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
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
Authoritarians and tech CEOs now share the same goal: to keep us locked in an eternal doomscroll instead of organizing against them, Janus Rose writes.
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.
LF leftists in Kansas. Assemble
They're dozens of us.
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
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
There is another way - if it’s in your power, don’t obey the regime in any way.
Can you please cite a historical event anywhere in the world from any time in history where ignoring a regime was done and worked to remove it from power?
You have said "don't obey", but you have ruled out violence, so I am assuming you mean "ignore".
Thanks.
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.
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.
People need to know that posting doesn't actually do anything!
posts an article about it
Posts comment about it.
It’s super helpful to identify the issue.
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
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.
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.
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 reeks of puppeteering; there can’t be that many arseholes here, right?
That's because there are a lot of marginlized folks here - gay, trans, autistic, linux users - who have spent decades disucssing politely and negotiating.
Problem is the people throwing Nazi salutes and writing all these executive orders have, quite clearly, said they want us all either dead or in camps.
Now I wouldn't dream of speaking for everyone else, but I'm certainly not going to be attempting to politely debate myself out of a one-way train ride, if it comes to that.
So, yeah, while I don't encourage violence for the sake of violence, the neoliberal 'oh dear we must all be very polite at all times and let rationality solve all our issues!' is dead and worthless.
I've taken classes for and armed myself, and I have zero qualms with defending myself and friends and family by any means necessary if it comes down to a situation where it's us-or-them, regardless of who 'them' is.
If you told me even five years ago that I'd be carrying a gun and be fully prepared to use deadly force to defend myself I'd have called you goofy, and if you told me that I'd be willing to use it against agents of the state if they came after me, I'd think you have lost your damn mind.
But, well, it's been a long 5 years, and frankly, IMO, the rule of law and the trust in any governmental institutions have been eroded into nothing.
Something like 80% of all theft at this point is unpaid wages.
You have to understand that a system that calls corporations people is inherently violent. Profit is unpaid labor, so the existence of a tax code that not only allows -but celebrates and defends- billionaires is class warfare. If you steal $1000 from a store, the police show up. If the store steals $1000 from your paycheck the police tell you to get a lawyer with a $5k retainer. The store's existence isn't hampered by the $1,000 while most families would be ruined without out.
However, the only instance of the crime the system cares about is the one against the corporation.
Corporations are the only people that don't have to worry about eating. Corporations are the only people that don't have hands for handcuffs. Corporations are the only people the law cares about.
Corporations own the media. Corporations own the red ones. Corporations own the blue ones. Corporations own the food. Corporations are eager to own everything the DNC will meet the RNC half way in privatizing.
We are here because infinite money now equates to infinite speech. We as individuals have ever less speech because we have ever less money. Unions are being crippled now and soon protesting itself will become a crime against the state.
It will be a crime to speak out. It will be a crime to be different. It will be a crime to work too slow or think too much.
When every notion of freedom becomes a crime, crime becomes our only freedom.
Ready Player 2 mother fuckers.
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.
That’s probably time zones. I’m in Europe, and I’ve noticed that if I post something that’s not in line with mainline American thinking, I’ll wake up to a bunch of downvotes. The same could be true for Oceania/Asia or Europe/africa, depending on where you are.
Fuck negotiating and debate. That's what has allowed the rich to erode or steal everything we could have had. That's what allows wimpy politicians to get walked all over as the bullies take over again and again.
Yes we're missing two things
- Anonymous ID / Reputation system to tell it's a human
- Community-run moderation. So some chronically online sadsack can't ban you from a significant portion of lemmy for life because you disagreed with them.
I am definitely one of those "to arms" types because I think talking is over. That's all the oligarchs want, more talk. When a forum for discussion is introduced the controlling powers study it for monetization and misinformation purposes. When they figure out how to manipulate the fediverse and platforms like Bluesky it'll be over. It's important we keep ads off of them or they'll dictate the discussion
there can’t be that many arseholes here, right?
oh my sweet summer child
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.
Only for the moment. Spammers have already found us, but so far in small numbers. All the other bad parts of social media are already here too, just so far not in large amounts and so you can find useful content. But those who gain from the garbage are coming and decentralization doesn't help.
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.
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.
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.
As someone who is outside the US, the best I can do is share important information with people inside the US.
I would be very surprised if any of our US-Allied governments call out Trump. I would be overjoyed, but surprised.
This is a very enlighting article
Posted from my iPhone
"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"
Agree, best thing we can do is starve their platforms and deny them advertising revenue. Just delete our accounts.
I don't know, i was thinking about it and it seems like they would love it if we would just unplug like that, because then we couldn't reach the majority of people because they're only using those platforms. I fucking hate psyop bullshit for making me have to question every single fucking thought like that.
If you must be on those platforms (because face it, that is where grandma is) don't doom scroll. I block all from the creator of shared memes on facebook - then when I block two I use that as a sign I'm done for the day. You should follow similar rules - make it clear that you want social media for social purposes and the memes, information (which is likely false or exaggerated), and everything else is not welcome to you. Alone you and I are nothing, but together we start to become a statistics that they will notice. Thus my plea that you follow similar rules as me in blocking the non-social parts and not doom scrolling - if there are enough of us they will be forced to make their platform more useful to keep us for one more ad.
For anyone interested here is the CIA's publicly available field manual for simple sabotage. Dated, but mostly still relevant.
Hey! I've seen this one before!
What will matter in the end isn't what you put online.
It'll be how good your memory becomes when ICE comes knocking on your door asking about your neighbors. That's the hard part.
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.'"
Get on the streets and see who else is there and organize with them the old fashioned gen-x way.
The article is full of examples of ways people have organized.
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.)
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.
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.
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
Sure you can. Fight online propaganda with online propaganda.
They've been censorious for over a decade. It's just the old target was "acceptable" to most denizens of reddit and similar social media. Now that the censors are expanding their reach, we see umbrage? Come on now. This was inevitable
"I’m glad there’s OxyContin and video games to keep those people quiet" - Andreessen, allegedly.
Thanks for sharing this article. What a disgustingly crass sentiment
Not a comment on the merit of the article, but a tangential thought: Fediverse has presented the same amount of doom to scroll as the algorithms. I open my phone to get a break from work, life, etc, and any app I think to open for social or news, presents the same anxiety of "I just can't deal with that type of shit right now; where can I bury my head in the sand?"
