New Weapons For an Old Fight

In the last ten years I’ve learned two competing truths: social media is wildly powerful; social media is useless.
It’s a lever problem. I am the product. I am not the customer. The product is not always wrong, but it is always pliable. It is always a secondary concern to the customer.
I scream into an abyss on social media and the medium is designed for the disagreers to yell back. It is designed to sew foment.
Previous political mediums may not have been designed to do the opposite, but I feel they did the opposite.
They leaned toward building alliance, they leaned away from gridlock. They made gridlock costly. Social media makes gridlock vastly more profitable than consensus.
There is advertising to be sold to how I feel now. BLVGARI or someone else is buying ads on the New York Times so that when I look to find my outrage for the day I consider buying a medium sweater from a bearded man from Europe with a fine lady on his arm.

Social media doesn’t just feel futile, it feels warping. It warps some other me that could exist. I want none of it. Except I want to see my friends play music, I want to see the best musicians on earth shed in the studio, I want to see great dunks, I want to see friends like Desdamona talk about what is going on in their life in a low-impact way. I want MN music drama to be played out on Facebook and I want to eat my popcorn and watch and never comment. I want a lot of what social media offers. But it warps me. It has already warped me. How do I fight without it? How do I protest without telling you I protested and sharing a photo? Maybe that is part of my duty. I’m not without followers on these social media channels. Is it my duty to fight or to win? Am I the arbiter of what fighting is and what winning is? Is the mob on social media the arbiter?
But how is a weapon designed and consistently controlled by someone like Elon Musk a weapon I can wield to stop someone like Elon Musk?

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Social media killed many hierarchies in our world. There was a week in 1991 where Nielsen and Billboard changed how they tracked the Billboard 200 and overnight artists like Skid Row, N.W.A. and Garth Brooks were sitting shoulder to shoulder with who we thought were the biggest pop icons on planet earth because we switched to data, not anecdotal reporting. The gatekeepers before June 1991 were record store managers and other intermediaries who thought they had a sense of what actually moved units out of their stores. But they were wrong. Rap, country and heavy metal were profoundly under-indexed by record store managers. But when they started actually keeping track, they realized that those genres were wildly popular.
There are mainstream parts of our culture that I believed were on the absolute fringes before social media. The alt-right comes to mind. That’s the big one. But, so many micro-movements, so many things I didn’t read about in the paper, or in the magazines. So many things I believed were small were actually the N.W.A. of the 2010s. Fandoms built up in muted unison and then rejoicing when it is confirmed that the tribe is huge, the voice is strong, the movement is real.
Social media has made dreams and nightmares come true. And some of my dreams are some of your nightmares and vice versa. Social media will get us into problems it can’t get us out of.

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You are not going to be shocked that old Sean McPherson thinks that Donald Trump’s second term is already a huge problem. He is denying the humanity of so much of humanity. He is firing throngs people in cruel ways. He is investigating and deporting law-abiding humans in cruel ways. He is cruel. He is cruel to the world in a way the world has never been cruel to him. I have harbored some guarded optimism about a path forward in Palestine and Israel in the past two months. Trump seems to be unnecessarily derailing these potentials sby denying Palestinians a right to their homes and asserting Americans right to their land. Shame on you Trump. In an article about couples therapy in the New York Times I found this quote by Daniel Oppenheimer:

Epiphanies are real, but they’re fragile. They are a one-leafed seedling, pushing up through the crust of the ground, or a blind hatchling waiting, naked and alone, for its mother to return with a worm. They are easily crushed under foot or done in by harsh weather. If they’re not protected and nurtured, they will crumble and blow away in the wind, as though they never existed.

I immediately thought of the very shaky ground our world is built upon. The recently built alliances, the threadbare string tying two parties previously at odds together, ever so precariously. I feel conservative Anna. I want the changes to come slowly, purposefully, legally, humanely, carefully.

The changes are not coming this way. The speed of the changes is itself one of the changes.

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What are the new weapons for the old fight? Are they the old weapons we had eschewed in favor of more efficient ones? I listen to Brother Ali’s podcast. He talks about the network of street team people across the country that he and his team let atrophy when they thought it could all be done on social media. Fuck a poster. Share it on Facebook, let the message spread that way. Ali now laments losing that network you could touch, that network you could email, that network you could put on the guest list and say thank you face to face to. That network you didn’t pay a third party to reach.

At a dinner on Monday a friend asked how you learn of protests without searching on social media. The table had no legitimate suggestions for how to do that. Has that network atrophied? The political bookshop that used to be at 25th and Lyndale. Posters up for protests. I don’t know if the network has atrophied. My access to the network has atrophied. The muscles I used to know of these protests has atrophied. They have been replaced with full-time jobs, little children, musings on text about favorite movies and early bedtimes.

What are the new weapons for the old fight? What do you stop first when the sky is falling? Do you stay local when the problems are national? Have folks you’ve had conflicts with before part of the same team for a greater good? Are you fighting to fight are you fighting to win? The winning message is never “fuck no, not this stuff.” The winning message is a message, not a counter-message. What is our message? Don’t be cruel. It’s nebulous, it’s reactive. It is what I feel. I just don’t want my country to wield cruelty at home and abroad against disenfranchised people. I don’t want my country to trample on the progress that has been made toward a more equitable world.

What are the new weapons for the old fight? I’m sure it’s not a blog with a peach background. I’m sure it’s not a Facebook post. What is the message? What is the medium? Where is the protest? The most optimistic and organized in my network are working on it. I get the emails, I read the google docs. When are the least optimistic and least organized like myself going to join? When I am going to start sacrificing for the movement? I’m typing cause I’m asking. I’m typing cause I believe it will push me to do more than type. And I’m publishing cause I think it might do the same for you.