hachyderm.io is one of the many independent Mastodon servers you can use to participate in the fediverse.
Hachyderm is a safe space, LGBTQIA+ and BLM, primarily comprised of tech industry professionals world wide. Note that many non-user account types have restrictions - please see our About page.

Administered by:

Server stats:

9.7K
active users

Elizabeth Tai | 戴秀铃 🇲🇾

You Can’t Post Your Way Out of Fascism

"...keep us locked in an eternal doomscroll instead of organizing against them".

Agree! What's the point of ranting on social media? Think about it. It takes time and energy to create that. Why not channel it to more productive organisational efforts?

Via @justincox

404media.co/email/34326692-bdf

404 MediaYou Can’t Post Your Way Out of FascismAuthoritarians and tech CEOs now share the same goal: to keep us locked in an eternal doomscroll instead of organizing against them, Janus Rose writes.

I keep seeing this being posted, @liztai @justincox but I deeply disagree. Some of the most disenfranchised people in the world, today, *cannot* do anything like what the authors are claiming is the only proper action.

There are people who are in countries on visas that they must get renewed, or without papers for whatever reason. There are people who even the most minor misdemeanor would ruin, utterly. There are people who are disabled and cannot form part of real-life, community actions they're proposing. There are people who don't get a vote. There are people who are locked up – rightly or wrongly – and get neither a vote nor a presence in the world. There are people who are diverse in some way or other and this article adopts an extremely ableist stance that actively condemns and disparages what might well be their only means of voicing their opinion at all.

What should these people do? Shut up? Remain silent because it "detracts" from some more holy and more worthy resistance? Get off the field because the big-folk want to play? They're not even good enough to voice their opinions online – maybe their only platform?

They're gatekeeping resistance. I won't stand for that.

@charlie @justincox I don't think you understood the article at all 😅
Edit: ok that was rude but I was in a rush, but I am sure they don't want to gatekeep but be more efficient with the social media bits.

"But perhaps the greatest of these sins is convincing ourselves that posting is a form of political activism." To me: that quote's meaning is not ambiguous: people who post, online, in outrage at the political status quo are committing a sin because they dare to think it's activism, even if posting in outrage is the only accessible political-or-not act of protest that's available, and these authors (I usually am a fan of 404 Media, largely) would decide what's worthy activism and what's sinful and pretentious. @liztai @justincox

I'll accept that I might have misunderstood the article but if their meaning is something else, they should have worded it more sympathetically and acknowledge more nuance, put it under a less vehement headline, and expressly allowed that not everyone can participate in real-life street protests in community.

Theirs is just another opinion I don't agree with and that's normally quite fine but they're arguing that everyone else should silence their opinions, claiming that those who don't are guilty of aiding the fascists by validating them.

This is unhelpful. This is gatekeeping.

@charlie @liztai @justincox It's an internet column, not the Bill of Rights.

Lighten up, Francis.