If thereās one thing Iād hoped people had learned going into the next four years of Donald Trump as president, itās that spending lots of time online posting about what people in power are saying and doing is not going to accomplish anything. If anything, itās exactly what they want.
Many of my journalist colleagues have attempted to beat back the tide under banners like āfighting disinformationā and āaccountability.ā 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.
Crossā book contains a meticulous catalog of social media sins which many people who follow and care about current events are probably guilty ofāmyself 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 mechanismāan 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 āa solipsism that says you are the main protagonist in a sea of NPCs.ā
In the days since the inauguration, Iāve 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 fascismāor who know they canāt, but simply canāt 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 āhypocrisyā of people who never cared about being seen as hypocrites, because thatās not the point. Even violent fantasies about putting billionaires to the guillotine are rendered inept in these online spacesājust 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 itās 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.
āFor 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 itās on fire,ā said Cross. āBut we didnāt evolve to be able to absorb this much info. It makes you devalue the work you can do in your community.ā
Itās 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.
He traded his life for another. He showed the world that itās possible. And āweā outnumber āthemā. Making people realize that is an achievement in itself.
Would you say people like Rosa Parks ādidnāt accomplish anythingā?
āTheyā actually won the recent election meaning ātheyā are actually the majority. The only way for āusā to accomplish anything other than constant bloodshed and a near 50/50 civil war scenario is to convince a bunch of āthemā to change the system with āusā.
Weāre not fighting a dozen people like Brian Thompson, weāre 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 ādonāt hateā Trump, and while thatās still a scary metric, itās not the point that I wanted to make.
āTheyā arenāt Republicans or Trump supporters, theyāre wealth-hoarding billionaires that actively make peopleās 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 āone of the peopleā (for some godforsaken reason). Theyāre 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 Iāve gathered the great majority of people voting him arenāt part of that and they donāt actually like him, itās just that they hate āthe gaysā, āthe libsā, or āthe immigrantsā more.
Anybody who didnāt vote for the party who opposes Trump but was eligible is actively against the reform that caused these problems. If youāre against reform but promote Luigi then you donāt care about a single person who went into medical debt or died as a result of it.
Theyāre not āagainst reformā, theyāre disenfranchised, lazy or justā¦ not the brightest minds.
They made a mistake (a big one at that), but that doesnāt mean that they like whatās happening. The upper class has been doing their best to keep us dumb, busy, tired and uninformed. And itās clearly working.