Did Twitter Make Us Better? A Critical Review of the Book "#HashtagActivism"
Did Twitter Make Us Better? A Critical Review of the Book "#HashtagActivism"
An anticapitalist tech blog. Embrace the technology that liberates us. Smash that which does not.
#HashtagActivism is a robust and thorough defense of its namesake practice. It argues that Twitter disintermediated public discourse, analyzing networks of user interactions in that context, but its analysis overlooks that Twitter is actually a heavy-handed intermediary. It imposes strict requirements on content, like a character limit, and controls who sees what and in what context. Reintroducing Twitter as the medium and reinterpreting the analysis exposes serious flaws. Similarly, their defense of hashtag activism relies almost exclusively on Twitter engagement data, but offers no theory of change stemming from that engagement. By reexamining their evidence, I argue that hashtag activism is not just ineffective, but its institutional dynamics are structurally conservative and inherently anti-democratic.
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I read another book along similar lines called If We Burn, which was a broader look at the 2010s protest movements that sprung up from online activism. What I took away from it is that most of that activism was hollow and didn't have a political vision or party program, it was just the masses shouting "No!" at their shitty governments. It was also easily put down once people in power got used to it.
I actually also reviewed that one, except my review of it was extremely favorable. I'm so glad that you read it and I'd welcome your thoughts on my very friendly amendment to his analysis if you end up reading that post.
Oh I absolutely loved it, don't get me wrong. I lived through that decade as my own political awakening, so every single event described was something I watched super closely and posted about and participated in as part of the online activist space (and sometimes in person!)
Your observation that the social media companies can leverage and benefit from these protest movements (and perhaps even create them) is important, I think. It's probably why Musk bought Twitter, he wanted to wield that kind of power over the masses and their ability to organize. It seems to have worked, too. We don't see anything like what we saw in the 2010s these days.
Same, and thanks! We're probably a similar age. My own political awakening was occupy, and I got interested in theory as I participated in more and more protest movements that just sorta fizzled.
I 100% agree re:Twitter. I am so tired of people pointing out that it has lost 80% of its value or whatever. Once you have a few billion, there's nothing that more money can do to your material circumstances. Don't get me wrong, Musk is a dumbass, but, in this specific case, I actually think that he came out on top. That says more about what you can do with infinite money than anything about his tactical genius, because it doesn't exactly take the biggest brain to decide that you should buy something that seems important.
@theluddite@lemmy.ml @queermunist@lemmy.ml Though I'm probably a bit older than you both, occupy was also the moment where I first engaged in a protest for a sustained period of time and then continued to do so after. There was a lot of incoherence around occupy that took me years to get my head around. But I've come to believe a totally horizontal, leaderless movement organized through social media platforms is dead on arrival. I thought I'd throw a few observations into the mix if that's OK.
It was pointed out above that such a thing is like shouting "NO!" at the government; I fully agree with that. Bevins argues (at least in interviews; haven't had a chance to read his book yet) that these spontaneous NOs can be dangerous: if they go far enough they can create a power vacuum that the most prepared (read: organized and ruthless) forces quickly move to fill. This is the real story of what happened in several countries during the Arab Spring, by Bevins's read (I take it). So while folks are excitedly believing they're participating in the birth of a new form of democracy, what they're really doing is inflicting a dark Shock Doctrine on themselves. I have to confess that I, too, did not see this at the time.
There must be some kind of theory of change, pre-organizing to build power, and a clear-eyed recognition of the situation to avoid these DOA movements and have some hope of bringing lasting, meaningful change for a lot of people. Much of the US left (such as it is) seems allergic to looking reality squarely in the face. I'd almost go so far as saying there should not be attempts at lefty mass protest until such power is built, such theory is developed, and widespread recognition of our situation, grounded in reality, exists, exactly because of the danger that actors with very different goals from ours are better positioned to take advantage of the chaos mass protests generate.
Personally I'd refer to (what used to be) social media as "surveillance media". The form the modern US state takes is public-private partnership, with many state functions dispatched by private corporations and actors. Though Musk clearly has his own aims, he is almost surely playing a state role with Twitter not too different from the one he plays through SpaceX. So, though social media's always been corporate mediated, I'd add that recognizing the role of public-private partnerships in the modern US context leads to the probability that Twitter has become something else. In that view, the finances are almost irrelevant, and LOLing about this or that number going down or this or that many advertisers leaving the platform amounts to copium. If Twitter really is performing useful functions for the state then it will continue to exist no matter how much money it "loses"; failing to perform those functions is what would put it in jeopardy, not revenue figures.
Jesus yeah that's a great point re:Musk/Twitter. I'm not sure that it's true as you wrote it quite yet, but I would definitely agree that it's, at the very least, an excellent prediction. It might very well be functionally true already as a matter of political economy, but it hasn't been tested yet by a sufficiently big movement or financial crisis or whatever.
+1 to everything that you said about organizing. It seems that we're coming to the same realization that many 19th century socialists already had. There are no shortcuts to building power, and that includes going viral on Twitter.
I've told this story on the fediverse before, but I have this memory from occupy of when a large news network interviewed my friend, an economist, but only used a few seconds of that interview, but did air the entirety of an interview with a guy who was obviously unwell and probably homeless. Like you, it took me a while after occupy to really unpack in my head what had happened in general, and I often think on that moment as an important microcosm. Not only was it grossly exploitative, but it is actually good that the occupy camps welcomed and fed people like him. That is how our society ought to work. To have it used as a cudgel to delegitimize the entire camp was cynical beyond my comprehension at the time. To this day, I think about that moment to sorta tune the cynicism of the reaction, even to such a frankly ineffectual and disorganized threat as occupy. A meaningful challenge to power had better be ready for one hell of a reaction.