this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2024
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United States | News & Politics
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Same solution as people faced under every oppressive regime. Organize, educate, and build a worker movement. You can start reading about how worker movements were organized in US back in 1930s that lead to the New Deal.
Sure, and I'm amazed to see the recent resurgence in successful union organization. I was told about company towns in high school, but what they didn't teach me in high school is how those company towns were defeated. You're right, I love that alternative. Now how do I wake up my friends and neighbors? I've been woken up to the dangers here. They haven't, and when I attempt, they resist like I'm asking them to put on the glasses.
Not everybody is going to be receptive, especially if they're not experiencing the problems you're concerned with themselves. The best strategy is to focus on people who are already starting to question things and to help them develop a better understanding of what's happening and what effective actions they can take. Ultimately, every movement starts with a few people and then grows as the ideas spread. It's very likely there are orgs around you that you could participate with. So, that's certainly something to consider.
How best can I identify these people? I've made it clear I don't trust the internet or "apps" or whatever. Nobody seems to want to communicate or meet up face-to-face or via any other trustworthy medium for a huge variety of reasons, most predominantly simple inconvenience, which is... disheartening. I've tried organizing directly in my workplaces before. I've been "unofficially warned" several times and outright fired twice. I've gone to city council meetings which were remarkably similar to parks and rec's representation without the comic relief. I've tried speaking directly with my neighbors as tenants, who are usually totally disinterested because, like you stated, they aren't experiencing the same problems, or, because of political affiliation, are actively hostile to the proposal. The one guy I spoke to that was actually interested in principle said that the legal protections afforded to tenant organizations in my state were so poor that it positively allows retaliation, and that he didn't feel safe organizing under those conditions, which I can't blame him for. Organizing with the democrats is... Well, I don't organize with the democrats, despite my nose-holding at the polling station.
So how do I identify these people? Where are they? I'm genuinely terrified of approaching the "wrong" person. I'm also apprehensive about being a leader, which I fear is actually called for in this situation since I don't see anyone else stepping up to take a swing around here.
The question you're asking is probably the most important question that needs to be asked right now. How to organize and how to find like minded people is something that's the first step towards any real change.
I can't help you with the specifics since I have no idea what the situation is like in your area. In my city there are a number of socialist orgs, and they meet face to face. I definitely think any actual serious organizing needs to happen offline, and if people can't be bothered to make even the effort to meet in person it's safe to say they're not really serious about effecting any actual change. Perhaps look if there are organizations that meet up to do mutual aid, help homeless people, and so on. There must be shelters where people volunteer at to help. Getting involved and talking with people like that would be a good start.
If there really is nothing around you and you genuinely feel motivated enough to organize people then stepping up might be the thing to do. To do that you have to first figure out what your politics actually are. How you think things should work, how they work now, why the problems you see exist, and how you think they should be solved. It's also worth thinking about why current movements in US are failing and what you think needs to be done differently to succeed. The reality is that there are millions of people just like yourself who are in the same situation as you. And as long as people stay atomized and isolated, then they stay powerless.
Unfortunately, there's no recipe that you can follow here, and there's no guarantee of success. This is a process of trying things, evaluating the results, and iterating on what you're doing. Good news is that there are lots of examples of successful worker movements around the world that can be learned from. There are no easy answers here, but the only way that's guaranteed to fail is to do nothing but vote every 4 years.
No recipes, but some Excellent suggestions here. I'm thankful you took the time to write all that.
Glad to help. I can very much relate to the frustration you're feeling. I live in Canada, and a lot of the same dynamics are happening here as well. Each and every year things get worse, and there's no clear path to change. What I've come to realize is that meaningful change takes time. It's not something that will happen as a result of a one time action like winning an election and putting your guy in charge. It's a long process that requires long term commitment. People in US are just entering the stage where they're starting to become politically aware and to ask questions about why things are the way they are. It's going to take time for people to develop solid understanding of the issues and to learn to work together towards solving them.
It's a shame. I've always thought of canada as a sort-of bastion on this continent against america's peculiar brand of bipolar insanity. To watch so many of your people fall into the throes of exported trumpism is truly saddening, though I guess the fact that it did take root means the ground was already prepared. You have my empathy.
Thanks, and you're absolutely right that right wing populism is taking root because there is fertile ground for it. In my view, the question of why people are becoming increasingly enamoured with these ideas is the one that really needs to be asked more. People like Trump have always been around, so what factors are enabling these opportunists today that didn't exist previously. The systemic pressures leading us where we are today are the real problem that needs to be addressed.
I have a strong intuition that the internet and its incentives and pervasiveness accounts for a large majority of these factors. I don't know how to evaluate that intuition for truth value, to be honest. Part of the problem is for any given question you look for an answer on the internet, you can find a thousand different answers, and the one you're most likely to find is the one you already believe (fuck you google). Part of it is regulatory capture- there are practically only restrictions on what the end user of internet services can do, but no real restrictions on ISPs and telecom and data services etc. Part of it is the NSA spying not just on its own sitizens which would be unconscionable by itself, but also the entire rest of the world's citizens, which is abhorrent and terrifying. Part of it is self-styled "social" media, which is generally understood to mean "advertisment platforms with token incentives to drive users to view advertisements" leading to the mass adoption of lowest common denominator media, entertainment, news. Part of it is increasing incentives to ratchet up viewer engagement, and the easiest way to do that is to make them angry. Put it all together and you find people in echo chambers being fed unregulated corporate propaganda not in their interests, being spied on and potentially reported for non-conforming thought, arguing angrily with people they've never met about issues they don't, couldn't possibly, fully understand. On both sides. There's no doubt in my mind that you and I both fall into this trap, but can't see the forest for the trees.
I love the idea of the internet, and fediverse seems like the perfect incarnation of that ideal. In practice, the internet has mostly been a disaster in my opinion, and given enough time I suspect it will be competing with the industrial revolution for "the worst thing humanity ever achieved."
I'd actually argue the internet has been a net positive overall because it counters a lot of the control the oligarchs have over the media. For example, if Israel was conducting the genocide before the days of the internet we simply wouldn't know about it. And we've had the internet for a long time now, so access to things like social media and different views doesn't really explain why particular views become more popular than others.
In my opinion, the main driver of discontent is the deteriorating economic situation. We have major crashes roughly once a decade, and each time a crash happens we see a massive wealth transfer to the top occur. This happened during dot-com bubble, then in 2008, and now with the pandemic. Each time the rich got bailed out while the public was left out to dry. People end up being pushed further and further to the margins, and they have less and less of ability to absorb the next crash that comes. Many people are losing whatever savings they had, and have no hope of retirement. Younger people see little opportunity for themselves, while becoming increasingly pessimistic about the future and problems like the environment.
All of this is pushing people out of the mainstream because they see that the system is not working in their interest. Once people leave the liberal mainstream they become open to different ideas. These come either from the right or the left, and because the left has been effectively gutted in the west, the right is the main source of alternative ideas.
Though I would definitely argue that the internet contributed to, eg, amazon and dotcom bubble, and that it has tended to solidify oligarchic control of information rather than the reverse, I think I have to concede that overall independent economic factors play a larger role.
Right, consolidation of the internet under a handful of large companies has been a big concern. Notably, that's precisely why stuff like the fediverse is so important. Decentralized social media that's run by regular people is precisely how the internet was meant to function. I'm optimistic that things are looking up in that regard. Platforms like Mastodon and Lemmy are still niche, but they're starting to gain momentum and they show a path forward. It's encouraging to see that people are actively tackling the problem and we have tangible results to show now. The fact that we're having this discussion here as opposed to a closed platforms like Reddit is a huge success.
I could imagine trying to have this conversation on reddit- but I'd prefer not to. I'd be whacking down a hundred trolls and a dozen bots for each genuine reply.
Lemmy is starting to feel like reddit back before it was evil. I'm already anxious for its enshittification.
That's the beauty of open source platforms, the dynamics are very different. With a commercial company you're stuck with whatever the company decides, and that's what drives enshittification. Companies ultimately exist to make money for the owners and the shareholders. The users aren't actual stakeholders on these platforms in any meaningful sense.
On the other hand, open platforms are developed by regular people because they want to have publicly owned social spaces. Even when a project starts going in a bad direction then anybody can fork the code and take the project in a different direction, and anybody can run a server the way they like.
I wrote an article on the subject a little while back, talking about these dynamics in more detail https://justiceinternationale.com/articles/2020-12-02-we-must-own-our-tools/
Yeah, for sure and that's what gives it such a small home-y feel, too. As much disdain as I have for hexbear, I'm glad they have a space to do their hexbear thing. Where I see this being a problem is in the future as communities grow, server costs will grow proportionally. Communities online grow exponentially once they reach a critical mass.
Right now one person can operate an instance of a few tens of thousands of people. What happens when that one person isn't able to run the instance as a hobby anymore? People have shown an extreme unwillingness to- Okay, I'm one of them. Not only am I broke, but there's no good distributed payment model for this (lemmy tax, anyone?), and donations just consistently don't work, basically because of people like me practically wanting everything for nothing. Or, not for nothing, but rather I am already paying to stay alive and access the internet- If you ask more than that from me, you will get the same line as my creditors get: "I'm broke as shit."
This isn't a hypothetical, Mastodon has millions of users now and it's working fine. Larger instances run on donation, and it works fine. It only takes a small percentage of users to contribute at the end of the day. The nature of federation also helps amortize costs. You don't need to have millions of users all on the same server. It's a different model where you have many smaller servers with thousands of users, and there's overlap between them. This is also how internet worked during the time of BBS and IRC. The model of big companies running walled gardens is an aberration, and it's not how things were meant to work. The internet took a wrong turn for a period, and now it's self correcting.
I was definitely not thinking of mastodon since I didn't have a good experience in my brief time there. I dunno, I'm quite sure of that. I'll take some of your optimism though.