How bad do we let things get? Should we wait until the planet can’t sustain life anymore? Should we wait until it’s 100 degrees F in the Artic? Until wildfires blanket entire continents or the last glacier is gone? Should we wait until fascist billionaires take even more from us? Until there are Flock cameras at every mail box? Maybe we should wait until the wells run dry or the tornadoes never stop. When is it going to be enough? I’m so tired of seeing things getting worse. Every. Single. Day. I’m ready. I’ve been ready. How about you?
How do we coordinate? How do we look after each other? What is the signal? If we don’t work together then we are just continuing our slow march to destruction to the drum of the parasitic billionaires. Please, for us, for the cats, the dogs, the birds and trees. The fish and the whales, the beatles and the centipedes. Please tell me it’s worth it to you, that you’re willing to get uncomfortable, that you’re willing to fight. There are more of us than them, and we are rapidly running out of time to make that mean something.
Are you guys fucking nuts?
You can’t even utilize the tools giving to you to muster a solid defense online. You’re all just showing up everyday giving up/down votes and reading your daily alloted news article about Trump in your over moderate hug box.
You probably had to review multiple rules just to post this message in case you pissed off some almost homeless 18 year old moderator. I know the instinct is to say fuck me over this stuff. But think how moderation is actually a tool to destroy creativity, originality and effort. Moderation is a tool created by corporations to sanitize the internet so it could be sold piecemeal to advertisers. But what this also does is prevent us from keeping events in the forefront. If i have a political content community that only allows one type of content, that is fucking boring and stifling. When we separate our politics into [discussion], [political memes] [news] it may look nice but you kill free form thought and how people actually communicate. This is what feels different from the internet back in the day and the internet today. We have moderation sanitize our efforts. Compare this to MAGA or the right whose spaces are more creative. They combine multiple types of media into a menagerie that keeps things alive and interesting. Their spaces are filled with new, memes, in jokes plus calls to action. Because that’s exciting. That’s how content works. There’s collaboration and mixing of media to create new stuff, like we use to before 15 years ago.
The left has been boxed in on purpose. We are in a snuff box. MAGA seized every platform that’s full of kindling and energy while we placed ourselves into a snuff box. Until we fix some core problems and understand how the internet works to engage people then nobody should be encouraging any kind of revolution. If you cannot fight in an online digital space and get measurable victories in a low effort maximum impact environment then a revolution is just going to get people killed and laws that push us towards more authoritarian state.
And maybe I’m wrong. Could be full of shit. But if you want things to change we need to look at us as a whole and address our faults because we all fucked up big time. For decades the left went from a dominate culturally relevant position to a fucking joke. We’re still using the most outdated playbooks and refusing to adapt to a new world. MAGA fucking sucks. But their victories is directly related to how we reacted and interacted. How did we show up for no kings with millions and nothing happened. How did we show up to BLM and only thing that lasted was the idea that the organization was corrupt and stealing millions. How did we show up for the woman’s march and still they’re dying in states because they can’t access abortion. What we did is not working and I think it’s a systematic problem in the left that needs to be reviewed before attempting anything.
For what it’s worth, I agree with you wholeheartedly.
I see what you’re trying to get at, but you picked the wrong target. Moderation is a tool to keep a community that is focused around a specific topic from devolving into flame wars, trolling, spam, and co-opting. I don’t know if you have see what happens in large, unmoderated online forums, but it isn’t pretty. Tin-pot despot mods are a big problem, sure, but getting rid of moderation is not the solution.
Even 4Chan has mods.
Mods today are not what mods where originally used for. Hell does anyone remember what the original point of up and down voting was for.
Originally we held a strong belief that the community should control moderation while mods were there to make sure nothing illegal or crazy was posted.
We also didn’t call people arguing “trolling” but that changed so mods could remove anyone they didn’t agree with. It’s disgusting that we accepted it.
Moderation is abused quite literally everywhere, including on Lemmy. I just got banned from Lefty Memes by diva because I said Mao killed millions of people. Reasoning: transphobia/chauvinism.
This user is 100% correct in their assessment.
last interaction we had you were transphobic as fuck to me, called me a troglodyte, clanker, mentally ill, fake trans, all sorts of gross shit. obviously it never got moderated because .world. I even posted my fucking sharps container, some good that did.
then i see your name pop up in an anarchist space doing apologia for US empire.
spoiler
obviously it’s on sight, go pollute some other space with your presence.
death to america btw
How was I transphobic? Because I assume everything you say is a lie?
You can say whatever you want, the reality is that you have a personal grudge against me because I don’t accept your bullshit and I call you out on it.
Imagine suggesting that detailing the millions of deaths in the great leap forward is ‘U.S. Empire apologia’. Like I said, you’re 100% mentally ill - and you routinely lie or sweep for countries responsible for millions of their own peoples deaths.
Choke on it.
Dude you were being extremely transphobic. I actually went and read your convo. You were using the fact that Diva is trans so say some really horrible shit. No wonder she doesn’t want you posting in her comm.
Even if you differ in opinion. You actually do have to be nice to people and you do have to treat everyone with respect.
Bullshit, post the comments - I don’t need to be nice to anyone, especially not people who sweep for mass murderers.
That wasn’t very nice.
Again, why should I be nice? Tell me why I should be nice to someone saying death to America?
What I said here is 100% accurate.
question, are you a police officer? or just cop-brained?
Literally anyone with half of a brain recognizes that not voting for Kamala was the wrong choice. Congratulations, you and your alt account have proven my points for me.
Also, sick strawman - post the transphobia.
I don’t think it’s quite as bad as you suggest, but I understand where you’re coming from here. I think it’s also worth considering who stands to benefit from our lack of organization. When the right wing wins, the billionaires win, but when the left wing wins, the billionaires lose. Left wing leaders are systematically targeted and repressed. MLK Jr wasn’t assassinated until his message started to reach more than just poor black people. When he started encouraging all people to throw off the yolk of the ruling class, by providing for themselves instead of being good little capitalist consumers, that’s when he became so dangerous it was worth it to murder him. We need leadership, yes, but we also need a message that endures through whatever they throw at us. I think it’s possible, and I hope we can make it happen.
I never read the rules before posting btw, I just went for it.
*Yoke, btw. Just in case you want to use the word again in the future.
:::
Ah, you’re right, that was actually a mental typo so thanks for the catch.
Has anybody an idea of what is lacking?
One thing comes to mind: overcome or circumvent “the algorithm.”
Retreating from spaces like X and Reddit has had one big drawback: we are choosing to not engage with people that have bought into propaganda and right-wing rhetoric. There’s no winning anyone over or changing minds if you’re not there to speak.
At the same time, those spaces have elevated the generation of echo chambers to an art. Social media algorithm drive feeds of all kinds of media that strongly reinforce this. Breaking into those spaces would be a useful ability to bring change. Again, we can’t even begin to address that kind of a problem if nobody is there.
Alternately, we need a vehicle that can go around all of the above. What does that look like? I don’t know. Alternate media like print perhaps? Or maybe just an outrageously good youtube channel? Pooling some cash and buying advertising space? Anything would be better than nothing.
I totally agree.
This is a valuable idea. How can we grow it?
Wasn’t this the purpose of zines?
Which kind of zines?
Zine zines.
They are a solution people took back in the day to self publish. Publishing company’s act like moderators did back in the day. They rejected this arbitrarily and gate kept what people saw. So people would create zines of their interests and leave them all over town. Some became super popular
This is pretty much what I had in mind. Circumvent censorship, and put paper directly into everyone’s hand.
But we’re in a digital world. Using paper in a digital age is like bringing a horse to Nascar. The left is hung up on this romanticized vision of coffee shop activism. It’s destroying us. Those solutions worked for the time they existed in. If don’t adapt we’re finished
I have no plan. Only a few concepts and tactics.
Print newsletters keep coming to mind. Perhaps that’s me romancing a bygone era where sweat equity gets you distribution and readership, even if it’s just a single page. Then again, print has never been cheaper for the common-man, and sitting on top of global digital distribution would create an impressive reach.
We can also start making “conservative alt accounts” in social media, in order to penetrate those spaces. Build a profile that gets you into echo chambers that you don’t want anywhere near your real life. At the very least, before all these damn photo ID features and laws go into place.
There really needs to be a playbook for dismantling propaganda, and how to handle people that are programmed to parrot talking points. Like some kind of conversational aikido.
Social media rides on optics, tagging, and vibes. It might be possible to co-opt the style and tagging of existing content, say Newsmax, and provide a palatable lean for recent topics for a conservative audience. This is nothing like going full-bore "The Onion"1, but rather, providing a positive framing or just undercut the lies that are in the same space. Report the exact same stories - move for move - just without the hyperbole, lies, and vitriol. Facts should speak for themselves. Buy a blue suit and rip off their look.
In fact, more positivity online in general might be a big help to everyone. The algorithm rewards engagement, and while rage bait is 100x easier to create, stuff that makes people feel good (e.g. kittens) gets good traction too. Granted, that’s a high-effort and talent-focused operation - not for everyone.
Lastly, it’s possible that we could see a great firewall go up around the US, or find de-facto censorship and de-platforming a huge problem to any attempt to better organize digitally. Once you’re a legit problem, the ban-hammers will come out. I think it prudent to be prepared to use mesh networking, radio, sneakernet, private couriers, (again) print, anything that works around a complete fascist takeover of the internet. Fortunately, the bandwidth and storage requirements for truth and information are shockingly small. It won’t take much.
Edit: Lastly, attend rallies and protests and fucking network. You won’t find a better place for like-minded people that actually want to do something about all this.
Good points. I think the biggest obstacle is that these require reliable structures from voluntary engagements.