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.
. . .
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.”
. . .
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.
“If there’s one thing I’d hoped people had learned going into the next four years of Donald Trump as president,” she writes,
Ever the optimist? The only four years thing i mean.
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 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
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)
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
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.
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
