I’ve been mulling over Janus Rose’s recent 404 Media article, “You Can’t Post Your Way Out of Fascism.”. In many ways, she’s not wrong. But once again people are ignoring an entirely other way of doing social media that can, in fact, fight fascism.
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What is to be done? Well, Rose argues that there is no antidote to Trumpian poison to be found in merely taking to social media and posting about his (or Elon Musk’s, or Pete Hesgeth’s, or any other Trumpist’s) bizarre or cruel statements. “If there’s one thing I’d hoped people had learned going into the next four years of Donald Trump as president,” she writes, “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.”
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Can folks doomscroll on the fediverse? Yes. Can folks post on the fediverse? Yes. Might they post about the latest outrage of Trump? Yes, definitely.
Does that mean they are failing to fight incipient fascism? No.
In fact, I argue that the act of running, moderating, and participating in federated social media is precisely the sort of organizing that Rose calls for. It’s just taking place in a media environment, rather than, say, in an NGO’s offices in a city.
Oh get off their high horse. I know of no instance that is like Ecosia where your activity gets to, dunno, plant a tree or something. If you say online spaces somehow physically fight fascism, show me how many homeless people is your instance physically sheltering or helping immigrate to a better country, and we’ll talk.
Like, I love this kind of web space as much as the next person; but I don’t fancy myself in the emperor’s clothes.
Every revolution starts with a shit post 🐸
But freedom ain’t free and some blood letting has to happen to society to heal itself from the excesses of the parasite regime
I wouldn’t place any high value on what we’re doing here. At best, you should view this as bitching about the news at the local college-kid frequented coffeeshop. Yes, there is an element of raising awareness and discussion - it’s not useless, but ultimately, it’s not going to play a major role in getting us out of this shitshow. We’re discussing matters because it brings us some relief to do so, first and foremost.
To be fair I think lemmy kind of radicalised me. When I got here I felt like a left wing outcast on reddit, but I was in reality more like somewhere between a socdem and a dem soc type.
After a year here, I’ve been enlightened so much on online privacy and FOSS and stuff, learnt a lot about leftism and cool movements like solarpunk, and now find myself using the label “anarchism” to describe my political views. Lemmy has definitely slowly radicalised me and taught me a bunch of stuff.
Obviously lemmy is not perfect
(Also has it’s downsides, like a large tankie presence, aka. CCP and Putin propagandists, but to be honest, the left wing subs of reddit have been kind of taken over by tankie mods as well, which is part of the reason I switched to lemmy, most leftist communities on reddit felt authoritarian)
Same thing here. I was always vaguely left wing/pro FOSS/etc, but joining Lemmy introduced me to solarpunk and a much more anarchist/radical community in general. Since I started using Lemmy during the reddit API stuff I pretty quickly went from wishing I ate less meat -> vegetarian -> vegan and from vaguely anti-capitalism -> anarchist. Now I’m learning to hand mend my clothes and joining local mutual aid groups lol.
Just posting about bad things happening shouldn’t be the limit of what action people take (unless that’s all they can do obviously), but it’s also far from completely pointless to try and spread awareness of stuff like anarchism/anti-capitalism or ways you can make an impact/support others. Movements and ideas can’t spread if no one is talking about them. Plus posting about actual concrete actions you can do is super useful to anyone who wants to do something but doesn’t know how to start.
I think you are underestimating the effect. I’ve learned a whole lot in my year and a half here. Enough to develop a decent understanding of what’s going on and what concrete actions I could take in my corner of the world. I think we can’t expect action without understanding of why act and what action. I think discussions here help with that. For all the people who post and comment, there are many who read, learn go find out more, and so on. Some of those would take action that they wouldn’t have otherwise. If we don’t platform that do this, if all there is are corporate platforms that keep people unaware of even the basics of what’s happening beyond the reporting, then the number of people who’d act in some productive way would be even lower.
Nah you’re not going to post your way out of fascism. The whole point of Musk and Trump is they literally dgaf about what people say. Actions matter, and organizing on any social media that’s easily reachable by AI might as well just fax the FBI their plans.
fax the FBI their plans
Opsec is not the fediverse’s strenth, no. Anything you post here is going right to the FBI, courtesy of Palantir and Peter Thiel.
Anything you post online ANYWHERE is likely to end up there: if it’s not e2e encrypted, then you just told the FBI, and even if it is, you probably shouldn’t trust that it’s actually secure unless there’s public audits showing that it is, and you’re using a reproducible build from verified source.
…also, unrelated rant: stop taking pictures of people at protests and posting it online. Why is everyone doing state security’s job for them?
Pictures prove that protests were big and non-violent
and non-violent
And that would be good… why?
To attract more people to the follow ups
Both of those people are SO FUCKING THIRSTY for constant approval.
Musk wants to be acknowledged as superior by everyone, Trump only cares about a few fashie friends/idols/key holders of his.
I think the fediverse might provide a supporting role in information sharing but it can’t really replace in person organizations.
Yeah, especially because you’re all a bunch of feds out to learn the secret plans of my radical leftist militia
Look, if you can post your way out of this, then we should have been able to post our way into not having to.
But, judging from the outcomes of all THAT posting, I strongly doubt there’s a single thing anyone can post anywhere that’ll suddenly make people decide to wake up one day and go ‘Oh my! What a mess, I should throw away my entire world view and do ________!’ because that’s very much not how people actually work.
Best case, there’s enough pain and blood to nudge the lazy fucks into doing something in 2 years, but really, that doesn’t do anyone any good for the next 2 years and also very much isn’t assured: at least some of the lazies are actually in favor of this and the facists have a pretty good grip on the media and social network effects, so you can’t make a toot and expect it’ll do shit.
We’re past the polite letters to the editor stage, and in the misery and violence phase, even if it’s still being mostly coated in decorum.
The headline is just riffing on the headline of the article it’s replying to.
The original article said that there is no value beyond a false sense of accomplishment in posting to social media. He is saying that there’s some value but also inherent value in creating alternatives to corporate (and in many cases fascist) media spaces.
Having been one of under 10 people on the bad place getting people to mask up during the pandemic, it is absolutely positive to post about things. I provided proof from before the pandemic about how masks can help and which types. It was proof that saved lives and thank you to a little known mask company for posting that while unknowingly helping in the future.
You have to pick your battles and post only about what they’re doing and saying while acknowledging the following things:
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They want to “The opposition party is the media,” Steve Bannon, who helped run Trump’s 2016 campaign, told PBS Frontline five years ago. “And the media can only — because they’re dumb and they’re lazy — they can only focus on one thing at a time.” So the solution, per Bannon? Overwhelm them.
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“All we have to do is flood the zone,” he said. “Every day we hit them with three things. They’ll bite on one, and we’ll get all of our stuff done, bang, bang, bang. These guys will never — will never be able to recover. But we’ve got to start with muzzle velocity.”
- Also post ways to help around your community so people also can do something.
- Realize that they’re trying to privatize our government, being shocked at the way they’re doing it or talking about it does nothing.
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Counterpoint: no amount of red scare great replacement free market nonsense is gonna make me not shut off whatever screen is showing it to me
Yeah but no one wants to write about the real solution. # See inglorious basterds for instructions.
The corpo media doesn’t want you writing about real solutions, it’s easier to get away with here! And i doubt the alphabet agencies will care as much as they used to now that they’re being directly attacked.
Social Media is great for awareness and organizing protests
people seem to find the idea of organizing on lemmy absurd
Many people on lemmy has some ideology that either consider others insufferable, or is considered insufferable by most people.
That doesn’t mean that you can’t organize something on social media, you just need one with freedom of expression (so, no overseeing algorithm), and a clique of people capable of organizing themselves. It may even be possible to get that here.
Yeah, it’s good to post and rase awareness but if you don’t actually do something about it and only post online well it’s partially your fault why is your country the way it is.
Sure, moderating and creating places like the fediverse are good and useful. But 99% of the time people spend on the fediverse isn’t doing that
I feel like this article misses the essence of the original. It’s a strawman. Yes, being on the fediverse is better than being on twitter/facebook whatever corpo media. But it is equally susceptible to just endless scrolling without any action
Many Twitter refugees made a good choice in migrating from Musk’s X to Bluesky, carving out a new online space that is inhospitable to bigoted debate bros and time-wasting trolls. But in their enemies’ absence, many of these Left-leaning posters have just reverted to dunking on each other, preferring the catharsis of sectarian conflict over the hard work of organizing.
Yeah I’ve tried bluesky, this is entirely accurate. 90% of US political content on bluesky is basically a combination of r/whitepeopletwitter and r/clevercomebacks. Same people too, that reddit loves
