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.
