Originally published on November 4th 2022, on the now-defunct Cohost platform.
I think my favorite thing about Cohost is that we have divested ourselves of the two most toxic beliefs of social media.
- That this is a "safe space" where we can't openly talk about difficult things like fascism and sex. Distressing somebody else on here by posting something they don't personally wish to have seen isn't seen as a moral fault or communal responsibility to discourage.
- That posting here is somehow an important liberatory revolutionary act or that you are ever morally obligated to be constantly posting or reposting specific content.
Before the Arab Spring, I think people mostly didn't see Twitter or other social media sites as being crucial battlegrounds or tools of revolution. It was a place to post jokes mostly. And then there was the Arab Spring and this big analysis circulated widely that the people used Twitter as this incredible decentralized way to spread information and organize the uprisings.
And then suddenly everyone got this idea in their head that Twitter is some crucial tool of revolution. Now, many important social movements and uprisings have used Twitter in important ways, don't get me wrong, it certainly has been useful. But I think that this impression ended up spreading to being how people felt about all of Twitter.
Even when people weren't livetweeting protests, people came to feel morally obligated to look at social media constantly. This mentality of "if you aren't talking about this and sharing this post you're a part of the problem" as though your audience of 350 people makes you an NBC news anchor in terms of influence. And it became this vicious cycle. The more you post, you will naturally gain followers. Anyone who posts regularly simply will gain followers. But the more followers you have, the more pressure you feel to be on the hottest beats and retweeting the best most important articles and threads to Signal Boost and to weigh in on everything to influence your audience in a revolutionary manner. Thus, you post more, and gain more followers. Random people with absolutely no involvement in any actual political movement or organizing or anything will become Influencers entirely because they post a lot. Thousands of people who think they're fucking Leon Trotsky writing in exile from Mexico now because their ACAB meme got a lot of RTs from people who already agreed.
And it didn't matter what the purpose of your account was, you had a Platform and therefore you had to use it for good. But what social media is really good at is making everyone feel like they have A Platform. Whether it's 300, 3000, 30,000, or 300,000, you have Fans who look up to you and you have Influence. You might as well be Jennifer Lawrence, and saying "gay rights" is going to change the world. You feel powerful and important, and that further feeds into your compulsion to be posting and seeing this as a revolutionary act, an important act, something you have to do.
I started thinking about this a lot after Brian David Gilbert posted the song There's A Rock in My House. "When I stop looking at the rock I feel like I'm a bad person for doing so."
It connects back to the question that Chris Stedman asks us in his book I.R.L.. Has social media become your religion? Looking at current events on social media, retweeting Important Articles and Important Takes, tweeting your hopes and wishes for political change and affirming your faith in your specific political ideology, trying to be constantly aware of everything happening and putting so much mental energy into thinking about how you wish it would change... It's basically a form of prayer. It's not actually going to materially impact much. Making yourself constantly aware of the play-by-play updates of every single armed conflict does not materially affect the outcome. And like a toxic cult, there is no boundary between "ritual time" and "normal time." You do not conclude shabbat services with kiddush and stop praying. You feel the constant need to be on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, or Mastodon and constantly participate in the ritual.
In fact, it's become evidently clear that "the world is watching" doesn't really influence the actions of powerful people that much. They've realized they can do whatever and we can't really stop them by looking. Maybe it used to work when the world was only paying close attention to so many things at once. Now it's just been normalized that the entire world constantly has its attention split between everything all at once and isn't really able to adequately focus on anything at all.
During the Summer of 2020 during the many uprisings, a lot of people were unable to take to the streets themselves due to their health, COVID, or just not living where the action was happening. They felt helpless and unable to contribute. So what did they all do? They tried to be as constantly minute-to-minute aware of everything that was happening in every uprising and constantly retweet all of it always "so that people know" "so that the protestors can get updates on where the cops are" etc.
But every random account retweeting everything was not really making a meaningful impact. The locus of change was not in the retweets. It was in the protests themselves. It was only controlled and filtered information sharing directly between people who originated the information and people who needed it which was useful. Everything else was prayer. I mean it was cool to know about statues getting toppled all over the world but the people toppling statues were not the ones looking at their phones non-stop. They were outdoors, toppling the status.
I'm not saying that nothing said on Cohost will ever be important or that mass media doesn't affect society. But social media is not the locus of change. You will not post social change into the world. Whatever influence you can have on the world purely through posting is limited if it is not paired with actual political organizing outside of social media. It is collective organized action which affects change, not disorganized chaotic shouting into the void mostly to people who agree with you.
Mastodon really suffered from this problem because the very act of being on Mastodon had this mission to it like it was your job to make Mastodon succeed and kill Twitter to make the world better and so it was our ethical responsibility to make sure that the platform could be used for something like the Arab Spring, especially because in theory being decentralized meant governments couldn't censor anything happening on there. But that wasn't the reality. The lack of centralized searching and smaller userbase meant there was never a critical mass of people who used the platform living physically near each other enough that they could use the platform as a tool for social change, and finding each other was a challenge too. It just reinforced that physically being near each other is actually really important for making a difference in specific locations.
Combined with mastodon heavily believing in toxic trait #1 as mentioned above meant that people were constantly fighting over if we had the ethical obligation to not post about fascism and sex to create a safe refuge for mentally ill people with anxiety; or if we had the ethical obligation to make a space where we constantly alerted each other to fascism being on the rise and very very bad because somehow this would stop fascism in absence of any actual calls to action or organizing against them.
But cohost? The vibes are immaculate because it's just a website. You can certainly use your blog to write political essays, I certainly do, and maybe those essays will be good or influential, but we all understand that we aren't going to post our way into liberation. It's just a website. It's nice and pleasant to use. It's a good place to share my writing. But the meaningful political action I do isn't blogging it's the stuff I do with my union.