How social media killed the protest — For a certain kind of activist, politics has been reduced to pure performance::For a certain kind of activist, politics has been reduced to pure performance
At a point where we ignore people who set themselves on fire in protest, it’s hard to argue that nonviolent protest by itself accomplishes much anymore, soo…🤷🏼♀️
I was able to bypass the paywall using Google Search’s “cached” view of the page.
As for the content, although I agree with some of the tentpoles to this article, the rest seems a bit saggy. It’s more of an op-ed piece without much more than subjective opinions. If the Financial Times wants to paywall this kind of stuff, they’d better make it worth the price. (This definitely wasn’t.)
Please do not post ft articles without at least a summary.
It’s been well established public serving policy (say the recognition of a human right) will not be attained with anything short of a direct threat to the status quo. Action has to threaten a significant cost to commercial interests.
And then, the state is going to first respond with the brutality of law enforcement.
So at this point protests exist to offer an opportunity for negative press coverage to the state when they send anti-riot troopers and they are brutal to the protestors. (And this will not faze conservatives who believe that is an acceptable consequence for disobedience of authority by others.)
Hence how the next step is a sabotage campaign as per How to Blow Up a Pipeline by Andreas Malm. (The book itself is very little about the logistics of destroying an oil pipeline, but an explanation of how we have run out of alternative ways to demand redress of grievances from the state and from plutocratic interests.)
Blaming social media (or blaming apathetic protestors) is a misstep, and might be an intentional effort to redirect outrage to those who are not responsible for the problems. The state isn’t acting on police brutality / the climate crisis / union-busting / toxic work conditions / wages below sustenance (etc. etc.) because we’re failing to protest hard enough. Our representatives don’t represent the public, rather they are thoroughly captured by plutocratic interests. So all protests land on deaf ears.
If we want a public serving government, we have to have the capacity to cost them enough that they’ll agree to any demands, unconditionally. And the people have to retain that power perpetually, because capitalists will lie, cheat, kill or do anything to retain power, which they’ve demonstrated globally for over a century.
Aren’t all protests performance? In the sense that they are made for others to see and to bring awareness? What else are they for? It’s not for debate or promoting alternatives, it’s too messy for that.
Real world protest disrupt the daily life of the city (or country) making them impossible to ignore for politics and media. The government can respond with discussion or with violence but they have to respond.
Social media protest however can be completely ignored.
Real world protest on a meaningful scale is extremely dependent on population density both of individual cities and of the country in general.
In the United States we’re extremely spread out, even if we have some urban areas with incredibly high population density. The result is a situation where wide-scale protest logistics really aren’t in our favor. Even if you mobilized all of New England’s protest-inclined leftists to organize around one city, it’s hardly the numbers needed to shut anything down. We can’t just all go outside and produce nation-wide mobs in our major cities.
Look at Occupy Wallstreet. They had pretty substantial support and there were busloads of people from all over the country going to New York. But in the end it wasn’t enough to create substantial change.
Strikes have been effective because they mobilize the actual workforce that’s looking for a result, and are inherently disruptive to the thing they’re trying to change. Their demands end up being addressed because they crank up the immediate urgency of addressing them.
We need that. Targeted action that is actually effective on a wide scale. I don’t really know precisely what that looks like, but I think a good first step is the kind of action we see around remote work. People literally will quit over it and go elsewhere. Companies have done so much to leech profits out of their employment models that they’ve reduced any incentive toward long term loyalty.
They really don’t have much bargaining power right now, so people can dictate the terms a bit more. Individual decisions regarding how and when companies get to buy your labor or your creative output, as well as which companies you support financially, may well be closer to an actual path through the muck.
Outside agitation can also be incredibly useful. An outside actor in contact with people inside a corporate entity have an opportunity to speak out without the chance, legal or otherwise, of employer retaliation. Again, targeted and largely individual action.
Whatever the solution is, I suspect it’ll look a lot more like that if it’s going to challenge the status quo in the United States.
It is supposed to be a disruption of society or a show of force to convince political leaders to change policy.
Anyone kind enough to bypass the paywall pretty please?
I don’t think @autotldr@lemmings.world supports this article URL…
Thankyouuu
I’m sorry, I don’t know how to handle links for that site. You may contact my maintainer, @rikudou@lemmings.world, if you wish to add it to supported sites!
Paywalled. :(
Judging by the title this is most likely just a hit piece on any kind of activism the author does not personally agree with. I will not put effort into bypassing a paywall for something like that.
