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I mean...
Lauren’s story is, quite frankly, one of the more substantial “wins” in the book, which largely measures the influence of Twitter activism according to the metrics of Twitter itself: the saturation and permeation of slogans, platitudes, and their attendant discourse online. In the larger world, it is difficult to spot a victory or any lasting legacy of power among even hugely popular campaigns like #OccupyWallStreet, #ArabSpring, #BlackLivesMatter, #YesAllWomen and #MeToo. Occupy Wall Street fizzled, the Arab Spring flopped, George Zimmerman walks free, and police murders of black people have not decreased. While it’s true that a few of the high-profile voices of #MeToo managed to punish and even lock up a few of their higher-profile predators (and publicly censure a few more harmless perverts), no meaningful legislation has been passed to protect or empower ordinary women in the workplace. The campaigns featured in #HashtagActivism have given us little more than the prosecution of Harvey Weinstein, the cancellation of a TV cooking show, and the forestalling of a few tawdry book deals.
She isn't wrong there. This review of the book makes it seem pretty truthful. Granted, BlackLivesMatter is still on-going.
What he did was definitely predatory though, like people seem to have this completely warped memory of what was actually alleged. He did more than just jack off while on the phone with a female comedian (as if that isn't bad enough on its own).
Aziz Ansari, maybe. He got "#MeToo"'d in an article, but the article was (IMO) really tame. She went on a date with him, he was kind of pushy but (from what I remember of the article) he didn't really "rape" her. She went along with the sexual encounter and then the morning after felt icky about it. Which is valid, but I don't know if that's "#MeToo" level.
Aziz sounded more socially awkward and not really too comfortable with women to me from the article than anything.
She is wrong though. Maybe it is this way in NYC, but in other places these campaigns did have an effect on getting the stories out so that police officers would be charged, changing local budgets, reforms on local hate crime laws, swelling the numbers of local organizations. I live in a deep red state and this stuff does have a material effect in my town. It just isn't the type of thing that ever gets covered by shows like chapo since lefty media is sort of its own social sphere and ends up primarily analyzing itself.
Well, I guess if you haven't been involved in anything it doesn't exist and isn't possible. That settles it.
She is wrong though.
Babe, no she isn't. As @sifodeas states in another reply to you: The deep south has not improved. Occupy Wallstreet, while noble, did jack shit to improve material conditions. "WE ARE THE 99%!" is a catchy slogan, but that's all it is: A slogan. #MeToo only worked on Weinstein and a few other creeps (and some of them weren't as bad as Weinstein, but were still awful).
but in other places these campaigns did have an effect on getting the stories out so that police officers would be charged
...And how many of them have been convicted...?
For every rapist cop (like the one in... Tulsa? Oklahoma City? I know one of the OK state cities...) that gets convicted, at least 50 more that aren't rapists but murder a person of color, disabled person that probably couldn't hear/understand commands, etc. walk free.
That's a failure even if the "movement"/unrest causes the prosecutor to get off their ass to actually "do shit" when "doing shit" doesn't actually DO SHIT in punishing them.
In any case, skimming/quickly reading the article she's mostly talking about the book and agrees with the premise that Twitter and Social Media didn't really "move the needle." It might've caused some more organization, but the organization didn't do ANYTHING, which again: She isn't wrong about.
I'm not even sure what you guys expect at this point. It's like you refuse to consider the space between fully fixing the problem and actually building anything has to be crossed. Like if you break it down most of the hashtags are just telling people what the issues are and getting them basic info on how they can help. It isn't harmful or anything to get mad at because we'd have to do that anyway. idk i'm just tired of the attiude where people will lash out at you for doing literally anything to try and actually build the left and just going "lol i dunno" when you ask them what we should be doing. I'm sick of people pretending anything we do in our own community also doesn't exist and any meaningful improvement is impossible and all existing orgs are impotent when people don't even bother to check in with what is happening. Like, shit at this point it's just a self fulfilling prophecy. I think a lot of people here are more in love with the idea of the failed revolutionary than anything else.
It’s like you refuse to consider the space between fully fixing the problem and actually building anything has to be crossed.
Sure. But that's the thing: That "space" hasn't been crossed by the Twitter movement. There's been "movements" but they aren't anywhere on a "national" scale. The national ones (BLM, OWS) have been pretty (IMO) abject failures. OWS notoriously so.
That's the book's point: Twitter can be a force of good (Arab Springs) but a lot of the "local"/US based movements have been pretty tepid in terms of response despite a lot of outcry on Twitter/online.
Amber "Minoritarian" $250,000 a year Frost back at it again with the hard takes
As a teen and into my 20's I used to be all about tech optimism, these days I question if the internet has been a net benefit for humanity. I find it incredibly hard to keep an optimistic outlook on neoliberal capitalisms advancement of technology. As long as the people don't have a say on how we advance technology it'll continue to be in service of creating the next exploitation machine, a hamster wheel for the mind like the internet, endless widgets and shiny gadgets for the consumer while the real problems that need to be solved in the world go on neglected and forgotten.
Yeah now we aren’t oppressed by people. It’s the algorithm controlling our every move. The line between us and ai was removed almost at introduction.
The source and the critique don't really seem to take Habermas completely when it comes to the "bourgeoisie public sphere". Fraser narrows it down to the public sphere not being inclusive enough, while Amber doesn't seem to understand where the bourgeoisie nature of the public square's origin makes it terminate. Habermas's whole point was that commodification of society would naturally lead to the collapse of the public sphere. The same forces that originate the sphere, the bourgeoisie, eg the free press and printworks leading to higher literacy rates would come under the eye of production panopticons when the capitalist drive looked for the next marginal utility.
The larger point, and I think someone like Deleuze is relevant here, is if the proletariat will be class conscious in the way Marx thanks it will be, if capitalism is the lived reality informing the subject (also the object of Mark Fisher's pessimism RIP). Amber mentions that Ida B Wells understood power, which lead to the formation of the NAACP, but of course the NAACP has been well co-opted by the market. Being offline certainly doesn't guarantee any panacea either, if understood in this fashion.
I'm not sure what the answers are.
