like, say, for instance, Lockheed Martin (just a cartoonishly easy example, chosen at random)
if you did the work before realizing it was evil, that’s one thing, but doing the work once you know better?
:what-the-hell:
“no ethical consumption” doesn’t mean you can murder kids, you goddamn psychopath
Copypasting from a Lemmy post about the Lockheed employee earlier.
So, “cancel culture” is an umbrella term. The entire point of it is to conflate things which are materially different and blame them on a nebulous “culture” to deflect from discussing specifics of a situation. These are all things which could fall under this umbrella:
- A call to action that an executive should be fired for polluting a river
- People being mean to a comedian on Twitter after they were paid millions of dollars for their special in which they make a bigoted rant
- A local social media thread of people calling out and corroborating the behavior of a local serial abuser
- Antifascists doxxing nazis
- Google filtering search results
- A moderator on any social media platform doing anything ever
This framing is not materialist and therefore not useful to a Marxist. However, I’d argue that framing it based entirely on marginalized identity is an incomplete picture, as much as marginalized people are indeed more prone to this kind of harassment.
Materially, corporate social media platforms operate under an attention economy. Attention operates very similar to capital because that attention is nearly fungible with actual currency. The system for exchanging the two has been built up and automated for decades. Where a firm would have previously isolated and constructed a consumer demographics by hand, social media platforms work by automating the construction of those groups as well as the distribution of attention to them.
Twitter in particular is designed to create, identify, and boost individual influencers. Some people, for a variety of reasons, with multiply the attention given to them. A platform owner is given attention by their platform’s users. They make high-level decisions about how to optimize the algorithm and distribute that attention. Some users, for whatever reason, create content which multiplies the attention it receives. When their content is shown to a user, that user is statistically more likely to continue engaging with the site than if they hadn’t been shown it. These creators are dubbed influencers and prioritized in the algorithm. The more attention is “invested” in them, the higher “returns” they have. This is why clout-seeking is a default behavior. The design of the website and of the algorithm directly influences user behavior in aggregate.
So given all this…
If there were an organized proletarian campaign to doxx and harass executives of war profiteers and government contractors, that could genuinely disrupt the material operations of those contractors. It’s hard to retain a CEO when your last three began receiving credible death threats. And if this were to happen, the marginalized status of any executive would be irrelevant. This is not what happened to Ana.
The “naturally-occuring” (insofar as the existence of Twitter is “natural”) collective act of doxxing and harassing someone is an act which does not further a revolutionary struggle, is done for the emotional catharsis of individual participants, and is easily coopted by capital. This is true even without the consideration that marginalized people are significantly more prone to this sort of harassment due to how the attention economy interacts with other elements of the superstructure.
Do I think Ana should have taken a job with Lockheed Martin? No. Do I think doxxing xer was productive in preventing people from working at Lockheed Martin? Also no. [Edit: I’m crossing out this next bit. I’m not the original author of the comment and literally all of the responses have been to these couple sentences when these were by far the least consequential to me personally. I haven’t followed any of this saga and don’t have any interest in doing so.]
Do I think the narrative of xer being a traitor of some kind would have blown up if he didn’t have a variety of marginalized statuses? Absolutely not. Show me the time when thousands of Twitter users doxxed and harassed another Lockheed employee who was not trans; who was not disabled. I can’t think of one.When we do not organize ourselves online along class lines, we will be organized by the owning class along lines which are profitable for them. This is an excellent example of how the base relies on the substructure for reinforcement and if the internet is to be a tool for revolutionary action or even revolutionary inhabitance, we need to act accordingly.
Yeah he’s not part of any of my communities so I don’t really know anything about xer and don’t feel much of a stake in the fight. I just thought the analysis stuff was cool
Do I think the narrative of xer being a traitor of some kind would have blown up if he didn’t have a variety of marginalized statuses?
Lol large part of why this blew up was because this person admitted to cashing checks from Lockheed for 15 years and having a loving enough family that covered their expenses, but still playing up a poverty porn narrative to grift on Patreon. Class lines are important, so why the identitarian emphasis on a situation that is more than just that?
The post this comment was originally responded to was saying something along the lines of “doxxing disabled trans people is still wrong”, if that makes any difference
Not the original author, but I’ll edit and pass it on. Thank you
ana uses he/him pronouns in addition to the neopronouns, not she/her. he sucks, but we shouldn't cisgender him
I thought I’d edited all the references to him. Did I miss some?
Edit: think I got it. I should know better by now than to just trust that everyone’s gotten the pronouns of the current trans person of ridicule correct, even in leftist spaces
you might have, but i didn't see the update. i had to step away from my computer for a few minutes in the middle of the post, so it might have updated in that time and i just didn't notice
It’s a real microcosm of how culture war works. Even if you spend a few minutes to read the post, the part that spurs action is the part that’s emotionally loaded with moral content. Not that it’s invalid to be upset about. It’s just that we have these reactions as a way to handle people in our direct communities. If I personally knew someone pulling scumbag moves like that, yeah it would make sense to become outraged and do something about it to make sure it didn’t continue happening. But this is at least 2 degrees of separation removed for me.
However, I believe it was Facebook who found that strong emotions can cause measurable mood changes up to 3 degrees of separation away. A sufficiently networked person could affect the mood of like half the people on the planet (like celebrity levels, but still)
if you did the work before realizing it was evil, that’s one thing, but doing the work once you know better?
:what-the-hell:
“no ethical consumption” doesn’t mean you can murder kids, you goddamn psychopath
Weapon makers throughout history have also often believed that they are preventing deaths because better weapons will kill fewer people (either because the weapons will be so horrific that they will be a deterrent or because they will be so foolproof that casualties will be minimized). This has pretty much always turned out to be wrong.
Which is hilarious because there's another person on Twitter has worked on drone design and research that has been defending the Lockheed sm0l bean. Some of the older tweets from this person talk about how there's a need for drones so that we can reduce casualties. This person is also radlib and presents a progressive picture of themselves. These are deeply unserious people and it's a disservice to not just queer people, but people in general in the global south
a need for drones so that we can reduce casualties
For fucking whom?!
That's just Jevons paradox with weapons instead of resource consumption.
Wait until you find out that VA healthcare doesn't last the rest of your life
Do you at least still get to drink at those veterans only bars? Are those real or is that just a movie thing?
Veterans of Foreign Wars posts are different things and even though they have cheap beer, the trade-off is that they're full of boomer vets, so it's like drinking at the worst kind of dive bar. So yeah, they're real, but not worth it.
There's a VFW down the road from me that just plays way movies on all the screens and is full of old guys sitting alone drinking Busch and watching them.
I’ll say it again, someone I know who works at Lockheed as an engineer prefers to “not think about it” when talking about the evil shit. Mfer was doing documentation for the F-35 😂
Mfer was doing documentation for the F-35 😂
Objectively doing good for the world.
Mfer was doing documentation for the F-35 😂
They should keep their job then, seeing how bad the F35 is. Hopefully they can engineer some more failures for the US military
When the government is dropping trillions of dollars on a weapons program that doesn't work, I guess you'd be a fool not to take their money.
No ethical consumption =//= no ethical production.
If you do ghoul or ghoul-adjacent work, at least have the good grace to be a little ashamed.
I flew in and out of Baltimore last week, where you go past some Grumman office on the way to the car rentals. I'm picturing hundreds of 10 year old boys all sitting at desks drawing guns with 5 barrels and giant bombs full of ticks and fleas.
I don't care if you didn't know they were evil. Anyone who worked for a MIC can die for all I care. You just don't excuse the death of brown people because "I didn't know" fuck that shit.
I have a friend who despite being anti-capitalist and describing themselves as an anarchist told me a week or so ago he was considering joining the Navy because his plans right out of College didn’t pan out.
I mean, I flirted with the military back when I was in college. My grades were kinda shit and my prospects looked pretty bleak. A military job just felt like any other kind of job, except it was 2003 and everyone who applied was getting hired.
Fortunately, I knew a few people to took that path ahead of me and they all informed me it was an absolutely shit way to live even before you have to worry about getting shot at or blown up. So I buckled down, got passing-enough grades to find an entry level IT job, and built up my resume over the next seven years until I could land a job in O&G.
Now I work for a soulless, planet-destroying energy company. But I've got a house and a spouse and a dog and something that could pass as a retirement account. And all the blood on my hands is at least several degrees removed from what I'm actually doing with my time.
Yay. :-|
