Your Algorithm Is Not Your Activism
Your Algorithm Is Not Your Activism
I’m seeing a lot of “Why aren’t people talking about [insert social issue here]?” posts on social media. If I don’t take names below, it’s because it’s all quite ubiquitious, and because naming individuals will only turn this into a part of toxic online battles engaged by trolls and bots. My brief point: Get offline more often or, at least, don’t assume that the “online public square” was ever a real entity.
Like too many people on the entire planet, I am probably online more often than I should be. As social media platforms tremble, quake, and break off into pieces, and as we dodge the bits of digital concrete threatening to cave our heads in, there appears to be a growing collective sense that, maybe, just maybe, we ought to be rid of all of them.
I got on Twitter, reluctantly at first, at the suggestion of a friend who turned out to be right when they said, “It will really help get your work out.” It’s fair to say that without the reach of Twitter my work as a mostly unaffiliated rat bastard would have floundered and floated around in relative obscurity. Facebook, for a while, was the same, helping to bring my essays and opinions to a wide range of readers and, more importantly, allowing me to stay in touch with friends. (Yes, once upon a time, FB really was a gathering place for friends!)
Of late, both Twitter and Facebook have begun to fail in their original purposes. I know I share the anxiety of many that we’re all being shadow-banned for various reasons, including dark, ideological ones, and I can barely see my friends’ posts about their lives on FB. Since I’m the sort who still writes and calls people regularly, I’m not hugely concerned about losing touch with the ones I care about, but, well, it’s annoying.
For a long while, social media appeared to be an important organising tool — but its importance as such was always exaggerated. When the Arab Spring first broke out, Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter, boasted that the platform had brought about the events — a claim that was proven to be overblown and incorrect. Twitter and FB have never been anything but tools, at best. While organising events a few years ago, some of us learnt very quickly that getting the word out on Facebook — where event announcements were, initially, easy and seemingly effective — meant that our audiences would skew very, very white. This was especially troubling and ironic given that our topics had to do race and inequality. When platforms consist largely of people who, by dint of their education and digital access, are largely white, any messaging on them tends to flow that way. We learnt quickly and switched to a multiplicity of tactics to get the word out, including old-fashioned phone banking.
Today, we are seeing massive numbers of people on the street in protests and we can be certain that little of this has to do with social media. Cultural memory only stretches back so far, and it’s tempting to think that no one really got large crowds out in a time before social media. But as I wrote in Current Affairs in an essay about Facebook,
[I]n 1972, thousands gathered to support a Black radical socialist feminist who had been declared an enemy of the state. She stood on the stage and exhorted the audience to rise up and bring about a socialist America. She was behind a four-sided panel of bulletproof glass as she spoke, because she and her supporters knew fully well that she was under threat of assassination from the state and white supremacists.
The woman was Angela Davis and the evening part of a campaign simply titled “Free Angela.” Millions across the world, in countries far and wide, responded, at a time when social media was not even imagined as a possibility, when people had to pick up actual telephones connected to wires in the ground and send telegraphs to get movements going. What sparked such deep and profound support for Davis was not the desire to be part of a cool movement but a long series of historical connections made over several decades, long before Davis was even born.
I see the same drive behind protests today: a willingness to be drawn by history, not by algorithms. Which is why I roll my eyes when I see some slightly musty social media denizens complaining that no one is talking about a giant, giant protest or strike going on right now, whatever or whenever that might be.
If something is happening offline, it is significant enough to those in the thick of it, whether they number in the tens or tens of thousands. And, increasingly, there is a strong possibility that they are not coming together through social media channels or talking about their work there, for reasons that are more or less obvious.
The fact that something is not being talked about very much or at all on a group of creaky, dying, heavily surveilled social media platforms drenched in advertising for everything from cat litter robots to tank-bras does not mean it does not exist. If five people are gathering somewhere, somehow to talk about the books they need to read in these times, that is happening. If tens of thousands of people are protesting, that is happening. Their presence is not determined by the algorithm, and those of us who are, frankly, too invested in social media, need to understand that life is going on outside. Complaining online that no one is talking about an event at which, clearly, many are gathering is a bit like whining that no one is at a party to which you weren’t invited. Algorithms are not activism.
“ On the Possible Death of Social Media ”
“ On Leaving Twitter, Or Not.”
More here.
Image: Nicolas de Staël, The Boat, 1955.
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