So, I don’t know why I am doing this, but I was reading “Log Off” by Katherine Cross more carefully, after a short discussion here, and here. It seemed to me a good idea to have a post dedicated to this, and possibly in the future if this works out, about other books. The book is dense, and highly relevant to Lemmy and broadly Fediverse culture, and it spells out nicely some things I had thought before, but in much more packed and well thought-out way. I found myself highlighting something on virtually every page. So I guess I would like to post my thoughts on these highlights and see what other folks think about those as well. So here goes. I am posting the quotes as separate comments to this post, to facilitate them being discussed more thoroughly.
One thing I firmly believe is that arguing on the internet is 100% pointless and never accomplishes anything. We are too alienated and isolated and atomized on the internet to ever truly reach someone else across the gap of ideology and prejudice, everything bounces off because we’re all just strings of text on a screen. Every debate is another random encounter in the posting RPG. Rather than a public square, it’s a mob farm for exp.
I think online spaces can still be useful, but conflict is entirely useless. It’s just for fun.
I don’t even know if it is about conflict per se, or the very notion that it is virtuous to engage with these media politically. Even these alternative platforms, because they are modeled after Twitter, Reddit, and the like, possess the same qualities, by making us react and respond to similar ways. I guess digital infrastructure for activist groups should be more similar to private infrastructures of orgs rather than corporate social media. And they should be community first, with a sophisticated take on the channels available to communicate to and from the organization and the rest of the community.
Until some time ago, I was still on the fence about Lemmy though. On the technical level it has some desirable attributes in the community structure and federation, that could possibly help. But the user culture, me included, is so fucked up that only with insane levels of moderation it could ever fulfill such a purpose. For this another medium should be considered in Lemmy’s place (I don’t think Mastodon is the one either), that would constrain antisocial and non-social user behavior on the technical level. So, this is a loose argument that Lemmy and Mastodon are not tools for social change, and should be abandoned as such.
I think the format promotes conflict. Lemmy ultimately is made to be Reddit-like, so we shouldn’t be surprised when it produces Reddit user culture. Ultimately we need an entirely new format that promotes cooperation over conflict.
As for moderators, I also think the volunteer model is bad. They do important work and should be compensated for their labor.
I disagree. I joined Lemmy as an anarchist and I’ve been convinced over time that Marxism is actually the correct idealogy.
And I will never be able to convince you otherwise! I could say that I think there are other factors which made you change your mind, give examples from my own evolution from anarchism to Marxism, we can trade replies back and forth for hours or days, ect etc
It would all accomplish nothing.
This myth of social media’s indispensability to our movements, not just as a tool but as the forum for change, is dangerous. If we internalize it too deeply, it actually demobilizes our movements, lulling us into mistaking quote-tweet wars and “clapbacks” for meaningful political action, seducing us into seeing nanoseconds of digital catharsis as an adequate substitute for change. It seduces us into mistaking the profitable content we generate for truly resistive speech — as well as tying our worth and our success, as people and activists, to the engagement metrics created by large tech corporations.
Social media is chock-a-block with political content, hashtag activism, and disinformation that turns grandparents into fascists. How could it be anti-political? Because it demobilizes and scatters the polity; it makes it much harder to come together, deliberate, and effect change in our communities. Worse, social media tricks us into thinking that that’s exactly what we’re doing. What results is a “public square” where real people can get hurt but nothing ever really changes.
But the worst people in the Valley also thrive on all the demobilizing disengagement that their platforms have slowly led us towards. They have alchemized activism into toxic Twitter beefs and seduced us into thinking that we’re one viral campaign away from solving some massive socio-structural problem, which makes it all the easier to devote our energies to pursuing these digital white whales in lieu of more tangible goals in our lives and communities.
First and foremost, one of the ugliest side effects of terminal COVID-posting that proliferated amongst the Extremely Online was a deepening mistrust of their fellow human being; every time they fell for outrage-bait about some wanker being a dick about not wearing a mask, their inevitable response was, “I don’t trust people anymore!” This is a neat fit for conservatives, whose entire movement is built on a notion of Original Sin, developed through two centuries of monarchism, fascism, nativism, and lesser varieties of know-nothingism, that treats strangers as essentially threats. But for anyone to the left of Mussolini, such contempt for your fellow human being, such unwillingness to reach out to one’s neighbour for fear they’ll be like That Bitch from Panera Bread I Saw on TikTok, is extraordinarily dangerous — and fatal to realizing the ideals we share, which are necessarily collective.
Incredibly bad take. How one can look at the global negligence of COVID prevention, which I remind is a novel, highly-transmissible neurodegenerative disease for which there is no cure, and conclude that it is actually bizarre and antisocial to care about it, that it is playing into conservative ideology to have trust issues from the immense trauma of navigating said global negligence as one cares about it, is beyond me. I treat people who are not doing anything to prevent the spread of COVID as a threat because they are. As it turns out, that’s a majority of the world population right now. We are all living the “if everyone jumped off a bridge, would you?” scenario in real-time. Don’t blame me for not jumping with you.
I did not expect when I posted this that it would be a field trip on the very phenomena Cross is taking issue with.
You are not jumping with me anywhere. I invited people to comment on the quotes of another author.
Negligence of COVID prevention is important. To me, trans equality rights are important. And a score of other not only important but critical topics, from climate change to ableist structural eugenics.
But by dunking on each other in places like these, even if Lemmy / Mastodon is not corporate, achieves nothing. Your comment does nothing. My comment does nothing.
We had this mentality passed on from corporate social media, and it is just wrong to think that our posting achieves anything good the internet has to offer, to activism or otherwise. This is the true message of the quote, and not minimizing the importance of any macro-, structural, systemic topic.
That said, for those still grasping with the notion of weaponized sincerity, the above comment is the more fine specimen of it.
For the record, I’m aware that this is not your quote. I am adressing a rhetorical “you” in my message. However, I’ll use the more direct you now. You asked for discussion about the quotes you posted, and I gave it to you. I am not sure what’s weaponized about my sincerity but it is, indeed, quite sincere.
