New polling from Gallup shows that Americans are increasingly identifying as political independents and rejecting the labels of the two major political parties.
my inner pessimist tells me that this rejecting is fueled by social media and that the trend will reverse once the oligarchy finishes making social media just as complicity as legacy media
I’m optimistic in this regard. I think the future you’re describing is already here. Their grasp on social media is stronger than ever, but they’ve overplayed their hand. It grows more clear every day that these platforms are nothing but tools of social conditioning and control. The popular resentment for these platforms rivals the political parties themselves, and likely exceeds that of the traditional media. I mean, how’s Mark Zuckerburg polling lately?
The thing is they build up this control, and every time they squeeze they piss it away. They squeezed during the George Floyd uprising. The Silicon Valley platforms censored the Blue Leaks across the board. They banned this community for it’s uncritical support. What happened? We slipped through the cracks. Sure, we might not be agitating on their platforms as much any more, but we’re free. We’re able to discuss and analyze the state of affairs much more clearly now. The same thing happened with the Russia-Ukraine war. They cracked down hard, flooded the zone with war propaganda, banned a lot of sources of information which weren’t toeing the line (to be clear, they deliberately leave the cranks alone every time they do this). People signed up for Telegram and continued following their sources there instead.
The genocide in Gaza is somewhat unique, because a lot of the primary sources there are explicitly proscribed as terrorist organizations to begin with. There was no r/Hamas or r/PFLP to ban. No funny memes for mujahidin teens Facebook group. The horrors of the genocide were broadcasted much more organically, in bits and pieces from thousands of personal accounts. If anything, it is much more difficult to censor something like this compared to a centralized news organization, website, or internet forum.
Every time they do one of these crackdowns, they are eventually effective at limiting the flow of information on the mainstream platforms, but it is a phyrric victory. The Internet itself is too porous. Every time they crush a community on Reddit, it turns into one on Discord, one on Matrix, and two on the Fediverse. All the while, it is too easy to grab a clip from one platform and post it on another. The actual social networks involved change with every crisis too. If they are effective at rooting out everyone involved in radical environmentalism, they will still be starting from a very elementary level on police abolition, or BDS or regime change in one country or another. The surge of gestapo freaks in Minneapolis has activated a whole new wave of people recently who were not and did not need to be on their radar before. And this dynamic will continue playing out as well.
We need to be careful about falling into early 2000s style Internet utopianism, but despite their methods being more sophisticated than ever, they definitely don’t have this shit under control, and they won’t until they start arresting people by the busload for posting.
my inner pessimist tells me that this rejecting is fueled by social media and that the trend will reverse once the oligarchy finishes making social media just as complicity as legacy media
I’m optimistic in this regard. I think the future you’re describing is already here. Their grasp on social media is stronger than ever, but they’ve overplayed their hand. It grows more clear every day that these platforms are nothing but tools of social conditioning and control. The popular resentment for these platforms rivals the political parties themselves, and likely exceeds that of the traditional media. I mean, how’s Mark Zuckerburg polling lately?
if they’ve had this control already; they wouldn’t have lost the narrative on gaza and US interventions to gen-z & gen-a.
they’re only now realizing this mistake and doubling down to fix it
The thing is they build up this control, and every time they squeeze they piss it away. They squeezed during the George Floyd uprising. The Silicon Valley platforms censored the Blue Leaks across the board. They banned this community for it’s uncritical support. What happened? We slipped through the cracks. Sure, we might not be agitating on their platforms as much any more, but we’re free. We’re able to discuss and analyze the state of affairs much more clearly now. The same thing happened with the Russia-Ukraine war. They cracked down hard, flooded the zone with war propaganda, banned a lot of sources of information which weren’t toeing the line (to be clear, they deliberately leave the cranks alone every time they do this). People signed up for Telegram and continued following their sources there instead.
The genocide in Gaza is somewhat unique, because a lot of the primary sources there are explicitly proscribed as terrorist organizations to begin with. There was no r/Hamas or r/PFLP to ban. No funny memes for mujahidin teens Facebook group. The horrors of the genocide were broadcasted much more organically, in bits and pieces from thousands of personal accounts. If anything, it is much more difficult to censor something like this compared to a centralized news organization, website, or internet forum.
Every time they do one of these crackdowns, they are eventually effective at limiting the flow of information on the mainstream platforms, but it is a phyrric victory. The Internet itself is too porous. Every time they crush a community on Reddit, it turns into one on Discord, one on Matrix, and two on the Fediverse. All the while, it is too easy to grab a clip from one platform and post it on another. The actual social networks involved change with every crisis too. If they are effective at rooting out everyone involved in radical environmentalism, they will still be starting from a very elementary level on police abolition, or BDS or regime change in one country or another. The surge of gestapo freaks in Minneapolis has activated a whole new wave of people recently who were not and did not need to be on their radar before. And this dynamic will continue playing out as well.
We need to be careful about falling into early 2000s style Internet utopianism, but despite their methods being more sophisticated than ever, they definitely don’t have this shit under control, and they won’t until they start arresting people by the busload for posting.
Hope so too. “Meet the new media, same as the legacy media. Only this time, Fox News bothered to make more than one Fox News.”