, zoom in, zoom out, tap. All that.
WDYM have apps? You have a web browser. It’s intended to visit websites. I would understand if those apps would provide any functionality outside of that of a website. Maybe putting website bookmarks on the home screen would be a good user-friendly feature for Android though. Those could even use RSS to indicate something. Maybe those should be just RSS indicators even.
If you mean that you don’t want web, just something like Usenet - I have no answer except Usenet itself. Freenet (Locutus) seems to have a winter depression, but I haven’t visited their Matrix channel lately.
What I mean is that there’s a whole different world of how you make an app usable on a mobile phone with portrait screen and a website that’s displayed on a big screen. Many remaining forums I’ve seen from the past were built for a different time, with outdated designs and no good usability on a vertical-based screen.
Now, I’ve seen something line the Swift and Rust forums that do look good on mobile, simple and aesthetically pleasing.
About apps, they’re not necessary indeed, but for many services it’s an assurance that the usability was thought for that environment. For example, the only reason I do enjoy browsing Lemmy is because of the Voyager app that resemble the defunct Apollo for Reddit and copied all the good usability of it for iOS. If it wasn’t for the apps people built for Lemmy, I’d probably not have much drive to come back to it often.
I know what hobby project I’d want to lift, but I also know that I struggle with much simpler undertakings - like, for example, cooking something normal more than twice a week.
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.
Just because you have an easy time with something does not mean everyone does
That was the whole point of my answer.
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.
constitutional rights
Hate to say it, but there’s the very real possibility those days are numbered.
As it sits, those of us that are savvy need to be actively using and promoting privacy-centric communications methodology to ensure we have a means to communicate safely and effectively as time goes on and those tights are further eroded. I don’t see the internet completely dying, given the technical nature of it, but peering and connectivity will likely be hampered in the coming months and years, so it is in our best interest to find and employ feasible solutions now to attempt getting out ahead of anything those muppets come up with.
You are missing the point.
Those days might be numbered, but these places are the last bastion.
They will invade private homes, businesses and offices with impunity first.
Churches in particular have a long history of being relatively safe in (civil) war.
Not immune, just relatively.
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.
Yeah, the US Constitution is just a piece of paper now because nobody’s enforcing it.
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.
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 government websites.
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.
Then start your own server and post whatever you want.
Doesn’t really work once spaces are established. Most of reddits problems aren’t the admins, it’s the volunteer subreddit mods which function just the same as lemmy.
Remember, there were plenty of rounds of moderator purges on reddit, especially when subs would lock down in protest. Any mod with ethics and a backbone would’ve been shown the door. So I think it’s fair to say a lot of the moderation problems were at least in part caused by the admins.
At least on Lemmy, different instances have different ethoses, so communities can be more in line with the instance they’re on, and there isn’t this need for absolute centralised conformity.
Also, having public mod logs is a big step towards transparency. Sure there are still problems, but it’s definitely no where near as bad IMO.
No. You claim to be a journalist; you don’t just stop reporting on the President of the United States. We don’t have that luxury.
Sounds like a complicit media attempting to absolve itself.
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.
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.
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.
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 have the social skills of a cholla cactus and so when someone says ѻɼﻭคกٱչﻉ ץѻપɼ กﻉٱﻭɦ๒ѻɼɦѻѻɗ กﻉՇฝѻɼᛕ I find it only confusing and unintelligible. I did consider making cookies for my neighbors with a notice saying _I don’t know how to ዐዪኗልክጎጊቿ ል ክቿጎኗዘጌዐዪዘዐዐዕ ክቿፕሠዐዪጕ but maybe someone else does…here’s some cookies? Mind you, my neighborhood is a tad lower class and has an air of desperation so they may not trust my cookies.
It’s a thought. My kitchen appliances are lent out right now, and I don’t actually know how to bake.
But I seem to understand enough leftist theory to bridge those who, like me, have been brainwashed to see communism and socialism as derisives and terms of contempt.
I’m also going through a psychotic break because a lot of stressors piled up at the same time seventy-seven million voters decided to give the Genie’s lamp to Jaffar.
People even knowing their next door neighbors NAME is leaps and bounds ahead of where we are right now.
