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.
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.
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.
Amazing take, no notes. I’ve done my due diligence, I’ve voted, I’ve canvassed for campaigns, I’ve donated to the right people.
I will NOT be debating with fascists or agitators while my friends and family members get taken away for being trans or the wrong shade of brown (or a Linux user lol). Someone in a more privileged position than me can.
I used that time to get my carry license instead.
That’s because there are a lot of marginlized folks here - gay, trans, autistic, linux users
I feel seen
Hahahaha you said linux users in the same breath of marginalized folk.
The cloud is linux. I don’t think social media is where we’re marginalized.
I agree with everything else you’ve said.
That was a joke. And besides, only certain distributions count anyways. Keep an eye out for our Slackware brothers, they need our help and support in these times.
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 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
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.
PieFed offers both, as well as most of the most heavily asked for features lacking from Lemmy (Categories of Communities, sign-up wizard asking for interests and subscribing to communities based on those answers, hashtags to facilitate cross-community discovery, etc.). Ironically it is the more foundational features (cross-posting, users tagging, comment previews, post searching) that it still lacks, but the point is that work is being done along the lines of what you said, even though I highly doubt that such will ever appear in “Lemmy” per se.
I love mastodon because its actual people I’m following, so I can see whats happening in their lives, in contrast to twitter, which just showed me constant outrage bait and shitposts.
I’ve been lazy on Mastodon because I’ve been spending all my time on Lemmy … I really should do more there in the future … thanks for the reminder.
Heh, same. The “subreddit” format is incredibly addictive.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You are right, but you are just missing an important ingredient: a physical community.
It’s quite easy for autocrats and gangs to isolate and eliminate loners.
And as for the communities, there is a hierarchy. Police officers and soldiers have no hesitation to eliminate gangs and terrorists. That’s their job.
They will have a little more hesitation to attack civil organisations, e.g. sports clubs, political parties and trade union places. But eventually, if someone tells them that terrorist activities were being undertaken, they’ll just follow orders. The way this is done is by getting people unfamiliar with the community to come in and do the dirty job.
They will have the most hesitation to attack religious places of their own religion. Many of the grunts tend to still be religious/superstitious.
Ah gotcha. Yeah my entire purpose for such means of communication is directly for the purpose of supporting a physical community via ease of digital communication, as well as maintaining communication with the wider world to stay on top of what’s happening outside of our local community.
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.
Then there’s nothing unique about open and decentralized social media.
The technology where I could “start my own server” has always existed.
Right, but getting people to actually know it exists is the problem. That’s why federated decentralized media is a good thing.
Isn’t federation just another version of moderation?
No. It’s how different instances share content with one another.
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.
Yeah there was still problems with the admins. But 95% of the problems people encountered day-to-day and what killed discussion and the vibe was virgin subreddit mods.
How do you solve that though?
Idk. Ban from communities after negative karma threshold with an automatic vote weighted by users subreddit karma to appeal? Just the first thing that popped to mind though sure there’s better ways. Matrix was working towards something iirc last i checked.
As it stands you can get blocked for life from a significant portion of lemmy for saying Trump is worse than Kamala would’ve been.
You pay mods and make them have rules.
I straight up hate that so many people are just now brushing up against the fact that everything is marketing. Everything is purposeful. Everything is sinister. Goddamn.
Shamelessly reposting this here, because it seems relevant:
Negative news has a greater impact on people than positive: https://assets.csom.umn.edu/assets/71516.pdf
Media sites know this, and use it to drive engagement:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-023-01538-4
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/social-media-facebook-twitter-politics-b1870628.html
And so, negative headlines are getting worse: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0276367
But negative news is addictive and psychologically damaging: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/why-we-worry/202009/the-psychological-impact-negative-news
So it’s important to try and stay positive:
https://www.goodgoodgood.co/articles/benefits-of-good-news
If you want a break from the constant negativity, here are some sites that report specifically on positive news:
- https://www.goodgoodgood.co/
- https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/
- https://fixthenews.com/
- https://positivenewsfoundation.org/
- https://www.onlygoodnewsdaily.com/
And here’s 35 more: https://news.feedspot.com/good_news_websites/
Some communities on Lemmy you might be interested in:
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- https://lemmy.world/c/hopeposting
- https://lemmy.world/c/worldinprogress
- https://lemmy.world/c/climatehope
Remember, realistic optimism is important and, unlike what some might have you believe, is not the same as blissful ignorance or ‘burying your head in the sand’: https://www.learning-mind.com/realistic-optimism-blind-positivity/
https://www.centreforoptimism.com/realisticoptimism
And doesn’t mean you must stay uninformed on current affairs: https://www.goodgoodgood.co/articles/how-to-stop-doom-scrolling
https://goodable.co/blog/tips-for-balancing-positive-and-negative-news/
thanks for the links, looking forward to checking them out.
You’re welcome
Excellent set of resources - ty for posting them
No problem 🙂
For those who are feeling disheartened or numb and want/need a little push to get things started, you should check out AOC’s video she posted. It’s like an hour and a half long but she does a good job breaking down the situation, acknowledging the challenges, but also provides examples of things you and everyone else can do to resist.
In her own words/examples, you don’t have to feel like it’s all on just you to rollback illegal FAA staff appointments, to stop musk harvesting USAID, etc. There are specific concrete actions you can take within your capacity to make a difference.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And boredom is a crime.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Let’s see that package
That’s what she said
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.
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.
Funny, I find this in my doomscroll app. I just want out, man
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.
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.
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.
He traded his life for another. He showed the world that it’s possible. And “we” outnumber “them”. Making people realize that is an achievement in itself.
Would you say people like Rosa Parks “didn’t accomplish anything”?
“They” actually won the recent election meaning “they” are actually the majority. The only way for “us” to accomplish anything other than constant bloodshed and a near 50/50 civil war scenario is to convince a bunch of “them” to change the system with “us”.
We’re not fighting a dozen people like Brian Thompson, we’re fighting tens of millions of idiots who empower them.
First, people supporting Trump are not the majority by any metric. They are 49.8% of the people who voted, which is 31,8% of the eligible voters and 23,3% of the total us population. You could argue that the majority of people “don’t hate” Trump, and while that’s still a scary metric, it’s not the point that I wanted to make.
“They” aren’t Republicans or Trump supporters, they’re wealth-hoarding billionaires that actively make people’s lives worse. As it has already been said, support for Luigi is pretty much bipartisan. Nearly everyone hates those people, and even plenty of people who voted Trump did it because they see him as “one of the people” (for some godforsaken reason). They’re propagandized into voting Republican through all the culture war, misinformation and fear mongering, but when people like Brian Thompson die, no one is actually sad and a lot actually celebrate.
Trump does indeed have a personality cult, but from what I’ve gathered the great majority of people voting him aren’t part of that and they don’t actually like him, it’s just that they hate “the gays”, “the libs”, or “the immigrants” more.
Anybody who didn’t vote for the party who opposes Trump but was eligible is actively against the reform that caused these problems. If you’re against reform but promote Luigi then you don’t care about a single person who went into medical debt or died as a result of it.
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.
“bread and circuses” has been an effective strategy for thousands of years.
I’m afraid you can’t vote or protest your way out of fascism. Only way out is to shoot.
Violence’s bad
Ignoring all the times that violence did in fact help won’t help.
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. :)
Is this some copypasta? :D
What the fuck did you just fucking say about me, you little bitch? I’ll have you know I graduated top of my class in the Navy Seals, and I’ve been involved in numerous secret raids on Al-Quaeda, and I have over 300 confirmed kills. I am trained in gorilla warfare and I’m the top sniper in the entire US armed forces. You are nothing to me but just another target. I will wipe you the fuck out with precision the likes of which has never been seen before on this Earth, mark my fucking words. You think you can get away with saying that shit to me over the Internet? Think again, fucker. As we speak I am contacting my secret network of spies across the USA and your IP is being traced right now so you better prepare for the storm, maggot. The storm that wipes out the pathetic little thing you call your life. You’re fucking dead, kid. I can be anywhere, anytime, and I can kill you in over seven hundred ways, and that’s just with my bare hands. Not only am I extensively trained in unarmed combat, but I have access to the entire arsenal of the United States Marine Corps and I will use it to its full extent to wipe your miserable ass off the face of the continent, you little shit. If only you could have known what unholy retribution your little “clever” comment was about to bring down upon you, maybe you would have held your fucking tongue. But you couldn’t, you didn’t, and now you’re paying the price, you goddamn idiot. I will shit fury all over you and you will drown in it. You’re fucking dead, kiddo.
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 been the outcome of every war we’ve fought for 50+ years. We just lost a 20 year war against goat herders.
Guerrilla Warfare by Che Guevara is a good starting point.
This is what cracks me up about the “your rifle won’t fight a tank!” jackasses.
It’s like, have tanks ever worked against a domestic insurgency? Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, I can’t think of any time the U.S. military just wiped the floor and left.
And in those circumstances, the loss of life was even less of a hit. In a civil war, for every American you order shot, that’s one less customer or soldier you have, and that’s if the soldier you ordered to do the killing doesn’t just turn on you or refuse. Your position becomes weaker, even if you gain ground anywhere.
Just the small percentage of people killed or disabled by Covid absolutely shook the labor market. Imagine what killing people in civil war would do. Suddenly the wealth they fought to protect evaporates through efforts to preserve control, and they’re left with neither.
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.’”
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.
