Can it be a dress rehearsal?

Nathan: No, I found this Reddit post that says that’s [reads slowly, staring at phone] co-opting tankie aesthetics. So I don’t think we’re allowed to do that

Desk work in an office was the most performative, exhausting thing I’d ever done. I remember starting factory work and having it fucking reshape my body worse than the start of any workout I’d ever tried. Like the physical demand of it was brutal. But there were no weird stigmas about talking to people or not talking to people. I didn’t feel like I had to pretend to work when we weren’t busy. My boss didn’t feel the need to constantly imply that I might lose my job. I never questioned whether what I was doing was useful.

And with factory work, my body eventually caught up. I got in shape and even though I was physically tired at the end of the day, my brain was alright and I could myself to do a load of dishes or spend some time with my kids. Even when I was exhausted, I knew I had a good reason to be. For some reason, sitting in an office chair doing nothing for 8 hours is incredibly taxing. I’ve corroborated that with so many people. It’s bizarre. Office work turned me into a shell of a person. I was in a brain fog for months at a time with only a few hours of reprieve, just enough to remind me what being normal felt like and that I was depressed.

Edit: may be relevant that I’m autistic. Office culture does seem to be designed for someone, just certainly not for me. And honestly whoever it’s designed for can fuck off out of principle

They’re not landlords. They’re the housing vanguard

Not the original author, but I’ll edit and pass it on. Thank you

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.

I used to work at a resort for rich people. Like Old Money RICH people. Instead of renting a wedding venue, they’d gift the venue a historically-accurate remodeling project for all of their flooring and replace their chandelier with a period piece from their collection. And then they’d get gifted a reservation. Shit like that. We’d cater for these giant parties that were just in some rich fuck’s house. Like I’d wake up, eat a grilled cheese sandwich with Kraft singles and then go serve dinner at The Kraft House, which was the summer home owned by the grandson of the dude who invented pre sliced cheese or some shit like that.

I’m going to say pretty definitively that many of these people consider their domination of the world to be a moral good. Like if they had a relative who was not participating in the cycles of wealth accumulation like everyone else, we’d pick up bits of gossip and these people were morally outraged that people were not doing their part and living up to their potential.

I lived my whole life feeling like nothing made sense and that everyone was living by these arbitrary rules that they couldn’t explain and made their lives worse. Working that job, for the first time, I saw who the rules were made for and everything clicked. It was like seeing a species in the wild that I’d only seen in captivity. By far the most radicalizing job I’ve ever worked.

Liberalism to Fascism Pipeline: The Movie