@newde Was this online or in person? Many radical people seem to be like this, no matter what they believe in. If you enter a conversation without being interested in what the other person thinks, because you believe only you are right, it will be very hard to change their mind.
@madeindex This is often online, indeed. Actually I wrote this post just after experiencing it here on Mastodon.
I have no problems with passionate arguments, not at all. But I can't escape the feeling(s) that: 1. Leftist infighting is the pinnacle of salon socialist privilege; 2. It is hugely detrimental to the shared cause.
@madeindex@newde Hi, social media encourage infighting by being optimized as toxic coping mechanisms – notifications give a feeling of self-worth, which is useful against depression, while creating an addiction and preventing users from going on with their lives and feeling worthy in the real world.
They also put their users in concurrence to meet their own health needs, so they want to eliminate each other. Can't be more blunt than that.
@madeindex@newde Asserting characters limits on their users creates commodity fetishism (hence e.g. the editors wars), and become the fear of lacking from something is irrational, social media users will endemically confuse trials (reward path A) with goals (reward path B). Thus a weird custody fetishism, electoralism/FLOSS activism within unions, field activism within sociological research, and so forth. This also leads terminally online activists to confuse adversity with progress opportunities, and this enables strategies (e.g. against student activists) of faking adversity and then giving up against a marginalized struggle.
@madeindex@newde Because the same notifications are available for publications and comments, users will develop echo chambers – people can't conceptualize, and circularly consume and produce comments in closed circuits. This depends for some part on making social media users develop an attention deficit, so they couldn't read e.g. moral philosophy books; one way among others actually is encouraging cyberbullying and making users develop a FOMO, the fear of being dogpiled while they're AFK. Because it's an addiction, its stakes will be treated as real, and the constant threat of being dogpiled will trigger their survival instinct, which will force users to check their notifications and relapse in their addiction in order not to let them associate getting over their addiction with thriving as e.g. students – everyone would be so proud of them.
@madeindex@newdeSome online activists are thus culturally isolated from the rest of their societies, and can't develop any kind of radical theory – realistic, systemic, clear, accessible – because their premises (e.g. Solanas) won't be grounded in reality. Social media, because they're subscription-based and because they're designed to hurt their users, can't be decoupled from strategic forms of selective ignorance – if we don't do this, we join the club.
@madeindex@newde Social media also happen to predate on young abuse survivors and structurally improductive people, something that seems to match Ayn Rand's advocacy for despising and openly oppressing the thick, untalented masses. Because they may be unaware of their oppressions while joining e.g. X or Mastodon (invisible impairment, LGBTI+ closet), they will try to make sense of what's happening to them by branching it on more "legitimate", "trendy" oppressions and ironically enough they will be accused by other social media activists of making up oppression. Because they won't be able to defend their own needs, they will be somewhat authoritarian but as organized forms of political, technological, economic abuse survivors. Google has been instrumental in this (and don't get me started about Microsoft's lame WIMP user paradigm – they just treat hobbyist developers as a threat and as a noisance, and they will always opt to degrade their users' experience over improving their technical litteracy in any way).
@madeindex@newde For these reasons, in any kind of activism branch there are local activists organizing in AFK communities, who most of the time are safe and competent, and social media activists, who are most of the time the exact opposite.
@madeindex@newde This should be considered in the broader context of organized intra-class abuse: from exhausted parents, with decreasing wages and family allocations, and increasing weekly schedules; among students, with fewer teachers per class, and likewise increasingly exhausted teachers; because:
1. Exhausting the poor makes them prefer cars over public transportation, high-calory meat over a plant-based diet; it makes them eat a lot, anxious, and it prevents them from reading. Bernard Lahire among others has identified that French university students from the working class would drop more frequently because they would watch TV shows (hedonistic dispositions) over studying (ascetic dispositions); IMHO because they're fucking tired.
2. Intra-classe abuse (by making the poor tired) shatters our class awareness, prevents us from spontaneous forms of mutual aide and this from organizing; masculinism and feminism, as forms of gender solidarity/awareness (U. K. Le Guin), as well as religions, as form of moral communities (É. Durkheim), are also targeted (hence insidious attacks on the de facto religion of the poor, Islam).
@madeindex@newde The bourgeois may have routinely advertised for another form of intra-class abuse, Twitter, but because this one precisely relies on a clear concurrence between our psychological and social needs, constantly trying to get someone's attention was to constantly trying to solve ethical problems. Now the bourgeoisie has about 200 millions wannabe ethical problem solvers craving for humanities books.
@madeindex@newde Mastodon is one incomplete solution among others. For the sake of all of what is good, I'd urge these activists to leverage this opportunity to diversify their means of publishing and consuming information through a new, pseudonymous tildeverse identity, from within an anonymous, plausible deniable Tails USB key. Because these activists:
1. have gamified solving social problems, 2. have mostly been victims of arbitrary characters limits and of an artificial attention/information scarcity, 3. have been burnt by reading, and 4. crave for literature,
embracing the web 1.0 by writing documents from within an Emacs[1][2][3]-Tails install, versioning[5][[6]](magit.vc)] them, and pushing them online using GNU and Unix tools[7][8], in the scope of the #100DaysToOffload challenge, can make them an actual threat to the bourgeoisie; dedicated, smart, fearless activists.
